Addicted to You

by Bethany Kane

  He served her pussy to his cock in precisely the manner he’d fantasized about doing for tortured days and nights. It was every bit as decadent as he’d imagined, he thought as he watched himself plunge into her repeatedly.

  The fantasy was topped a hundredfold when he heard Katie shout, and he felt a rush of liquid heat around his cock. Her vaginal walls clamped him tight.

  It was too much. His balls pinched in a crisis of bliss. He let go with a guttural groan. His orgasm scalded him, as if his semen had reached the boiling point in his testicles and was ejected with explosive force.

  A pleasure-infused moment later, he dropped those accursed sexy leather boots and fell down over her, bracing himself with his arms and panting like a madman.

  “You’re going to kill me,” he accused without any real heat, busy as he was trying to recover from being turned inside out by cyclonic sex. She breathed heavily, but her gaze was solemn as she looked up at him.

  “No, I told you. I’m going to save you.”

  He made an exasperated sound and withdrew from the tight, warm channel of her pussy with a wince. He came down next to her on his side and rolled her into his arms, her back to his chest. She curled up to him like a cat craving body heat. Her hair was everywhere, Rill thought as he brushed a silky curl away from his mouth. Bloody glorious nuisance. He grabbed a handful of it and pressed the mess of golden waves to his lips and nose.

  “I still can’t believe you almost cut this off,” he said in a low voice as he released it and smoothed it across a curving hip. Tried to smooth it. It was like holding something soft and alive against a warm, silken curve. He couldn’t decide which sensation he liked better: Katie’s skin or her hair.

  She turned her head so that he could see her delicate profile, the rosy color of one cheek and an arching eyebrow.

  “Careful, Rill,” she whispered. “You’ll make me think you like something about me.”

  “If I liked you any more, you’d be at risk of being eaten in one bite.”

  She chuckled and turned her head on the pillow. “I thought you didn’t want me to compare you to the big bad wolf.”

  He shifted his palm over her lower ribs and waist, capturing the vibrations of her laughter, once again appreciating how much of her body he could span with one hand. Her scent enfolded him, the light, clean, fruity smell from her hair, the subtle, addictive fragrance he’d come to prize that seemed to release from her skin when she climaxed.

  It struck him as surreal, what had just occurred. This was Katie who fit the curve of his body like a seed snuggled within its shell. This was Katie he’d just fucked like he thought it was his last volitional act on earth.

  I told you. I’m going to save you.

  But who would save Katie from the distrust . . . the dislike Rill had acquired for the world since Eden had died?

  Fourteen

  Katie had nearly fallen asleep, feeling drowsy and content in the circle of Rill’s arms. She was roused after several sleepy minutes, though, when she felt him trying carefully to extricate himself from their embrace.

  “You live here, Rill,” she murmured sleepily. “If you’re considering doing a fuck and dash, you’re out of luck. I’m in your bed.”

  “I’m not trying to get away,” he said. “I just need to get rid of the condom.”

  She opened her eyes into slits and glanced back at him while he got out of bed. Her gaze was snagged by the small, sexy smile that curved his lips. A pleasant rush of warmth settled in her lower belly and pussy when she recalled those delicious minutes she’d spent under the magic of Rill’s mouth.

  “If you can manage to part with those boots, you could take a shower with me,” he suggested quietly.

  She grinned. “I think I can manage that. I usually only sleep in my boots for special occasions like this one.”

  His bark of laughter took her by surprise, but it was his hand swatting her ass that made her spring up like she’d been goosed. She rolled over on the bed and retaliated by doing the same to him, spanking a dense, hard buttock. She saw the flash in his eyes and started to back away immediately, laughing the whole time. The devil spark in his blue eyes, that naughty grin—those were things she associated all too much with the Rill she knew and loved. He caught her by the ankle when she tried to scoot off the bed. He yanked. She slid toward him along with the majority of the bedding.

  “No, no . . .” she protested between jags of laughter. She squawked when he flung her over his shoulder. He smacked her butt again and headed toward the door.

  “Quiet, woman. You’ll have all the wolves in a three-mile radius howling at the front door.”

  Katie was laughing so hard she barely had air to protest her ignominious position. Despite his boisterous play, Rill set her down gently enough in the bathroom and even left her to her own devices as she pinned up her hair.

  Once he’d started a steam going in the shower, he came up behind her where she stood at the bathroom sink. Katie met his eyes in the reflection of the mirror.

  “How many of those damn things do you have to use to pin up that stuff?” he asked, his gaze following her actions with interest.

  “I’d appreciate it if you stopped calling my hair ‘stuff,’” she managed around the large bobby pin she’d stuck in her mouth.

  He caught a rebel tendril at her neck and ran it between his thumb and forefinger, watching in fascination when it coiled again as he released the tension.

  “There’s even more of it than I thought . . . before having touched it, I mean,” he said gruffly.

  Katie went still in the process of inserting a pin when she saw the expression on his face as he studied the errant curl. A second later, she thought she’d imagined it when he turned and pushed back the shower curtain.

  “I’ve wanted to do this for more years than you probably care to know,” Katie told him a minute later.

  Rill glanced up from where he’d been watching her work up a lather on his chest beneath searching, sensitive fingertips.

  “Don’t tell me you wanted to get naked with me in the shower since you were fourteen years old,” he said, a smile in his voice. “That really is more information than I want to know.”

  Katie laughed. “No, I did not want to take a naked shower with you at some innocent age.” She continued her discovery of his body, worshipping every nuance of bone and muscle. When she brushed a fingertip over a nipple, thrilling to the way the flat, dark brown disc beaded beneath her, her smile faded.

  Rill, naked and wet with warm water, was no laughing matter, after all.

  “But I’ve wanted to touch you for a while now,” she admitted huskily, her eyes still on his stiffening nipple. She inhaled slowly, searching for courage.

  “In fact, I’ve wanted you for years.”

  He placed both his hands on her shoulders. Katie continued to stroke him with a soap-lathered hand in the silence that followed, too intimidated to look up at him. Actually, too scared to breathe, given what she’d just admitted. When he didn’t respond for what seemed like an eternity, she glanced up. Her mouth fell open when she saw the stiffness of his facial muscles.

  “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “I . . . Yes,” Katie mumbled, confused by his intensity. “Does it really surprise you?”

  He didn’t speak, just stared down at her, unmoving. The water hitting the tub floor started to sound like a loud crashing noise in her ears.

  “You say this has been going on for years?” Rill clarified.

  Katie glanced away from his penetrating stare. “Is that so terrible? I never acted on the attraction, obviously. Not while . . . Eden was alive.” She said the last hesitantly, not sure how Rill would take the mention of his dead wife while they stood together naked in a hot shower. “I know this isn’t easy for you to talk about, but it’s not easy for me, either.”

  “I had no idea,” he said starkly.

  She looked up at him, surprised. “None?”

  He shook his head
slowly.

  For some reason, his admission deflated her. Was she so substandard as a female that a man like Rill couldn’t sense her desire, no matter how hard she tried to mask it? Was she so “not his type” that Rill never had even considered her as an attractive woman who admired him . . . wanted him?

  His expression had grown grim. Damn. Why had she spoken when all had been going so well between them?

  “What’s wrong?” Katie asked slowly.

  He shook his head and turned, letting the warm water rinse the soap off his body.

  “Don’t tell me you drove across the country like this because you have some kind of a crush on me.”

  His words seemed to echo around in her skull like her brain had suddenly vacated it and left an empty, hollow space.

  “Crush? Why do you say crush? What? I’m incapable of any meaningful feeling? The extent of my emotional range is a crush?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Rill replied, but Katie didn’t like the way he averted his gaze.

  “Well, what it is that you’re saying, exactly? Because I’m pretty sick of being cast as the perpetual teenager in a fucking John Hughes film!”

  He turned to her, obviously shocked by her explosion of anger.

  “I only meant that I suspected there was some other reason for your impulsivity in driving all the way here from California. That’s all. I knew you weren’t telling me the whole story.” Something seemed to occur to him and he straightened. “Jaysus. Don’t tell me you drove all the way out here because you planned on this happening.” He waved significantly between their naked bodies.

  Katie’s scalp and spine tingled with fury.

  “I told you why I drove here: because you’re my friend, and I love you, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you here all alone, destroying yourself.”

  He nodded his head slowly. “And you thought offering me your body might be a way to jump-start me out of my funk, is that it?”

  Anger sent her blood to a low boil. “I didn’t come here with the intent of seducing you. But what if I had? Are you upset about the idea of my intentions, or are you more upset that us getting together possibly could be the thing to kick some common sense into that thick head of yours?”

  For a moment they faced off while the steam rose around them. A shadow of uncertainty flickered across his face. He swallowed thickly, and Katie wondered if he was about to apologize. The man certainly knew how to shove his foot in his mouth. She wasn’t to find out Rill’s intentions, however, because at that moment a man shouted from the kitchen.

  “Rill? Katie?”

  Her eyes sprang wide.

  Rill’s expression flattened with shock.

  “It’s Everett,” Katie hissed incredulously.

  Five minutes later, Katie came downstairs from the dormer bedroom to greet her brother. She felt somewhat more composed for his unexpected presence than she had standing nude and furious in the shower with Rill. Rill had whispered to her to wait in the bathroom while he went out to meet Everett.

  She’d taken one look at Rill’s initial shocked, and then, grim expression as they stood there in the shower and knew they wouldn’t be greeting her brother arm in arm.

  She followed the sound of low male voices onto the front porch. The air felt crisp and cool on cheeks that were still warm from steam and phenomenal sex. Everett turned at the sound of the screen door squeaking open. Her brother grinned at her, white teeth flashing in the dim light.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded as she returned Everett’s hug.

  “I could ask the same of you,” Everett replied. The hall light illuminated his handsome, classically cut jaw and smiling mouth as he stepped away from their hug. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt. Golden-brown whiskers darkened his jaw. He’d pulled a gray newsboy hat down low over his brow, shadowing his upper face. Everett loved hats, and had a vast collection of them. Most people assumed it was an affectation, but Katie knew he wore them to hide what was perhaps his most famous feature—his tousled blond hair. He wore it relatively short, but in the front, around his face, it was so light that it caused double takes from a hundred feet away.

  Not that Everett needed any help in the garnering-attention department, Katie thought grumpily. She and Everett had always been very close. She knew that most of the women alive on the planet would sacrifice their firstborn to be near Everett Hughes.

  Katie’s reaction to her brother’s presence at that moment was quite the opposite of the general female population’s.

  “I came to see after Rill, that’s all,” she replied briskly, avoiding glancing at the tall, brooding shadow to the right of her. Rill’s latest accusation—that she’d come here with the mercenary purpose of seduction in order to flip him out of his funk—still smarted and stung. She gave her brother a wry glance.

  “What? You couldn’t trust my judgment, either? Is that why you’re here?” she asked sourly.

  Everett looked politely taken aback. “Retract the claws, Katie. Mom and Dad told me about you coming out here, and I thought I’d come join the two of you. Rill’s my friend. You’re my sister. I needed a vacation. These are beautiful woods. What’s so shocking about me coming for a visit? I need the fresh air.”

  “Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

  “Not really,” Everett said pleasantly. “Haven’t you?”

  Katie’s fake smile melted into a frown.

  “Rill’s made it clear how he feels about visitors. We’ll just have to cheer him up a bit, make him remember why he should appreciate us,” Everett blathered on amiably. Katie gritted her teeth. Her brother was playing the part of a cheerful, perennially clueless friend to perfection. Give him an English accent, have him say old chap, and he might be reprising his BBC role as the handsome, lovable, doltish aristocrat in Lord and Butler. Everett was an excellent actor, but Katie could see through this particular role perfectly.

  She couldn’t tell if Rill was sweating it or not, but he needn’t worry about whether or not Everett knew what they’d been doing before he arrived. Everett knew, all right. He must have picked up some message in Rill’s call to her mother and father; some code a parent couldn’t quite catch. Hadn’t Rill said something stupid to her father like Katie wasn’t safe in the house with him?

  The awkwardness of their delayed greeting likely only confirmed her brother’s suspicions.

  “There’s not enough beds in the house,” Rill said.

  “It’s a good thing we Hughes have skins thicker than a walrus, or we might actually get our feelings hurt by all this rudeness,” Everett said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Katie mumbled.

  “What’s that?” Everett asked.

  “Nothing.” Great, Katie thought. That flat, lifeless quality was back in Rill’s voice. Next thing she knew, he’d be back to hitting the bottle. Katie didn’t need to see Rill’s expression to know that he definitely did not want her to pipe up and tell Everett that he could have her bed, as she’d be all too happy to join Rill in his.

  “No problem. I’ll take the couch,” Everett continued. “I slept on it last time, anyway; remember, Rill? There was no heat up in the upstairs bedroom. So . . . what have you two been up to?”

  Katie sensed the sparkle in her brother’s eye, even though her view of his upper face was obscured by his hat. Rill’s shadow went entirely still at Everett’s question. Rill’s obvious unease in this situation made Katie want to kick one of the intact posts on the front porch railing.

  “You’re timing is impeccable, Everett,” she said.

  “That’s what I’ve been told,” Everett replied lightly, ignoring her sarcasm. “So what about it, Rill? I’ve had a long trip. Why don’t we go down to that little pub down in Vulture’s Canyon and get a beer so I can unwind a little.”

  “Everett,” Katie exclaimed in disbelief. “Rill hasn’t been drinking lately. What are you trying to do? Ruin everything?”

  “Aw, Katie, give it a rest. He just wa
nts to talk to me. Maybe I’ve got a word or two for him, as well,” Rill said woodenly as he clomped down the front steps.

  Katie glared flaming knives at her brother, but he only smiled.

  “No worries, Katie. Leave it to me to take care of him.”

  “If you’re his caretaker, we might as well purchase his casket now.” She sighed when Everett smiled and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Don’t do anything stupid, Everett. The last thing he needs right now is a drinking buddy,” she whispered when he remained with his head bent. “He really has been doing better.”

  “I just want to talk to him, that’s all,” Everett said softly, all signs of his old-chap act gone. “I’ll wait to talk to you in the morning about what the hell kind of stunt you’re pulling.”

  “It’s not a stunt.”

  Everett surprised her by removing his cap. He studied her, serious and somber. After a moment, his eyebrows went up in quiet surprise.

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “I can see that.”

  All her annoyance at her brother faded when he said those five words. Her uncertainty remained, though.

  She continued standing on the front porch even after the two men had gotten in a car and driven down the hill.

  Fifteen

  “Where’s Rill?” Katie asked when she stumbled bleary-eyed into the kitchen the next day and saw her brother sitting at the table reading a newspaper. Katie had glanced down the hallway when she came down the stairs and seen Rill’s bedroom door wide-open, so she’d assumed he was up.

  Everett set down the paper and took a swig of his coffee. Katie noticed he was wearing the newsboy hat again, a white T-shirt, horrid knee-length sweat shorts, black socks and white Converse tennis shoes. With his tall, lean body and careless elegance, he actually managed to make the ensemble look quirky chic instead of atrocious, which it would have been on any other human on the planet. If Katie thought Everett was trying to be cute on purpose, it would have annoyed her, but she knew the truth. Almost everything Everett did was effortlessly perfect, right down to the fact that he typically couldn’t care less about perfection.