by Ruby Scott
Patrick shifted himself so that he was straddling my legs, his fingers sliding over my bare arms. Strangely, his touch did not elicit the sort of response that it should have. I should feel shock and disgust at the fact that the man I called brother was touching me in ways that no brother should. I only felt the electricity jumping between his skin and mine, creating a deep, burning desire in the core of my body.
Yes! My body crowed in jubilation as his tongue touched the seam of my lips dragging a deliciously slow line against my lower lip. This is what I need. I thought about breaking away briefly, insisting that he stop and that this wasn’t right, but the thought went straight out of my head the moment his fingers brushed the hem of my shirt. I shifted my legs slightly so that I could arch up and allow him to remove the fabric as his fingers skimmed the bare skin underneath the shirt.
I didn’t even think about telling him to stop as he pulled it over my head. As he broke the kiss, I realized that he was panting just as much as I was, and I allowed myself an inner smile. I was affecting him much the same way he was me.
“Do you want this?” he breathed, hesitating before touching my bare skin once more.
I gave him a look that equated to my most potent bitch-face. “I’d like to see you try to stop.”
He grinned and leaned down once more, lips moving from the corner of my mouth to my jaw. As he reached my ear, he breathed, “You have no idea how long I have wanted to do this.” Each word was a hot caress against the delicate skin, and I felt shivers of desire trill down my body. I reached up with my fingers, finding the bowtie and quickly undoing it. My fingers were still shaking as I began unbuttoning his shirt, but I couldn’t seem to remember the reason why.
“You have no idea how much I didn’t know that,” I breathed back, propping myself on my elbows so that I could whisper the mock in his ear. He let out a laugh, one that didn’t truly leave his body, only rumbled in his stomach and up through his throat.
As I shucked his shirt off, I sucked in a deep breath. The sneaky bastard had been lifting weights. How had I not noticed the difference when I first saw him? I traced the defined contours of his chest as he began working at the zipper of my skirt. I grinned as he cursed, attempting to yank it down.
“Here,” I said, guiding his hand through the motions of correctly removing the skirt.
“Damn women’s clothing,” he growled. “Such a pain in the ass.”
“You’re a pain in the—oh,” I started to say, and then was cut off as his hips dipped down and ground against mine. I could feel him, hard and ready, pressed against me and that made me considerably speechless.
“Much better,” Peter said, and I did a repeat of the bitch-face up at him as I realized he was saying as much due to my sudden lack of words.
I reached down and gripped his length through the trousers, and he arched against me, eyes going wide.
“Wanted to say something?” I asked dryly. He grinned down at me and swooped low to capture my lips once more. We spent the next few minutes undressing each other, and even though I was fully naked before him, I felt the safest I had around him in years. He had always managed to make me feel small and insignificant and too big for my own skin at the same time, but now there was only the comfortable camaraderie of two people who knew each other well. That, and the burning pulses of desire that ran like lightning down my body with each stroke of his fingers against my skin. That was a bit distracting.
“Are you sure you want this?” Peter asked again, lips only centimeters from my own. I closed the last few breaths between us in answer. I hadn’t been surer of a single thing since I’d decided that this would be the college I would go to.
When he entered me, it was as if the entire world shattered into tiny little fragments and reshaped themselves into something new and completely foreign. I had never felt something quite so exquisite, such a mixture of pain and pleasure.
I cried his name out over and over, each thrust he administered heightening my pleasure. It was as if I was suddenly a pan of water on the stove, simmering and drawing nearer and nearer to the point of boiling. I had never thought of it that way before, but the analogy seemed to fit perfectly in that moment.
I reached up and wrapped one arm around the back of his neck, fisting in his golden locks while the other traced its way down his stomach, feeling the tense and release of muscle in his body with each thrust.
I don’t think I had ever come so hard in my life. It was like a whirlwind that came upon me quite suddenly, taking the boiling water and tossing it up into the air to become a tsunami. I screamed wordlessly in pleasure, not giving a damn about what the people next door thought.
As my muscles contracted around Peter, he soon joined me, stilling and arching his body in a perfect shape. I reached up and kissed the straining skin of his neck as we rode the wave of pleasure out together.
Afterwards, I realized that we hadn’t even drawn down the quilt. I griped about it internally, wondering where the hell I’d get another quilt that was homemade by grandma, but decided to not worry about it for the time being. I simply rested with my head on Peter’s chest, listening to his heart pounding wildly against his ribcage like a caged bird wanting to escape.
His heart calmed, and his breathing slowed, and I knew that he was dozing. I shifted so that I could look up at him. His dusky blond eyelashes brushed his high cheekbones, but I could tell that he wasn’t asleep by the wrinkle between his eyebrows. As I looked up at him, his eyes opened to slits, and I caught a glimpse of turquoise. “Regretting it already?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. What I had done tonight with Peter was something I wouldn’t have done without being so emotionally shaken before. True, I’d always admired his good looks, but just when I had thought that he was bearable, he’d open his mouth and it would make his beauty irrelevant.
But tonight, I’d caught a glimpse of someone he could be. Women always talked about changing men and how it was impossible. I completely believed that; man is a stubborn creature, set in his own ways. But what if this man had decided to change himself without the prompting of anyone else? I narrowed my eyes up at him thoughtfully, my hand mindlessly tracing his palm.
Then, it would be a true change, something that had come from within, not from without. From that brief glimpse and what had come after, I decided that I completely believed that it was possible that Peter, the devil whom I had despised for so many years, had finally taken a turn for the positive.
I sat up, hovering over Peter to let him know that I wasn’t turning him aside or refusing him and gave him a small kiss. “I need to think for a while,” I told him. “I have a lot of things that I need to get past first before I can seriously think about us as an item.”
Peter nodded. “I understand.”
Just that made me think differently of him. While he may still be an asshole, he was an asshole with a heart, and the two were worlds away. “Thank you,” I said to him, squeezing his hand and then getting up to go take a shower.
“April,” he said as I reached for the door handle. I turned back to look at him, gloriously displayed on grandma’s quilt. He had tanned, too, I thought incredulously. Damn, times were changing. “You will always be able to rely on me. I promise.”
“I believe you,” I said simply, because I did. I was taking a great leap into the unknown with only Peter as my safety net. Right now, that felt like the only thing that would be a safety net. Right now, I trusted him completely and fully.
Maybe stepbrothers weren’t as bad as I’d originally thought, I mused as I washed myself off in the shower. I closed my eyes, tilting my head back to let the water drum along my throat. I had a changing, growing human being who happened to be beautiful at the same time waiting on my bed outside, waiting for me.
Life was good, I decided.
THE END
© Copyright 2015 by Maya Grey - All rights reserved.
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Riding the Alpha Cowboy
by Maya Grey
The bar was pandemonium, as most bars located in the central location of any city are on a Friday night. However, Vanessa Crowley was most definitely not the one who was supposed to be in the crowded bar, sipping on a brandy and trying to block out the world.
It simply wasn’t her scene. Vanessa was in her element sitting in a library with her latest cozy mystery or walking around the art gallery that had opened recently situated just a few blocks away. No, on a Friday night, if Vanessa was real with herself, she would have been curled up against her husband’s chest and watching some old Western movie that most likely had John Wayne as the starring actor.
But that would have been two months ago. The options above would have been what Vanessa called P.H. Post Husband. Once she had discovered that Rich was cheating on her, not even with another girl, but with a man, she had instantly gotten him out of her life and her apartment. It seemed much too large, now, and she had taken to leaving it only a few moments after arriving there after getting home from work.
Vanessa had dealt with a particularly melancholy day and had come home to her empty apartment, wanting a kind of comfort that didn’t exist there anymore. Thus, she came to the bar. The drinks seemed to help a bit, though she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was completely alone in the world.
The next sip of brandy Vanessa attempted to take ended up on her shirt. She glared over at the man who had pushed his elbow into her forearm, but he was already moving on. Every man seemed to move on.
Vanessa let out a sigh and downed the rest of her drink without pretense, feeling the burn go all the way through her and settle somewhere in her stomach, where it became a pleasant sort of warmth. She sighed once more and leaned back, before remembering that the bar stool she was resting on had no back, and she bumped against the warm back of one of the many patrons inhabiting the over-crowded bar.
A third sigh seemed nearly comical, so she kept it in, settling for setting her elbow down much too hard on the bar top and pressing her chin against her hand. The bartender was a man who looked to be about her age, perhaps a few years younger, and she watched him pour drinks as if he had been born into the job for several minutes. He had a fluidity about him that people simply didn’t see anywhere else. He reached for the bottles before even looking, sliding glasses along the table with a precision that took years to perfect. Vanessa should know; she’d been a bartender for the vast majority of her twenties. She made a mental note to give the man a tip that went above and beyond normalcy. He deserved it.
Just as she was mentally calculating the tip, adjusting figures as she continued to watch his superb work, someone slid into the bar stool next to her.
Vanessa ignored him. She could smell his spicy cologne, oddly different and not at all oppressing as every other cologne had seemed to be these past few days and months. It was too much like Rich’s scent, and she couldn’t deal with those memories, not right now.
“Howdy.”
The voice was low, low enough to send tingles down Vanessa’s spine, and that southern drawl was sweet enough to make sugar seem pale in comparison. She didn’t even twitch an eyelash. Men were on a very firm no list for the month. Or perhaps year.
“You look as if you’re in need of a good drink, honey,” the man continued.
I don’t see you, so you won’t see me. It was child’s logic, but Vanessa couldn’t help but employing it. Perhaps if she ignored him, he would simply leave. “Bartender,” she called instead.
The young man glanced up, a smile lifting his lips slightly as he glanced over at her.
“Can I get another?” she held up her empty glass. He nodded and made quick work of pouring her next drink.
“I’ll have what the lady is having,” the man Vanessa was avoiding looking at said easily, as if he wasn’t being completely ignored. Already, Vanessa knew two things about this man: he was cocky, and he was handsome. No man who was unattractive could speak so candidly to a woman who refused to even look at him.
Vanessa sighed. If he was going to have a drink while sitting directly beside her, there was no chance that she could shake him so easily. Vanessa steeled her nerves and glanced over at the man.
She obviously hadn’t steeled them enough. She had expected a slightly good-looking man, one who was the kind of easily good-looking that came with birth. One that got the ladies, but wasn’t the type of man who people stared at across the streets and in cafes. Vanessa had never seen one of those men in the flesh.
Well, that was a lie now. This man was made of the kind of symmetry that would make an artist cry. With coal black hair that she could hardly see peeking out of the cowboy hat and eyes that may have been a light green or perhaps a blue. She couldn’t tell because of the lack of proper lighting as well as the way his hat was pulled low over his face. The man was clad in a plaid shirt that was open two buttons down the front, just enough for Vanessa to catch a glimpse of pronounced collarbones as he shifted around to face her. The slight smile that tugged at his full and utterly sinful lips was more than overkill; it made her want to alternately throw herself at him and run away.
Shit. This was getting out of hand fast, and she didn’t even know his name yet. Vanessa told herself to look away; she tried exceptionally hard to tear her gaze away from the cowboy’s magnetic maybe-green-maybe-blue eyes and focus on the bartender once more, but she found that it was impossible. It was as if someone had hot glued their gazes together, and there was no way that she was able to get away, because she hadn’t been able to in the first few seconds when she was still able to.
The bartender slammed the two shot glasses down in front of the pair, effectively breaking the magnetic force that had been between them. Vanessa let out a sigh and downed her drink in one quick gulp. The alcohol made her dizzier than expected, and Vanessa wondered if she really should have taken another drink. She tended to do things that she would regret at a later time when she drank. Especially with handsome men who were giving her their full attention. Rich had never focused his full attention on her; Vanessa realized that now. She had never had such a great amount of focus put on her, not even when they had been having serious conversations such as when to get married and where to go on the honeymoon.
And they weren’t even talking yet.
“She hears,” the man drawled eventually, after what felt like a small eternity. It had been in those eternal heartbeats that Vanessa had completely lost her resolve to ignore this stranger. “I thought that you were hard of hearing.”
Vanessa opened her mouth to say something, anything, but her mind was blank. What does one say to such a statement? “I’m Vanessa,” she eventually said, sticking out her hand much too quickly and accidentally elbowing a patron in the back. He turned around and yelled something offensive at her over the loud music that had begun playing in the background; she didn’t even bother to listen to it. The cowboy glanced over her shoulder, frowning a bit—which created the most beautiful crease between his eyebrows, she noted—before taking her hand. His skin was dry and warm, nearly chapped, but Vanessa found that she liked the rough feel. Rich had always taken great care to keep his hands soft and perfectly groomed. Vanessa kicked herself for not realizing what that meant earlier. There had been the little signs all over the place; the way he always wore his snakeskin shoes and stared at guys’ asses almost as much as Vanessa did. The way he spoke, even, should have been a clue. But she had blindly ignored them all, thinking that Rich had loved her.
Stop thinking about Rich, Vanessa thought. Think about trying to deal with the current situation. “Zeke,” he replied casually, as if she hadn’t just switched topics co
mpletely. “Zeke DePriest.”
DePriest. That name was a famous one in their little Southern town. The DePriests owned almost half of the entire town, not to mention many outsourced companies. How on earth had one of their sons straggled off and become a cowboy? The chaps that clung to his hips for dear life did not look fake in the least, nor did the spurs that adorned his genuine leather boots. This was no cowboy wannabe. He was the real deal. Living in the south had given Vanessa a lot of time to learn the difference between people who actually lived on a farm and those who wished that they did. “A pleasure,” Vanessa said, and then winced. That was what her mother had taught her to say in response to meeting someone new, but with this man, the word ‘pleasure’ hung in the air like a taboo, feeling almost like a caress.
Vanessa most definitely did not miss the spark of interest that lit Zeke’s maybe-blue-maybe-green eyes. She groaned inwardly. Yes, he might be sex incarnated into man, and yes, he may have had the most beautiful accent she had ever heard, but he was still a man. Vanessa was not ready for men, not yet; no matter how pretty they happened to be.
“This place is crowded,” Zeke observed. Vanessa nodded, using her ample hip to nudge a skinny woman out of the way. The blonde shot her a dirty look and mouthed something at her that she didn’t quite catch over the sudden change of song. Vanessa just smiled, the kind of saccharine sweet smile that was reserved for truly annoying things, and the girl finally backed away, going to her own spot at the bar. Vanessa saw her check Zeke out and then give her a scornful glance. She felt a spark of rage light her belly. Yes, she might not be skinny and perfect, but she could most likely out-personality that skinny bimbo any day.
“Do you want to get out?” Zeke asked, slinging a thumb over his shoulder at the door. Vanessa wanted that more than anything, she really did, but she wasn’t sure what it would mean leaving with Zeke. Weren’t bars the places you left with strangers for one night stands? She started to open her mouth to say no, and then looked over his body again and frowned. Maybe a one night stand was what she needed. She could certainly use the break from reality. The fantasy that such a perfect man would ever want her would keep her going on in bed for years to come when it was just her and her thoughts. Vanessa glanced up at Zeke and noted the crooked smile that tilted one corner of his lip up. Oh, yes. She nodded, swinging herself off of the bar stool and picking up her purse from where she had stowed it underneath. She slapped a ten onto the counter and a couple of ones for the tip. The bartender nodded his thanks, flashing her a grin and a thumbs up after Zeke’s back was turned. Vanessa blushed to the roots of her hair and well down onto her neck. Was it so obvious what she was doing?
