Sounded pragmatic enough to me, but I was once again struck by how Hannah always seemed to think of her sisters first. She worried about them so much. Was this a new development, or had this always been the dynamic between them? I wanted to know what she was so scared of. I wanted to know the root of her concerns. I wanted to know why Hannah couldn’t just be straight with her sisters about any potential dangers that might be lurking out here in the “English” world, as the Amish apparently called it. But although we’d spent months working together, on and off depending on my schedule, I didn’t really know thing one about Hannah Miller except that she was strong, passionate, and most of all, guarded. Maybe to a fault.
Softly, I said, “It’s good you’re looking out for them, love. You’re one hell of a big sister.”
A flicker of sadness crossed Hannah’s face, creasing her brow. She covered it with a tilt of her head and a shrug. “That’s my job.”
I let those three words hang for a moment, debating on how to proceed. If ensuring the welfare of her sisters was such an integral part of Hannah, far be it for me to try and subvert that. Especially if I wanted to get closer to her in the future. If that was the goal, then I’d need to show her I was interested in more than all the carnal ways in which she could please me.
Was that what I wanted? That thought alone was enough to give me pause. I’d never been so intrigued by a woman before. I’d never wanted to get to their core so badly. I told myself, often, that I was the Joker—the guy who was here for everyone’s entertainment. Maybe what I was feeling was the dawning realization that I couldn’t be that for Hannah if I didn’t get to the bottom of whatever made her put up those walls. I couldn’t leave her smiling, when this was all said and done, if I didn’t dig a little deeper.
It was out of my comfort zone, but I was surprised to find there was nothing I wanted more.
When I couldn’t come up with anything good to say, Hannah chuckled and spun her keys around her finger. “Come on, Ash. You can ride with me. What’s the motorcycle term for that?” She appeared to ponder this for a minute. “Oh, right.” A jade flash of her eyes; a self-satisfied quirk of her lips. “You can ride bitch.”
I cocked a brow. I’d already resolved to respect Hannah’s boundaries… but I just could not let that remark stand.
Her hand was in the air, still twirling her keys, and I grabbed her wrist hard, pressing my thumb against her pulse. I felt it quicken as I pushed forward with my body, pinning Hannah between me and the wall in one fell swoop. Her breath caught as I slid my free hand up to guard the back of her head, but when her back impacted, she let out a low sound. “Oh…”
Hannah’s keys slipped from her grasp and dropped to the ground. Neither of us so much as glanced at them. I only stared into her eyes as I slid up against her body, the hard, hot length of my cock riding along the center seam of her jeans.
I felt the quake in her knees as I said, “How well do you think you know me, Hannah?”
“Not very,” she admitted in a wispy breath. She was doing her best to keep her chin up, keep the fire of defiance in her eyes, but I could tell by the way she parted her lips she wanted—badly—to sink her teeth into her lower one. A nervous habit, I reckoned. One she worked hard at overcoming. I’d seen Sarah do it at the bar. Must’ve been one of those things that ran in the family. Hannah obviously saw it as a weakness; she would not allow herself that kind of vulnerability in front of me. Nor would she allow her gaze to dip to my mouth as she so clearly wanted to. The struggle was written in the tightness of her face. In the tension around her eyes. In the subtle tremble of her irises.
With a slight flex I pressed harder into her, grinding my erection up between where her hip met her thigh, skirting the warmth I could feel radiating through her jeans. Her free hand shot out, seeking purchase along my belt, her fingers for one entrancing moment working at the buckle, but I seized her other wrist just as easily as I’d done the first and held both arms over her head, against the wall behind her. Hannah arched, and I was reminded of how her body had moved against the mirror in the Trick Shots bathroom, her legs up and around me as she balanced precariously on the sink.
“That’s right,” I murmured, my mouth close to hers, “you hardly know me at all. So you don’t know what I’m capable of.” And in one, quick move, I flipped her around, her ass pressing against my hips as I rocked into her, driving my point home.
Hannah moaned. She tossed her hair and bent in a smooth, downward arc, spine bowed, ass jutting. My cock spat precome against my zipper and I snarled, wanting so badly to rip her clothes off, to jam her jeans down around her ankles and ruin another pair of panties for her. I needed that warm, wet slice of heaven between her quivering legs. I knew she needed it too. I could smell it on her.
But what she needed more was to understand who among us was in charge.
“I don’t do anything ‘bitch’,” I whispered in her ear. Then I captured her lobe between my teeth, gave a soft suck, and set her hands free. “But I am ready to go when you are.”
I did my best to flash her my most irreverent grin as she slowly turned, a look of disbelief—and frustration—plain on her face. Her eyes blazed as she bent to pick up her keys, a sharp contrast to the darkness of her scowl.
“Get the hell out of my house,” she said, but I could tell by the way her breasts heaved she’d be joining me shortly—and that she’d let me back in anytime I wanted.
I strutted out to my bike, shaking my head and trying to hide my smile. I liked this game we were playing. It felt good. It felt… real.
Though I still couldn’t remember why the fairgrounds seemed so important, like I was forgetting something. I wasn’t about to let that nag me until it ruined my fun, though.
Had I stopped to think about it for a few moments longer, I might’ve saved us all a world of trouble.
5
Hannah
I would never forget the first time I went to the fair.
It was damn near two years ago, not long after I’d left the Amish community I’d spent my whole life in, desperate for greener pastures. I’d known I didn’t belong there anymore—that my continued presence there would only bring more misery and shame down on my head. I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t spend the rest of my days in quiet desperation, praying until my hands bled that God would, just this once, be wrathful.
Amish culture was all about forgiveness. Clean slates. The washing away of sin. But some sins were so terrible, so evil, that they shouldn’t ever be forgotten. For some, there should be no opportunity for penance.
That was just one of many reasons I belonged out here, in the English world. I didn’t have much to start out with—some stolen money, an ex-Amish friend who’d never come back from Rumspringa himself, and a good bead on how to secure an apartment—but at least I had my freedom.
And that turned out to be so much more precious than I’d ever dreamed. I didn’t have to let anyone tread on me ever again. I could choose the path my life would take, for good or ill. I was finally in control.
Of course, I’d immediately wanted to indulge in all things English. I was convinced that everything I’d been told about the outside world—all the things my family had labeled “bad” and “wrong”—was absolute crap. For the most part, I’d been right, and one of my favorite highlights through all the time I spent experimenting with English culture involved this very fair.
The same one that rolled into Bright Falls every year around this time. The one that had dazzled me, spellbound me, with its lights and colors. Captivated me with its myriad of sounds. Threatened to drown me in a sea of people and balloons.
On top of being utterly amazing, the experience had also been… overwhelming. So when Beth turned to me at the ticket booth and told me in our mother tongue that Sarah looked unwell, I was hardly surprised at all.
I’d been talking with Ash, trading innuendos with him about what might go down between us tonight if he played his cards right. The way h
e’d taken me over in my apartment still haunted me, possessed me, made my knees feel like Jell-O long after the fact. All I could think about was getting him between my legs again, putting a period on the end of that sentence we’d started in my foyer. I was itching for it. Craving it. I wanted nothing else.
But as soon as I saw Sarah’s face, the fire inside me extinguished to a low smolder. She was pale and drawn, clinging to Reid’s arm in a way I’d seen too many times before. Out here, we called it anxiety. Back home, they simply referred to it as unwell.
Sarah had always had something of a delicate constitution. As a child, she’d straddled the line between bravery and terror, climbing to the tops of the tallest trees she could find, then panicking when she realized she’d have to come back down. Someone always had to help her, the poor thing—we’d learned early on that there were just some things Sarah wasn’t capable of.
As an adolescent, she took on the role of mediator, finding some solace in keeping the peace between her family, her friends, and even her sisters. As noble as it was, I recognized that she performed this duty as a compulsion—discord unnerved her, triggered spells where she had difficulty breathing and staying on her feet. Sarah felt comfortable only when her life was completely in balance. I doubted there was a more uptight person on the planet.
Except, perhaps, for the church elders—the way they conducted themselves inside the village bounds, anyway. But I knew from experience that looks, and even reputations, could be deceiving.
“I’m all right,” Sarah said, before I could even ask the question. I scrunched my nose, disbelieving, and in Dutch she added, “Everything here is new and a little scary. But Reid has offered to take care of me, so I think I’ll manage.”
I regarded Reid a moment. Ash had made him out to be an enormous tool, but the way he stayed close to Sarah, the protective manner in which he embraced her, told a different story. His warm, brown eyes were shadowed by his brow, knotted with concern. He cared. He was worried. And that, at the time, was good enough for me.
She needs to branch out, I told myself in an attempt to soothe my own apprehensions. Live a little. And she can’t do that if you’re hovering over her shoulder too closely.
Slowly, I nodded. As Beth and Wyatt chattered next to us, we entered the fairgrounds proper.
“I was thinking of maybe heading into the funhouse first,” Ash said, nudging me in a mostly inconspicuous way. I took that to mean he’d like to split off from the group, and when I looked up at him, I could tell exactly why. He had that same look in his eyes he’d had the other night at Trick Shots when I’d proposed our arrangement, and then again in my apartment when I’d goaded him into getting rough with me. That was the way I liked it—hard, bruising. And in some ways… predictable.
“I was gonna take Beth over to the freak show,” Wyatt said, his boyish grin almost too sweet and summery to bear. How a kid that utterly adorable could have the temper of a berserker, as Ash told it, was beyond me. He was chewing gum, and I was sure by the end of the night, that particular piece would end up in my sister’s mouth. The way Beth looked at him… it was like Wyatt was the moon itself, come to Earth to put stars in her eyes. They were so full of youthful excitement it was sickening. I waved them off.
“Go,” I told them, “you’ll have fun. And you will too, Sarah, if you can get outside your own head for one whole minute.” Sarah blushed, but Beth was already disappearing into the crowd with Wyatt and I wasn’t sure she even heard me. “Be careful!” I called after them.
“Shall we?” Ash asked, offering me his arm.
I rolled my eyes at him, but took it. “So gallant,” I muttered. But I still smiled.
That was the thing—even though I saw right through Ash’s charms, he still made me smile like no one else could.
He guided me through the teeming masses in the direction of the funhouse, an attraction I’d never actually gone into before. Despite its name, it looked more terrifying than fun—the doorway was nothing more than several white, narrow sheets of plastic hanging from the mouth of a gigantic clown face that framed the entrance. Like teeth. Like we were entering through its jaws.
I shuddered. God, it was creepy. But Ash was insistent; he didn’t so much as break stride on our way in.
“Ugh, why do people like clowns?” I whispered, letting the darkness of the funhouse interior settle over me. It felt sticky, in a way. Like we were walking through cold cobwebs. The scent of stale popcorn bordered on overwhelming. “They’re so… weird.”
“Statistically, they don’t,” Ash answered, pulling me through the rows of bare bulbs, like vanity lights, affixed to either side of the long hall we found ourselves in. “There was a poll a couple years back. Something like forty-three percent of Americans hate clowns, twelve percent have an outright phobia of them, and only forty percent actually find them endearing.”
I side-eyed him. “How the hell do you know that?” I asked him. “And what about the other five percent?”
“I assume they didn’t give enough of a shit to answer,” Ash said, responding to my incredulous stare with a grin. “And I end up bouncing at a lot of trivia nights.”
I shook my head and laughed. “And you just… remember it all? File it away for moments such as these?”
“What, you thought I was stupid?”
“No!” I said, maybe a little too quickly. It was true—I hadn’t—but I hadn’t exactly thought he was smart, either. I really hadn’t given it much thought at all; I was interested in Ash for a lot of reasons, but none of them had much to do with cleverness on his part.
“Well, I have a pretty good memory,” he said, and it sounded to me like there was almost a sadness to those words—like maybe there were things he wanted to forget. I understand that, viscerally. There was plenty in my life I wished I could forget, too.
“I guess that’s why we’re kinda short on company,” I mused, noting the emptiness around us. Despite the crowds outside the funhouse, inside we were utterly alone. “The clowns, I mean.”
“Well, if I were a betting man…” Ash began, but then he stopped short and never finished his thought. “C’mon. I have it on good authority this place has got some of those crazy mirrors. The ones that make you look super tall or all… wiggly, or whatever.” And instead of letting me take his arm, he grabbed my hand, weaving our fingers together in a way that made me feel like we’d been doing this for years.
That small gesture was so… oddly intimate. More so than fucking in the Trick Shots bathroom had been. It made me feel vulnerable and uneasy; and yet I cherished the warmth that flooded my body almost as much as I was unnerved by it. This wasn’t supposed to be… a thing. Ash had a reputation. It was well-known, and to his credit, he never tried to hide it from me. And to be honest, it wasn’t like I faulted him for it. I just couldn’t see myself opening up to someone like that, knowing what the cost would ultimately be. I was the one who did all the running away, not the other way around.
I wanted to get us back to the parts of being together that felt the most comfortable. So as soon as we made it into the chamber of mirrors, I knew what I had to do. What I’d been longing to do ever since Ash pinned me against the wall back at my apartment.
And surrounded by mirrors? Kinky.
Ash was standing in front of one that made him look incredibly tall—taller than he already was—and terribly skinny—which he was not. No, Ash was broad and well-muscled, built to hold his ground. Built to hold women down as he fucked their brains out. Built to manhandle, and built to last.
Yet there was such gentleness in him when he took my hand, and before that, when he cushioned the back of my head from slamming against the bathroom mirror our first time. Mirrors were becoming a thing with us, it seemed. I wondered if he remembered the significance.
I slipped my arms around Ash from behind, letting him watch the reflection of my hands sliding up underneath his shirt. I grazed my nails along his abs, tracing each ridge, getting to know the smoot
h, hilly terrain that was his body. I hadn’t had enough of him before. I hadn’t gotten to feel him the way I wanted to. And here, again in public, I still wouldn’t be able to have my fill. But I could sate my appetite, just a little.
And his, too.
Ash’s muscles went taut as I dragged my hands down to his belt, ripping it free from the buckle. He never suggested I should stop. He never even asked what I was doing. It was like he knew, instinctively, how very badly I wanted this. How badly I wanted him. Without explanation, without conversation, we were somehow on the same page. We were… in sync, when it came to this. Desire was a language we both deeply understood.
I understood even better when I opened Ash’s fly and pulled his dick out, feeling the weight of it, its taut texture. His skin was so warm, so hard I could feel his pulse through the long, swollen vein along the underside of it. There was no doubt about it—he wanted me. He wanted this.
He inhaled sharply and I felt his shoulder blades flex. The ripple and shiver that rolled through his back was delicious, worthy of my tongue. With my free hand, I lifted the hem of his shirt and jacket and licked a hot, slick trail toward his nape. I could not reach it, even on tip toes.
In the mirror, Ash watched as I stroked him, gripped him, savored every inch of his aching, filling manhood. His eyes were glued to the motions of my hand, his lips parted, curled a little at the corners in a lazy smirk. I watched his eyes glaze, watched that animal hunger slip over his features like a shroud. This was lust, pure and simple. This was my jam—my comfort zone.
LUST: A Bad Boy and Amish Girl Romance (The Brody Bunch Book 2) Page 5
