Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  She cocked her head. “Then why leave?”

  Excellent question.

  He bent and kissed her again. This time, as soon as their lips touched, Gabe took charge, pushing her tongue into his mouth and clenching her arms so tightly around his neck that he felt her body lift as she came up on her tiptoes. Needing to be closer, he dropped his hands to her hips and picked her up and leaned into her, pressing her to the bunkhouse door. She hooked her boots against the back of his legs.

  His heart raced, his cock throbbed, and every time she moaned in his mouth, his hips rocked into her. Christ, he felt dizzy. And he was near to coming in his jeans.

  He tore away and tucked in against her neck, his nose against the leather of her choker. Her chest heaved, and each of her strained breaths filled his ear.

  “What do you want to happen?” He sounded like he’d run a marathon.

  “You mean right now?” She was no less winded.

  He nodded.

  She pushed his head back and looked him in the eye. “I want you to come in and come to bed with me. It’s not a big bed, but I think we can make it work.”

  “And your roommate?”

  “Britnee. She’ll be gone for a while. My room is private, anyway.”

  He brushed his nose over the maddeningly soft skin of her cheek. “Gabe…when I say it’s been four years, I mean for everything.”

  “It’s been almost three years for me. I just…I like you, I like feeling the way I do right now, and I want to be close.” Suddenly, her eyes filled and swam with tears, and she dropped her head.

  He brought his hand between them and tipped her chin back up. “Hey, hey. It’s okay.”

  “I’m trying hard not to say please because it sounds so fucking desperate, but…please?”

  Running his thumb over her perfect bottom lip, he smiled. “Always help a lady.”

  The smile she gave him back was sweet but hesitant. As forthright as she’d been, she was anxious, too. “Is that all it is? I think that would be okay—”

  “Hush. It’s not all it is. We’ll have to figure it out. Okay?”

  She nodded, and he set her down.

  “Give me your keys.”

  *****

  This bunkhouse wasn’t markedly different from what Heath’s own house had been before he’d converted it to a real home. The common area had some motel-grade furniture and a small television, the kitchen was little more than a sink and a small refrigerator, and there were no personal touches that he could see, but it wasn’t bad. Not a home, but shelter.

  Gabe had his hand, and she pulled him in the direction of a door at the back. She opened it and led him through, then flipped a switch on the wall, and two sconces on the far wall came on. The room was tiny, just a chest of drawers and a narrow bed. The bed was neatly made. On the chest was an empty duffel bag; it was the only sign that anyone lived here.

  “This is your room?”

  “Yeah. Sad, huh? I don’t have much. I kinda walked away from everything.”

  She was standing in front of him, facing away, and he reached out and swept her hair to one side and over that shoulder. Goosebumps rose up on the shoulder he’d bared, and he traced his fingers over the raised flesh. “You are beautiful, little one.”

  Turning her head a bit, she looked back at him sidelong. “Little one?”

  Those words had just come out. He grinned a little, feeling self-conscious. “Yeah…I don’t know. That just happened.”

  “It’s okay. I think I like it.”

  He stepped to her and kissed her shoulder. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The syllable lofted into the air on a quivering breath, and she made a sound then so much like a whimpering sob that Heath stopped his oral exploration of her shoulder and arm and looked up to catch her eye.

  “All right?”

  She nodded. “It’s just…all of a sudden, I feel what it was like not to have anybody all this time. Nobody to just touch me. It’s like I was numb and now I’m not, and all my nerves are freaking out.” With a nervous laugh and a quick, sharp shake of her head, she added, “It’s dumb. Makes no sense.”

  More than anything else, her youth came through like that—these moments of self-deprecating self-doubt. He changed his touch, smoothing his palm firmly down her arm, not unlike the way he’d soothe a skittish horse. “It’s not dumb. I know exactly what you mean. I feel it, too. I should go. We can take it slow, Gabe. We don’t have to rush.”

  “No!” She spun around and grabbed at his shirt. “No! I don’t want to go slow. I don’t want to wait. I feel this now, and I don’t want to lose it. Please don’t go. Please.”

  She pulled at his shirt and hooked her arms around his neck, craning toward him. He bent down and helped her.

  There was raw, ragged need in her kiss now, and feeling it, knowing that it was him she needed, believing it, Heath felt the cage around his heart begin to melt. Honestly, it had been on the fire for weeks now, maybe from the time he’d first laid eyes on this girl.

  He kissed her back with all that fire, and they stood in the middle of her tiny room, grunting and gasping, until Heath caught the back of her top in his hands and pulled it free of her jeans. She tore her mouth from his and stepped back, and he frowned, thinking he’d crossed a line somewhere.

  But no—she was simply taking her own clothes off. Without fanfare or display, she pulled her top off. Her bra was black satin, no lace or other adornment. Her breasts were small. Her nipples were already hard; they made peaks in their satin cups.

  She toed her boots off—not cowboy style, but good, sturdy brown boots that seemed to have been worn long and well. Then she undid her plain, brown leather belt and opened her jeans, and Heath swallowed dryly as she shimmied out of them and kicked them away. Her underwear was pink lace, what his wife had called ‘cheekies,’ and Heath’s knees felt unstable.

  The way Gabe dressed—usually in t-shirts and good-fitting jeans, nothing too attention-seeking, but nothing baggy and concealing, either—there had never been a question that her body would be beautiful. But as she stood there in her pretty, mismatched underwear, Heath marveled. She was both slender and solid, some nearly otherworldly cross between vulnerable and powerful, between fragility and strength. Her skin was a dewy, fair olive tone that nearly glowed in the incandescent light of the room, and it seemed without blemish.

  Except for the angry, uneven scar that started just under her left breast and swept around her left side.

  He stepped close and reached out to touch the scar.

  She stopped him. “Wait. Not yet.” When she took hold of his shirt and started working buttons, he realized that he’d been so busy watching her that he was still fully dressed.

  With a laugh and a shrug, he rectified that in short order, stripping with the focus on expediency that she’d shown, until he was down to his boxer briefs. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, he shed those, too. As he did so, Gabe took off her underwear.

  Her little breasts were perfect, round and just plump enough, with sweet, small, dark nipples. And below, at the join of her thighs, a wedge of dark curls. Imagining his hands, his face, there, Heath groaned and tried to breathe.

  In that moment, standing there with his throbbing, weeping cock stuck out like a dowsing rod, he felt absurdly young. He was thirty-six years old, and Gabe was the second woman in his life he’d been naked with.

  Now that they were both completely exposed to each other, Gabe picked up his hand and set it on her scar. “You can touch it now.”

  She’d needed him to be naked first. As he traced a finger over the scar’s strange pattern—jagged for most of its length and then surgically straight—and felt her chest tremble under his touch, he understood that this was the real exposure for her, and she’d needed him to be vulnerable, too.

  “That’s how my father almost killed me.”

  “God.”

  “Thank you.”

  Surprised, he looked up from her scar
. “Why ‘thank you’?”

  “Usually people say ‘I’m sorry’ when they hear what happened, and I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t know what they mean. So thank you for just saying the thought you really had.”

  He knew exactly what she meant. He thought he had a better sense of why people said they were sorry in such situations, and maybe it was simply age and experience that had given him that understanding. It wasn’t an apology, it was sympathy, but more than anything, unless someone truly close said it, that phrase really was empty. Just the words people were supposed to say to fill up the space. Because there were no words that could possibly be truly appropriate to stories like theirs.

  While he finished tracing her scar and let his fingers continue their acquaintance with her body, she set her hand on his chest, and he gasped. It had been a very long time for him, too, and she was right—his body didn’t know what to do with the sensations her mere proximity made in him, much less her actual touch.

  She swept a finger over the arced scar on the left side of his chest, on the inside of that pectoral muscle. “Is this where Destry kicked you?”

  “You heard about that, huh?”

  “Yeah. That must’ve been terrifying.”

  He shook his head. “No. It was a couple years ago. The worst part about it was waking up.”

  He’d never said that out loud before. When her eyes searched his, he held steady and let her look her fill.

  “Yeah,” was all she said.

  Heath decided that maybe he did believe in fate. Because he was standing naked in a room with one of a small, sad group of people in the world who could truly understand what he meant, how he’d felt, and she was only there because her truck had broken down before she could drive through and away.

  He caught her hand and pulled her close. This time, when he bent down to kiss her, he whispered, “This is the first time I’ve been glad I woke up.”

  In this kiss, he could feel their mutual and complete surrender. With their mouths joined, nipping, kissing, sucking, he lifted her off the floor and laid her down on that small bed. As he settled over her, she took hold of his cock, and—fuck. Holy fucking hell.

  He rocked his hips back and pulled away to settle on his knees, out of her reach.

  “What?”

  A deep breath was required before he could speak. “Been a long time. This is gonna go quick. Maybe I should—”

  “Please don’t say you want to leave now!”

  “I was gonna say maybe I should go to your bathroom and jack off first. Build up some stamina.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Okay. Well, don’t judge me on round one, then.” Another thought occurred to him. “Shit. Condoms?”

  At first, her expression was perfect, shocked frustration, but then it changed dramatically and she twisted under him and reached to the floor. Poking around under her bed, she came up, grinning, with a strip of Trojans.

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You keep loose condoms under your bed?”

  “I had a fight with Britnee. At the end of it, she stomped in here, threw these at me, and yelled, why don’t you just fucking get laid already!” Gabe giggled, and such a sweet, happy sound it was. “She’s from LA. She has a dramatic flair.”

  “Clearly. Helpful, too.” He tore one off and dropped the rest to the floor. “I don’t think I’ll survive much more foreplay without embarrassing myself.”

  “Talking about our scars was foreplay?” There was still humor in her voice.

  But he answered her seriously. “For me, yeah. I feel like we understand each other better than anybody else could. That’s…that’s hot.”

  “Yeah, it is.” She took his hand and brought it to those dark curls over her mound. He pushed his fingers between her legs, through her folds, over her clit. She was wet, and she tensed and flexed at his touch.

  “I don’t want to wait, I don’t want to wait, I don’t want to wait,” she mumbled.

  He rolled the condom on, flinching a little at the cold, lubed latex on his hot, seriously over-stimulated cock, then folded forward over her. He bent and kissed her mound, nudging her legs wider so he could flick his tongue over her tight little clit and dip into her sweet pussy, then he trailed his tongue up, over and into her belly button, over to her scar, up to swirl around the swollen knot of her nipple, then to the other.

  Beneath him, Gabe writhed and gasped, her hands roaming over his back, grabbing his ass, dragging up to clutch his shoulders, to clench in his short hair. His cock began to twitch and pulse, and he knew he couldn’t take this any longer.

  He grabbed her leg and pulled it up, bringing her pussy into easy position. Then he took hold of himself and pushed into her. He groaned painfully, and she arched and moaned, and he didn’t know how he could possibly control himself. The feeling of her young, tight body closing around him, clenching him, pulling him deeper, very nearly undid him on that single thrust.

  But he dropped his head to the pillow beside her ear and held himself together by sheer force of a will made of iron.

  Just as he thought he could master himself enough to move, Gabe moved for them both. She flexed her hips, rocking only gently, and clamped his ass in her hands. Fuck oh fuck, that felt so good.

  For a minute or two, he let her do the work and focused on the brilliant torture of those little flexes that narrowed the feeling down to the head of his cock against the back of her pussy. Christ.

  Still with his forehead on the pillow at her ear, still letting her use his body her way, he brought his hand to her breast and teased at her nipple, plucking lightly, twisting gently.

  Sybil had hated that, but Gabe seemed to love it. Each time he tweaked or twisted, she made a beautiful sound and pushed her chest more firmly into his grip.

  When her breathing began to get loud and erratic, Heath realized that their first time wouldn’t be a complete disaster after all. She was close—so was he, but he’d held it together.

  Now he took over. Pushing up onto his hands, he stared down at her, and when she opened her eyes and focused on him, he rocked his hips back until he was nearly out of her, then slammed back. The change from gentle to intense made her eyes flare. He did it again. And again. When he pulled back the fourth time, it was over for him. He dropped onto her, tucked his head on her shoulder, shoved his hands under her body and grabbed hold of her ass, and freed himself to seek release.

  He came almost at once, grunting like a damn animal, but he kept up a fevered thrusting pace, and it lasted for-fucking-ever, so that he thought he’d explode from the sensitivity. But she was with him, pulsing around him, her nails digging into his ass, every exhale a tiny yes until she was crying, Yesyesyesyesyesyes! Ohgod! Nownownownownow! YES! NOW! YES!

  When it was over, they simply stopped moving and stayed just as they were, his body on hers. After a moment, it dawned on him that he was too big and must have been smothering her, but when he tried to pull out and roll to the side, Gabe clenched her body around his and whispered, “No.”

  Her voice was muffled by his body, but still, Heath thought he heard something else in that one short syllable. He tried to shift at all, and she clutched him close, pressing her face to his chest, and he stopped, having lifted up only an inch or two. Her shoulders began to shake.

  She was crying.

  He didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t ask if he’d hurt her. He knew the answer to both questions. Nothing was wrong. He hadn’t hurt her.

  But what had just happened between them was momentous—an ending and a beginning.

  Heath felt it, too—shaken to his core, his emotions careening through him. But since he had been a small boy, he’d cried only a handful of times, and he’d shed his final tear when the firefighters, arriving too late to be of any real help, pulled Ruthie’s charred body from her mother’s car.

  If only he hadn’t been out with Logan that night. If only he’d been in his own truck, his safety gear might have backed the fir
e down enough to save them. Or at least to save his daughter.

  Shoving that thought to the side, he kissed Gabe’s temple and pulled out, only flexing his hips, so that he didn’t break her solid hold on him. Then he rolled to his side and wrapped his arms around her, tucking her even closer. She hooked her leg over his, like she was trying to climb into him.

  “I know, little one. I know,” he murmured into her hair. “I know.”

  She held him and wept and never said a word.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nine

  Gabe’s eyes flew open at the sound of the front door banging shut. Britnee was a slammer—doors, cupboards, windows, you name it, if it could be slammed, she slammed it. Not in anger or passive aggression. Britnee was simply loud. In everything.

  As her roommate banged around in the kitchen next, Gabe could track her movements: fridge—slam—juice bottle on the counter—slam—cupboard—slam—plastic tumbler on the counter—lighter slam.

  All that slamming suggested that Britnee hadn’t yet realized that they had a guest. Heath’s truck was parked in front of their bunkhouse, but it was dark, and she wasn’t necessarily the world’s most observant person.

  On the other hand, she knew about Heath and the rumors swirling around him and Gabe, and she’d seen him and commented, expansively, on his hotness. He’d been up at the ranch a few days before to re-shoe the horses, and the staff gossip mill had been churning at full capacity.

  Ever since his blow-up at the Jack, when he’d beaten the crap out of that guy and shouted at him to stay away from her, the entire town of Jasper Ridge and the staff of the Moondancer were all fixated. Like they were the hot new storyline on the town soap opera.

  Until tonight, she’d been profoundly frustrated, because he’d barely paid her any mind—she’d hardly ever seen him, and when she had, he’d mostly ignored her. Even that night at the Jack, he’d ignored her until he’d beaten a guy into the hospital who’d been no worse than irritating in his attention to her.