by Bethany Kane
But he’d decided on his long hike in the woods today that he’d dig deep. He’d try to salvage the friendship, because Katie was worth it. He’d been resolved on the matter until he’d seen Katie step out of Fordham’s car. The brown rinse she’d put in her hair had nearly vanished. Sunlight turned her long mane into a living crown and cloak of incandescent, shifting golden waves and curls.
If there was such a thing as a wild angel, its halo and wings might resemble Katie’s hair and sunlight combined.
When it dawned on him that she’d been out with Miles Fordham, anger had transformed his beneficent intentions to make things right with Katie. What was she trying to prove, anyway? Suggesting to him last night that they sleep together and then traipsing off with that tycoon-in-the-woods Fordham, whose smiles looked like they’d been airbrushed by a photographer?
His anger had turned to a dull roar as he’d watched Katie march toward him.
Had she let that asshole touch her?
The incendiary thought struck Rill again as he sat on the couch holding Katie while she slept. He told himself it was a natural reaction to be annoyed at the idea of Katie going out with Fordham. If Everett had stayed long enough in Vulture’s Canyon—if Rill hadn’t been so foul to him and allowed him to stay on—Everett would have disliked Miles Fordham as well.
Everett hated almost all of Katie’s boyfriends. At the very least, he was highly unimpressed. None of them was good enough for Katie.
His brow crinkled as he tried to recall if Everett truly had disapproved of Katie’s boyfriends or if it’d been Rill doing the disliking....
Katie rustled in her sleep. Her hand dropped to his lap. Rill jumped like she’d prodded him with a red-hot poker. Katie lifted her head from his chest and mumbled something unintelligible.
“Jaysus,” he hissed under his breath as he braced Katie’s shoulders with his hands and carefully eased his body around her. Her eyelids had fluttered open when he’d jumped, but they’d quickly drooped once again.
She was in some territory between sleep and consciousness when he carried her up the stairs. He gritted his teeth when she put her arms around his neck and pressed her supple, sleep-softened body against his chest. His heartbeat thundered in his ears and throbbed in his cock.
He’d broken out in a sweat by the time he laid Katie on her made bed, and it wasn’t because the room was hot. She’d opened a window before she left with Fordham. The air in the dormer bedroom felt cool against his heated skin. Her eyes were open, watching him as he straightened and looked down at her, but the sweet, slightly dazed expression on her face made him think she was still existing in the muzzy, warm embrace of sleep. She reached and caught his hand with her own.
“Come to bed, Rill,” she whispered throatily.
He swallowed, but the knot in his throat remained.
“I was going to tell you earlier that it’d been a mistake. We can still go back, Katie,” he croaked.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said simply.
“I do.”
But despite his words, he didn’t move.
She just stared up at him, her eyes keeping him pinned to the spot even though his conscience willed him to move. It surprised him a little to see his hand cradling her jaw. His skin looked dark in contrast to her pale gold hue; his fingers seemed large and blunt—poor instruments for exploring the delicate angles and exquisite softness of Katie’s jaw and cheek.
He pressed his thumb into her lower lip, testing its plumpness. He met her gaze and saw her heat.
The next thing he knew, he was unbuttoning her blouse, the frilly little flounces that decorated the placket tickling at his fingers. She reached beneath his opened flannel shirt as he leaned over her, her eager caresses making him lose his concentration.
“Where’s the scarf?” he asked bluntly, standing and glancing around her room.
“Rill, no,” she murmured as she came up on her elbows. Her blouse gaped open, giving him a glimpse of curving flesh tightly encased in a shimmering champagne-colored bra. He tore his gaze off the arousing sight and walked over to the bureau where he found the scarf.
“If we don’t do anything more than we’ve already done, maybe it’ll be okay,” he said grimly, holding up the scarf, a question in his eyes. Katie looked bewildered.
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean if we keep a cap on this fucking thing,” he growled, “there’s a chance we won’t have to . . .”
“What?”
“Lose each other,” he grated out between a clenched jaw.
“You’re not going to lose me,” she whispered.
“I am. I think I already have, but I’m such a selfish fuck, I still want to taste you again,” he said bitterly.
A tear rolled down her cheek. She held her hands together and raised them above her head. He glanced away, the evidence of her sadness and the arousing image of her putting her hands up to be bound making him feel like he straddled a razor’s edge.
It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay, he told himself repeatedly as he bound Katie’s hands to the wrought-iron posts of the headboard. It’ll be just like last night, and you kept it under control then. He hadn’t yet fallen into the degenerate pit where his relatives lived, where carnal desires and selfishness ruled his very existence.
He’d never been seriously tempted by another woman when Eden had been his wife, when just the thought of her calm, elegant presence could quench a random attraction almost immediately. But Eden wasn’t here anymore; the woman he’d believed Eden to be had never been there. She’d been an illusion he’d created in his mind from his own needs, his own fantasies.
He spread Katie’s blouse wide, baring her smooth torso. His hands shook slightly as he unhooked the front clasp of her bra and peeled the fabric off her breasts. He paused, his hands at the sides of her body.
This isn’t like last night all, he realized with a growing sense of desperation. Last night he’d been able to shut off the lamp, but he couldn’t turn off the late-afternoon sunlight that streamed through the window . . . couldn’t remove his gaze from Katie’s full, creamy breasts.
They looked vulnerable somehow, rising from the plane of her chest . . . tender, succulent . . . easy prey for the beast that raged inside him.
She must have been affected by his stare because she stretched taut and twisted in her restraint, shifting the firm globes of her breasts slightly. His cock jerked in his jeans. He grimaced and unfastened the first several buttons of the fly, giving himself some much-needed room.
“Don’t move, Katie,” he demanded through a clenched jaw.
“If you won’t let me touch you, I wish you’d get on with your business.” He glanced at her face when he heard her pressured hiss. Her cheeks were stained a delicate pink. Her light green eyes shone with a mixture of irritation and arousal.
This was most definitely not like last night.
She pulled on her restraint again and shifted her torso, jiggling her breasts. His fingers were suddenly ripping her jeans open. She must have felt some measure of his haste because she lifted her hips, making it easier for him to jerk her jeans and champagne-colored panties down her legs and off her feet in a rush.
He looked down at her when he’d finished. She spread her thighs and whispered.
“Hurry.”
But he was already on his way. He knelt between her legs and slipped his hands over smooth hips, cradling her buttocks. Instead of leaning down over her, he lifted her to him and served her to his mouth.
If last night had been wild, this was a frenzy.
She jerked her hips so hard as he thrashed her clit with his tongue that he strained tight to hold her in place for his consumption. He ran his tongue up and down the nerve-packed flesh repeatedly, and each time she quaked uncontrollably and wriggled. It was like holding a squirming creature in his hands and trying to perform a delicate piece of surgery. Her wildness sent him into a fever pitch, but he couldn’t get a good angle on her.<
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He swatted a taut ass cheek in warning, but his action seemed only to throw Katie into a heightened state of excitement. She keened and jerked in his grasp. He growled into her flesh and spanked her again, this time more firmly. But only when he grabbed her legs and tossed them over his shoulder, holding her thighs in place, did he successfully immobilize her.
He buried his face in her cunt, finally free to drink her cream without hindrance, to evoke every shiver of pleasure from her taut flesh that his hunger required. She shrieked and came a minute later. He held her at his mercy, pressing firmly with his tongue, vibrating her while she shook in climax. From the sound of her screams, his forced stimulation while she came was powerful enough to border on pain, but he wasn’t in a mood to show her mercy.
Katie’d been torturing him ever since she’d strutted into Vulture’s Canyon. It wouldn’t kill her to feel a little of the discomfort of this godforsaken lust.
He wasn’t finished even when the shudders in her flesh eased. He put his hands on the backs of her thighs and spread them wider. She gasped when he curled his tongue and sent it high into her drenched slit. His eyelids opened heavily. She watched him while he searched greedily for more of her essence. He closed his lips on her, his tongue stuck high up in the sweet, creamy core of her. He sucked with the ridge of his upper lip pressed tightly against her clit. Triumph and lust roared through his veins when he felt her tremble against him.
He closed his eyes, the sight of her face gleaming with perspiration and arousal overwhelming him. When she began to thrash against him like she had before, he held her with one hand at her hip up to his mouth and swatted her bottom, not hard, but repeatedly, the sounds of his palm striking taut flesh popping in his ears. When her frenzy only increased, he lifted his head.
She made a sound of protest between a groan and a shout.
“Keep still,” he ordered.
He regretted the pained expression on her beautiful face—the discomfort of the abrupt cessation of pleasure.
He buried his face again between her thighs to atone, agitating her clit briskly with his tongue. Even though she forced herself to stay still, he spanked her ass several more times, sensing that the sensation excited her nearly as much as it did him.
He knew he was right when she went rigid and shook again in climax as he thrashed her clit with his tongue. Sensation flooded him. He saw red as he felt Katie shaking against him and her juices coated his tongue and throat. The sound of her screams and his own palm firmly striking a plump buttock entered his ears in a sharp, arrhythmic cacophony.
He set her hips on the bed. The periphery of his vision had gone fuzzy and shadowed, but Katie was sharp in focus, the image of her scoring his consciousness, burning it with her sheer vibrancy.
He ripped at the remainder of his button fly, shoved and fumbled, finally jerking his cock out of his boxer briefs.
He was possessed. He couldn’t breathe.
A paroxysm of pleasure ripped through as he stroked his aching length, a convulsion of unbearable grief. His own hoarse shout cleaved through the thick cloak of his arousal.
Rill blinked open his eyes to the vision of his cock shooting an arc of semen onto the smooth harbor of Katie’s belly. It seemed to burn as it seethed out of his body. He’d needed to be rid of the scalding fluid. His body tightened and he ejected more . . . and more. He grunted each time he jerked his cock and more spilled onto the growing semen pool on Katie’s heaving belly.
In the last convulsions of climax, he shifted. He groaned in agony as he shot the final drops of his thunderous orgasm onto the dark gold pubic hair of Katie’s mons.
So close.
His body shuddered again, but his balls had been utterly emptied. He fell forward, catching himself with his hands next to Katie’s body, his eyes shut, struggling to regain his equilibrium. He felt a little like he’d been clocked in the head from an unsuspecting blow.
“Rill?”
Katie’s whisper penetrated his awareness. He slowly opened his eyes. He couldn’t describe the expression on her face as she looked up at him. Wary? Uncertain? Stunned?
She must be stunned. He’d been like a madman in those final moments, completely and utterly at the mercy of strangling lust.
He glanced down Katie’s naked body, pausing when he saw his semen wetting her abdomen and pooling in indention of her belly button. He moved quickly, hoisting his body off the bed and jerking up his underwear and pants. Even though the bathroom off the dormer wasn’t functional, there was a box of tissues on the sink counter. He returned to Katie and sat on the edge of the bed. He avoided her stare as he dried her belly and then untied her.
“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly as he released her wrists. Her arms were falling back to the bed, but they paused in midair.
“Are you?”
His gaze flickered over her face. Her springtime eyes, golden hair and vividly pink cheeks created a vibrant palette of color. He’d thought it before, and he thought it again a hundredfold seeing a postorgasmic Katie; he wished he could put her image on film.
All of it except the doubt on her face.
He placed his fingertips over his shut eyes, blocking out the image of Katie’s uncertainty. Or maybe that was his own wariness he saw reflected on her beautiful face.
“I don’t know why I want you so much,” he muttered brokenly.
In the seconds that followed, his eyes remained closed, but he sensed her rustling on the bed.
“You make it sound like a crime,” she said eventually. When he pried his eyes open, he saw that she’d pulled the comforter around her. He was glad she’d covered herself.
He hated that she had.
There was something so elementally right about Katie’s nudity. Now that he’d seen her full glory exposed, it struck him as almost a crime to hide it.
But of course he was thankful she had. She was more of a temptation than he was prepared for, broken as he was.
“It’s not a crime,” he muttered.
“It disappoints you that you want me,” she whispered. “Because I’m not Eden.”
His chin jerked around. “No. That’s not it.”
A prickly sort of uncomfortable silence fell between them. She’d pulled herself up into a sitting position, her legs crossed beneath the comforter. She held her blouse closed over her breasts. He realized she felt vulnerable in front of him. He wanted to comfort her, but he felt just as confused . . . just as exposed by his blind, naked need.
She inhaled shakily. Rill sensed her resolve to try to make sense of the situation, to put it into words.
“Has it been hard for you . . . when you get aroused by another woman since Eden died?”
Her matter-of-fact tone annoyed him. He didn’t want to sit here and analyze why he went crazy every time he touched her. He certainly didn’t want to discuss why he’d avoided relationships ever since Eden had died.
“No,” he replied edgily.
“Why is it so terrible to want me, then? Why am I so objectionable?”
He gave her a disbelieving glance. “How could you think I find you objectionable? You know what just happened.”
“You made love to me, and it seemed as if you liked it so much, you lost control a little bit. What’s so awful about that?”
“I wasn’t making love to you, Katie,” he snapped. He felt beleaguered and cornered. “I love you as a friend, but I wasn’t making love to you. That’s what’s wrong, if you’re so bent on knowing the truth of it. Now are you happy?”
Her face went rigid. Beneath the two spots of vivid color on her cheeks, she went pale.
“Get out of here,” she said in a low, dangerous tone.
Rill opened his mouth, wanting to take back his words. He felt as if he’d just reached across the bed and slapped her out of spite. Knowing he’d blown it, and that there was nothing else he could say or do at that moment to make Katie understand what he couldn’t comprehend himself, he stood and did precisely what she’d asked
him to do.
Eleven
Katie just sat there in the bed for five minutes after Rill walked down the stairs. She felt both overly aware of her body and distanced from it as well. It seemed that every nerve throbbed in a dull ache, as if Rill’s attack had come from pummeling fists over every square inch of skin and not from a dozen words.
Don’t be so dramatic, she thought irritably as she tossed aside the blanket and scurried out of the bed. He didn’t attack you. He just . . . just . . .
Told the truth.
It was the truth that was making her feel like she’d just received a beating, but that pain was 100 percent in her head. Rill had made her scream in pleasure. If she experienced some residual psychic pain following what had happened, surely she had only herself to blame.
Rill had warned her beforehand.
She grabbed some clean clothes and opened the dormer bedroom door. She paused at the top of the stairs, straining to hear where Rill was in the house. It was quieter than a grave down there.
She quickly showered, dressed and combed her hair. Much to her relief, she didn’t catch a glimpse of Rill when she made a dash out the front door. What she needed was some speed to sort things out in her cluttered head.
The days were growing shorter, Katie realized as she pulled out of the long driveway and onto the rural route. The narrow, black road surrounded by somber, towering trees, their vibrant colors washed out by the thinning light of the sinking sun, the seamless cool-blue sky overhead—all of it suited her dark, desperate mood.
I love you as a friend, but I wasn’t making love to you. That’s what’s wrong
The nerve endings beneath her skin seemed to throb feverishly with a dull ache at the memory.
She switched to the “manumatic” and got the Maserati into sixth gear on the straightaway portion of the slope down the hill. She drove on the twisting country roads without conscious thought, searching for stretches of road where she could feel the engine roaring at full throttle beneath her, where she could fly, unhindered by her doubts and insecurities.
