by Viv Daniels
I gave him a level stare.
“If I were a serial killer, would I tell you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re twisted.”
“And yet you came out here with me?” He raised his eyebrows. “I think that makes you pretty twisted, Hannah.”
“Just doing this makes me pretty twisted when it comes to my social circle.”
“It’s official,” he replied, and held out his hands. “You need new a new social circle.” And then he gave me that smile that melted my insides. Laying any lingering reluctance aside, I dropped into his arms. He guided me around the back of the truck, pulled down the tailgate, and lifted me up into the bed. Then he jumped up himself and went over to a toolbox-like trunk bolted to one side of the bed. Inside was a foam pad and a sleeping bag.
“I do a lot of camping,” Boone explained, almost sheepishly. He spread the pad out on the metal surface and started arranging the sleeping bag on top of it. As soon as he was done he plopped down on the blanket and patted the space at his side.
I ignored that and fell on top of him. This kiss was not the gentle, tentative exploration the last one had been. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. All the pent-up desire from the bar and the game and weeks of watching him across the fence came pouring out of me as I kissed him, my arms flung over his shoulders, my stomach brushing his chest. My knees were braced on either side of his thighs, my sundress bunched up and billowing around his legs.
“So, no more chatting?” he gasped when I paused for a moment to take the clip out of my hair and shake the blonde waves free.
“Nope,” I said, and threw the clip aside. I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I’ve been wet for you since I first got in your truck.”
Boone inhaled sharply, then slid his hands up my thighs and under the hem of my panties. “Holy…” Seconds later, he whisked the panties off, leaving me bare. Cool air flowed through the floaty skirt of my dress and across my sensitized flesh and everything started to ache with need.
“Take off your shirt,” I murmured, circling my hips against him. “I want to touch your chest.”
“Do you have any idea how hot you sound right now?” Boone asked with a groan. “It’s unreal.”
I started pulling his tee over his head and he sighed and lifted his arms. “I’m real.” And tonight, I was throwing caution to the wind.
“If all Canton girls are like you, I’m going to start hanging around the campus more.”
I pulled the material tight, trapping his arms above his head. “If you can do what you claim, I won’t let the other girls near you.”
Shit. I should not have said that. It came out less like a tease than like I was angling for something more than tonight.
Quickly, I ducked my head and took his lower lip between my teeth. I nibbled slightly, then flicked my tongue across his mouth and sank lower, tasting his neck and the hollow of this throat, tracing a line of soft, wet kisses right down the middle of his chest to his sternum. Boone was just as gorgeous up close as he’d been on the rooftop, all toned and golden from working in the sun. Sparse whorls of hair circled each nipple and his skin smelled of salt and sawdust. He untangled himself from his shirt and braced his hands on the floor behind him, leaning back as I explored downward to the ridges that defined his abdomen and the intriguing line of hair marching from his navel into the waistband of his pants.
Before I went further, though, I had a bit of curiosity to slake. My fingers traced the inked script running across the side of his torso.
“They only live who dare.”
His muscles tensed beneath my touch.
“It’s from a poem.” Boone’s voice floated above my head, more stilted than I’d ever heard before.
A poem? I’d never read it—though, admittedly, I’d only been an English major for two months. What kind of handyman tattooed poetry on his skin? It made me realize I hardly knew anything about the guy I was lying on top of.
“What does it mean to you?” I asked.
In response, he dragged me up his chest and kissed me again. One hand anchored around my back, he flipped me beneath him and settled his jean-clad legs between mine. The floaty fabric of my dress bunched up around my hips, leaving my lower half delightfully bare to the night air…and to Boone.
He eased his fingers between my legs and I discovered just how nice it was to have a man who worked with his hands touching you. Calluses that had felt rough against my face—well, they still felt rough against more sensitive spots, but wonderfully, urgently so. I bucked my hips and spread my legs wider for him.
His lips parted in an almost wolfish grin. “Oh, wow. You weren’t kidding. You’re soaked.”
“I want you so bad,” replied some voice that was not me, could not possibly be Hannah Swift. Maybe it was three vodka cranberries, or the fight with my father, or some sea-air-induced madness. I shook my better angels free. “Um— I need my purse. I have a—”
“Condom?” He nodded. “Me, too.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I really, really didn’t want Boone to be the kind of guy who argued about that shit. And I certainly didn’t want to put a stop to the festivities, but no matter how crazy tonight had gotten, I still had to think about tomorrow. But we were definitely on the same page.
Boone flicked his thumb across my clit a few times and I writhed on the bed of the truck. Despite the pad and the sleeping bag, I could still feel the ridges of the metal beneath me cutting into my back and butt, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was rugged and ridiculous and absolutely wonderful.
He was still fingering me, kneeling between my legs and staring down at me intently. Positioned like this, he could be staring at a tile on my neighbors’ roof. He was still in his jeans and work boots.
I reached for the metal button on his jeans. His erection strained against the worn denim, and I palmed it through the fabric. I wanted to hold it. I wanted to taste it. I wanted him inside me. I popped the button free.
“Wait, Hannah.” His words broke through my lust-filled haze. “We may be alone but we’re still in public. Don’t take all my clothes off yet.”
“Then when?”
Instead of responding, he moved away from me and grabbed the edges of the pad, yanking it, the sleeping bag, and me toward the tailgate. He dropped back off the side and pulled me right up to the edge of the bed. “Perfect,” he said, then leaned forward, hooked my knees over his shoulders, and buried his face between my legs.
I caught my breath. Instinctively, my hands started tugging my dress back down around my hips, but then the feeling of what Boone was doing to me overtook the panic swirling in my brain. His tongue, oh God…and his mouth. Oh, please, more. Like that, like that. Just like that. Do it, oh God, please. Please…
It might have been a minute before I realized I was saying it out loud, that I was begging, pleading with him to make me come in a voice so wanton that I was shocked on my own behalf.
“Yeah, baby,” he murmured against parts of my body that were not used to murmuring. I moaned and panted. “Come for me.”
That’s all it took. I came, throbbing in time to the waves of pleasure that washed over me. The sensations went on and on, until I lay boneless in the bed of the truck, staring up at the darkening sky. I barely even noticed when Boone climbed back up beside me. He pulled a condom out of his wallet and slipped it on. He’d unzipped his pants and slid them down a bit over his hips, but hadn’t taken them completely off. His weight pressed me into the hard metal ridges of the floor, and I slid my hands down the smooth, rippling muscles of his back to his jeans.
“Well, this is convenient,” I said. “If my hands get cold, I’ll just put them in your pockets.” I slid my hands into his back pockets and grabbed his butt, pulling him toward me even as he pressed into me. Yes.
“You feel incredible.” He groaned in my ear, withdrawing and then thrusting again, harder, deeper. Every time, he pounded me further against the hard metal beneath me,
and though I knew I’d feel it tomorrow, I didn’t care, couldn’t care. It was so hot.
Abruptly he pulled out and braced himself above me. “Do you like it from behind?”
I blinked at him. “No one has ever asked me that question before.” I probably would have gone red in the face if Dylan had uttered those words. But out of Boone’s mouth they sounded more sexy than crude. Or sexy and crude, all at once.
“That doesn’t sound enthusiastic.”
I laughed. “Let’s give it a try.”
He grinned and pulled me up until I was standing. “You’ll like this, I promise.” He turned me around and leaned me over the roof of the cab.
“Okay, then,” I said as he flipped up the back of my skirt so my ass was totally exposed. I spread my legs and he guided himself back inside me, then reached out and covered my splayed hands with his own.
“Trust me,” he whispered in my ear. “This way you can watch the night fall over the water while I fuck you.”
Delicious shudders passed through me from his words. Who knew I liked being talked to like this? That I liked talking during sex at all? I looked out over the water and my mouth dropped. While lying in the back of the truck, I hadn’t really realized how exposed we actually were. Sure, there was a nice, thick forest at our backs, but the river was open before us. If he hadn’t lifted me up here, there could have been an entire flotilla of boats out there watching Boone do dirty things to me and I would never have known.
Boone had his hands on my hips now, angling them just so for maximum penetration. I wasn’t breathing anymore, just gasping in time to his movements, my hands searching for purchase against the smooth white paint job as he drove me harder and harder toward some distant, glorious point.
Far across the violet water, tiny lights sparkled, and up in the sky, the first stars bloomed. Boone brought his hand around my hips to stroke me between my legs and I moaned.
“I told you you’d love it,” he said. I nodded wordlessly, since I knew if I dared speak it would only be to start begging him again. But he seemed to know anyway, and started whispering things in my ear. Things like “Spread your legs for me, baby” and “I’m going to make you come like this,” and “tilt your hips up just a bit—yeah, like that. Doesn’t that feel good?”
“Yes,” I moaned, dropping my head down. My blonde hair fell in a curtain around my face but it didn’t stop the words spilling from my lips. “Yes. Please, yes…”
He wrapped his spare hand in my hair and pulled me upright again, until every inch of me was flush to him, from my shoulders against his chest to our joined hips and his legs pressing mine into the back window of the cab.
“Don’t hide, Hannah,” he breathed into my ear. “I want to watch you while you come.” His breath traveled, hot and heavy, down the side of my throat and he closed his mouth over that sensitive spot at the base and sucked.
I came apart, crying out and clenching my muscles around his cock as my second orgasm shot through me, sudden and intense and almost painful in its power.
His thrusts turned fast and wild for a moment and then he came, too, his fast, breathless exclamations an echo of my own. And when it was over we both stood there for a moment, panting, and then we sank down to the floor of the cab, muscles tingling, utterly spent.
Above us, the trees shushed in the wind and beside us, the water lapped the beach.
“Wow,” I whispered.
“Mmm.” He slipped his arm around my shoulder and leaned back against the cab for support. I nestled into his embrace, resting my head against his magnificent chest and trying to get my heart rate back to normal.
My world, however, had spun completely out of control.
Six
We must have sat like that for several minutes without saying anything. Which was probably a good thing, given how talkative I’d been recently.
“We should probably get back to the club,” I said at last, when my breathing and my pulse had returned to normal. My brain, of course, was blown away. “There’s a car coming to take me home.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “But we’re not done yet. You only had two. I owe you another orgasm.”
I laughed and grabbed my panties and my purse. “I’ll take a rain check.”
He looked surprised. “Really?”
My mouth clamped shut. “I—that’s not what I meant. I meant it’s fine. Two is plenty.”
“But then how will you know I was telling the truth?”
I shook my head at him and checked the time on my phone. Yeah, we had to get back. It was nearly eight. “Honestly, I don’t think I could handle another right now.” That was categorically untrue. I could have half a dozen more of those and still beg for more. Literally beg, as it turned out.
What the hell had happened to me just now? Hannah Swift did not behave that way.
He plucked the phone from my fingers. “Okay,” he said, typing away, “but I owe you.” He handed it back to me and I saw he’d added his number.
I looked down at the entry, confused. Is this how it usually went with one-night stands? I had no basis for comparison.
The ride back to the yacht club, we chatted about utterly mundane things. Weather, traffic to and from the mainland, and even, to my eternal chagrin, how the gas mileage was on the truck. I can’t believe I asked him that. I can’t believe he answered.
When we got to the club, I saw a black town car waiting for me near the front.
“Guess that’s my ride,” I said to Boone.
“Swanky.” As I moved to get out of the car, he put his hand over mine on the bench seat. “Hannah.”
“Yes?” I turned back. His face was in shadow.
“You have my number.”
I nodded.
“Hey,” he said suddenly. “You’re okay, right?”
A tiny, nervous laugh escaped my lips. “Oh, Boone,” I said. “I’m more than okay.” I leaned across the seat and placed a soft kiss on his lips. “Thank you for tonight.”
And then I slipped away. Boone waited until I was in the town car before driving off, which I thought was sweet of him. The driver was an older gentleman who barely said two sentences for the whole ride back to Canton.
Which was a relief. I sat back against the plush leather seats, my hands trailing idly over my sensitized skin, through my mussed hair, across my swollen lips. I was probably going to be sore tomorrow, both from that hard truck bed and from the sex itself.
Oh my God, what had I done? Don’t get me wrong, it was incredible, but also absolutely insane. I looked at the phone, where his number was in my contacts. Boone. That’s it. No last name.
I’d just has sex with a guy whose last name I didn’t know. Who did that kind of thing? Not Hannah Swift, that’s for sure. And then he gave me his number.
Quickly, before I could talk myself out of it, I texted him back.
Hannah. :-)
Now he had my number, too.
Oh, who was I kidding? He had my number from the first moment at the bar. He certainly had my number in the back of that truck. Why had I said those things to him? I was not a talker in bed. I always thought the idea was ridiculous. But I’d talked for him. I’d begged for him. And he’d talked, too. He’d called me baby…and I liked it. And every time he’d told me to come, I’d complied, as if I could somehow orgasm on command. Or maybe only on his command.
I let my head thunk back against the buttery-soft seat. So much for my innocent little flirtation with the neighbors’ handyman. Right now, I didn’t know who I knew less: Boone or myself.
I put my hands down on either side of my legs and pressed into the seat, fighting for a calm I couldn’t conjure. Okay, Hannah, get a grip. Yes, you did that crazy, crazy thing. It was totally wild and very unlike you. But—be honest—was there a single moment of this evening you didn’t like?
Nope. Not one second, not one iota, not one little tiny bit. I’d loved it all. I may be stuck in a dark little car, but my spirit was floating som
ewhere in the stratosphere, and there was a smile on my face that seemed stuck there for good.
* * *
I was still wearing that ridiculous grin the next afternoon, when I met a few friends for lunch. They’d suggested Verde, a favorite restaurant of ours near the Canton campus. I suggested about five other places, while secretly thinking anyplace but Verde. I never wanted to set foot in that restaurant again. Even though I knew Tess was out of town and not waiting tables, I’d spent a few days stalking that place last winter in an attempt to confront my sister about our relationship. Everyone on staff knew me, and I’m sure what they knew wasn’t great.
“You’ve been a total hermit since you got back from Europe, Hannah,” Caitlin said as we took our seats at the Thai restaurant I’d dragged them to instead. I made the excuse that you couldn’t get good Asian food in Europe—such a lie, by the way, the Indian in London is to die for— and that I was craving some drunken noodles. “Part of the benefit of you being a townie is I have someone to hang out with during summer school.”
“Sorry.” I shrugged. “It’s been a hectic summer.”
“Well,” she said, smoothing her curly halo of red hair, “my utter lack of a social life has been a boon to my grades at least.”
Boon. My cheeks went nuclear and my facial muscles seems to have a mind of their own. I quickly took a sip of my water to try to cover it. They needed to work on the air-conditioning in this place. I fanned myself with my menu.
“Hannah?” Emily asked from across the table. “You okay?”
“I’m great.” I studied the menu. Great didn’t even touch it. I was spectacular. Ecstatic. Orgasmic, even.
Caitlin sat back in her seat and crossed her arms over her chest. “You just got laid.”
I stared at her. “What?”
“Don’t try to deny it. You’re smiling like the town fool, blushing like a schoolgirl and your skin looks like you just stepped out of a spa. You got laid.”
What was the point in denying it? “Yes.”
