Crazy 4U

by Cach, Lisa

  “I might want that later,” she said.

  He smiled, and pulled her dress down as far as it would go in front, revealing one half-peach breast. “Chocolate is going to be the last thing on your mind.”

  She shivered, and he bent his head and rasped his tongue against her nipple. “Jack,” she breathed, looking down at the dark hair of his head. It was finally happening; he was finally here with her, wanting her, and nothing was going to stop them from joining their bodies together. She arched her back at the thought, the pressure of two months of waiting making her impatient.

  She found his hand and put it on the side zipper of her dress. His mouth never left her skin as he pulled down the zipper, his lips brushing round her aureola, his tongue finding the well above her collarbone, his teeth grazing the side of her neck, nipping at where it joined her shoulder and sending shivers through her body and straight to her loins. With both hands he peeled the dress off her, down her arms and past her hips, Kelsey arching to release the fabric beneath her. She wore no undergarments, and when the dress was barely past her mound he held it there, a thick confining band of fabric that would not allow her legs to part.

  He trapped her legs under one of his, binding them further, and lay against her side. She raised her hands above her head, invitation in her eyes. He lay one strong palm across both of hers and she grasped his hand, creating her own willful bondage.

  His face above and to the side of hers, he watched her reaction as with his free hand he stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers, then trailed them down her neck. His exploring touch traced around one breast and into the vulnerable pocket of her underarm, then down her side over the valley of her waist and hill of her hip. He skimmed across her lower belly, tripping lightly through the edge of her hair, the touch sending off alarms of arousal through her sex.

  He tortured her with his slow voyaging, his fingertips stroking the top of her thigh, the back of his hand teasing her hair and setting off hunger contractions in her passage, only to abandon her loins to again play with a nipple or slide over the edge of her lips, where she couldn’t resist sucking on his fingertip as her whole body wished to do with his cock.

  With his finger wet from her own mouth, he slid his palm firmly down the center of her body and lay it over her mound. He put his lips to hers and opened her mouth with his tongue, and when she received him he lightened his hand and gently slid the length of his fingers over the edges of her folds.

  She moaned into his mouth, her hands tightening on his. When she arched against his touch he pulled back, forcing her to lie passive if she wanted his stroking. Her thighs tensed with the effort not to move as his fingers worked their magic in the tight confines of her pressed-together legs. The desire to have him deep inside became visual, her mind imagining his cock sliding deep within her, filling her, stroking in and out. When at last his fingertip touched the entrance to her core, her body released itself in waves of pleasure. He pressed his mouth more firmly to hers, his tongue thrusting deeper as she shook against him, her thighs clamped tight to his hand.

  When the last spasms had died away he released her. She lay relaxed and lazy as he slid the dress off her legs, but when he touched the strap of one shoe she jerked her foot away. “Leave them on,” she said.

  He grinned. “I won’t complain.”

  He stepped into the bathroom and she guessed he was looking for condoms in his toiletry bag. She rolled over on the bed and shoved the sheets and blanket down to the foot, baring the bottom sheet as she had done at his house. She sat up and waited.

  He emerged a moment later with shiny packets in his hand and now as naked as the day she’d first met him, his erection even larger than she remembered. Her sex, so recently sated, tingled anew.

  “How do you want me?” she asked huskily.

  “Six ways from Sunday. But I’ll start here.” He pulled a straight-back chair away from the wall and sat down on it.

  Kelsey got off the bed and walked slowly towards him, placing her shod feet precisely one in front of the other, aware of the swollen anticipation between her legs. Her hair brushed sensuously against her shoulders and she lifted her hands to cup her breasts and play with her nipples between her fingers.

  Jack groaned, his erection bobbing in appreciation. Kelsey felt the power of her sexuality expanding within her, blooming like the rose she had named herself for when taking on this guise.

  She reached Jack and stood with one foot to either side of his, then bent forward and braced herself with her hands on the tall back of the chair. She kissed him, and as she did she straddled him, her legs forced wide by the width of the chair seat. He grasped her hips in his strong hands and guided her down. She helped him find the angle and then closed her eyes and threw back her head as he slowly filled her, her body lowering onto his, coming to rest with the nub of her desire pressing against the firm flesh above the base of his rod.

  Jacks hands on her hips set the pace, her thighs lifting and rocking her in response to his demands, the high heels of her shoes giving her the leverage she needed. As desire built again in her, she took over the pace, grinding against him in search of her own peak. Her pace was too much for his control and his arms came around her, holding her tight against him as he shuddered to his own climax.

  When at last he relaxed she kissed the side of his head, and then could not resist a gentle rocking upon his cock still deep inside her.

  “Don’t worry, Sweetheart,” he said against her ear, and laughed softly. “There’s plenty more to come.”

  He spent the next four hours proving he told the truth.

  Kelsey woke in the dawn hour, her body half-sprawled against Jack’s. He was snoring lightly.

  They’d fallen into slumber with the lights on, and the room revealed itself to Kelsey’s bleary eyes in a chaos of displaced furniture and pillows used for reasons no future guest would want to know about. Her feet were sticking out the bottom of the blanket they’d pulled over themselves sometime during their sleep. She raised one foot into view and thick red rose blossoms fell from it.

  The roses on the vamp had not only grown and bloomed: they were spent.

  Just as her night with Jack was finished, so were her shoes.

  She eased off the bed, then bent down and unfastened the shoes, shedding petals all the while. She stepped out of them, expecting to feel a sudden nakedness and shame, but instead a mix of joy and sadness flowed through her. She would never regret a moment of this night, and her only grief was that she must now leave it behind. Rosa was part of her, but only part. She needed a man who could love all of her. Jack couldn’t help not being that man.

  She found her dress and pulled it on. Jack continued to sleep, his face relaxed in peace. She resisted the urge to kiss him, fearing he would wake.

  Kelsey picked up her shoes, then after a moment’s thought placed them on the bedside table, a memento to prove to him that this had been real.

  She left on feet as silent as the falling of a petal.

  Chapter Eleven

  “We need eighteen Woodwardia fimbriata,” Kelsey said, putting her truck in park and hopping out onto the dirt road that wound through the wholesale nursery.

  “Eighteen what?” Jack asked. He had Monday off after having spent the weekend working the gamer’s convention and had accepted Kelsey’s half-hearted invitation to come with her to the nursery.

  “Giant chain ferns,” Kelsey said flatly.

  “Eighteen giant chain ferns, yes ma’am.” He shut the passenger door and went to work selecting ferns in black gallon buckets and sliding them into the bed of the truck. “What are you getting over there?”

  “Fifteen Polystichum munitum, twelve Adiantum pedatum, and ten Blechnum spicant.”

  “Go ahead, keep it secret if you want to,” he said, annoyance in his voice. He obviously knew she was being intentionally opaque with the names.

  “They’re all ferns.”

  “What’s the matter with you today?” he
asked, coming over to where she was picking through the specimens. “You’ve been getting increasingly sour by the minute.”

  “You haven’t been Mr. Cheerful, either.”

  “I told you why.”

  Kelsey tightened her lips. Yes, he’d told her all about the most amazing night of his life –with gentlemanly discretion about the details, of course – and each word fired Kelsey’s fury. If Rosa was so frickin’ unforgettable, a face never to be found again, a body beyond compare, then why was she so invisible in Kelsey Safire? She thought she had accepted that Jack could not be the man for her; but if she had, she wouldn’t be so angry by his continued blindness.

  “Maybe I’m angry at your reluctance to see the truth,” Kelsey spit out.

  “What truth?”

  “About your precious Rosa! She abandoned you again, Jack. No explanation. You’re hurt, you’re angry, but you’re still in love with her.”

  “Why should that make you so mad? What does it have to do with you?”

  “Nothing! Except that by now I think I’ve become your friend, and I don’t like to see my friends get screwed over.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “Love’s a funny thing,” he said at last, in a calmer voice.

  Kelsey colored. “Meaning what?”

  “It comes in different shades. Friendship, admiration, respect. Lust, longing. Protectiveness.”

  Her cheeks burned and she dropped her eyes, certain he had divined her crush on him.

  “There are many ways to love,” he went on, “but it’s a mistake to think that they all lead to the same real-world destination.”

  “What destination is that?” she mumbled.

  “A life together. Marriage. People can love each other without that ever being in their future.”

  Kelsey squatted down and fussed with a fern. He was telling her in the most delicate of indirect terms to lay off; that he and she would never be ‘we’.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen where Rosa is concerned,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t take joy from what we shared. You’ll let me have that, won’t you?”

  She nodded, too embarrassed to look him in the face.

  They gathered more plants and trees throughout the acres of the nursery. Eventually there was only one thing left on her list, and Kelsey chewed her lip as she stared at the words in her own handwriting, jotted down as a necessity for Jack’s garden long before she had ever visited Hiheelia.com and catwalked her way into so much trouble.

  “Please don’t get mad at me for this,” Kelsey said as she stopped the truck and got out.

  “For what?” Jack joined her in front of a dense mass of unusual rosebushes with thick, rough green leaves. They were blooming in colors ranging from white to deepest red, their heavenly fragrance wafting on the breeze, attracting bees and butterflies. “What’s to get mad at? They’re beautiful.”

  “They’re Rosa rugosa.” She watched his face for a reaction, detecting only a twitch of muscle near his eye. “We need some for your garden.”

  “Rosa rugosa,” he repeated without apparent emotion. “I saw that name was a type of rose, when I Googled her after that first night. I ignored it.” He touched a silken yellow petal. “Rosa Rugosa probably isn’t her real name, is it?”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” she said, feeling bad about the hurt she sensed under the surface of his expression. “’Rugosa’ sounds Italian.”

  “What’s it mean here?” he asked, gesturing to the flowers.

  “’Rugose’. Which means wrinkled, or with ridges. They’re named for their leaves. They’re beautiful, hardy, self-sufficient plants, which is why I wanted them for your garden,” she babbled, hating the silence when his face was like stone. “They’ve always been one of my favorite plants. Maybe they were one of hers, too.”

  “Which ones do you want?” he asked flatly.

  She winced at his tone. “We could find something else; we don’t have to use rugosas.”

  “Tell me which ones you want. These yellow ones? The pink?”

  “Jack…”

  “I’m not going to let her ruin my garden! Godammit, it’s just the name of a freakin’ bush! I’ll put the things in my garden if I damn well please!”

  “Then get one of the God damn pink ones, and one of the God damn red ones,” she shouted back, “and three of the God damn white ones! Because they smell really God damn good, okay?”

  He gaped at her, and after a long hanging moment of tense silence a chuckle formed in his chest, building until laughter came spilling out in a wave of mirth that washed her in shock. “Kelsey,” he said on a laugh and came over and hugged her, smooshing her goggled face against his shoulder. “How did I ever get along before I knew you?”

  “I don’t God damn know,” she muttered, and felt his laughter in her whole body.

  Chapter Twelve

  They were back at his house unloading the collection of plants when Kelsey dropped her bombshell on him. “I think Mark is going to ask me to marry him this Friday.”

  Jack dropped a pot of Gaultheria shallon on his foot. He knew that’s what it was because he’d been reading the tag when she spoke. “He what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “But you’ve only been going out for a month!”

  She shrugged and dragged a five gallon pot off the bed of the truck and carried it over to her staging area, working with a speed and ease that gave no hint of the true weights involved. They were doing the work alone, Kelsey having sent Bridget home when they went to the nursery. “He’s been talking about flying to Wisconsin to meet his parents, and he was all nervous on the phone, saying he wanted to take me somewhere special and talk about our future.”

  “You’re going to say no, of course.”

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’?”

  “You don’t love him.”

  “How do you know?” she asked accusingly.

  “Because I have ears. You don’t talk about him like a woman in love.”

  She gave him a dark look, visible despite the orange goggles she always wore on work days. “I doubt I’ll say yes, but it doesn’t mean I have to say no, either. There might be something there, if I give it time.”

  He snorted.

  “What?”

  “You don’t give this type of thing ‘time’. You know already whether or not you could ever marry him. Don’t torture the guy.”

  “So feelings never change over time? What about all those arranged marriages where people grow to love each other, when they originally thought it impossible?” she countered.

  “You have choice. People in arranged marriages don’t. Big difference.”

  “Feelings can change for the positive as you get to know a person, I’m sure of it. If they can change for the negative – which happens all the time as you get to know someone you’re dating – then I don’t see why they can’t change for the better. You have to keep your eyes open to who someone really is, instead of only seeing the bits that conform to your first impression.”

  “Even if that’s so, you’ve known Mark long enough to know he’s not the one for you. You’re young, there’s no reason you should settle.”

  “There’s no knight in shining armor out there for me, Jack. It’s only hobbits that come to my door.”

  He pictured Mark and burst out laughing.

  “Hobbits are good people,” Kelsey said. “Don’t mock them.”

  “They are good people. But you’re not one of them.”

  “So I’m bad?” she asked, slanting a sly look at him.

  “You’re not a hobbit. Just don’t settle, okay? You deserve someone who thrills you, not someone who’s ‘good enough’.”

  She made a noncommittal noise.

  “Promise me.”

  “But I like their little furry feet.”

  He caught her grin and knew she was having him on. “Why you—“ He threw a clod of dirt at her.

  She laughed and nailed him
in the chest, dirt spraying across his shirt. In moments they were running up and down the slope, chasing each other like puppies, both of them laughing so hard they could barely run.

  Jack swooped his arms around her from behind and lifted her off the ground, spinning her in circles, girlish squeals piercing her laughter. He set her down and they both staggered with dizziness, then mock-fell to the ground. Jack rolled over on top of her, pinning her panting beneath him. She grinned up at him, and without thought he lowered his mouth to hers.

  It felt like the most natural thing in the world. Her grin relaxed into the kiss, her lips answering his as if they’d done this together a hundred times before. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and when he traced his lips down to the corner of her neck she sighed into his ear with the trusting abandon of a long-time lover.

  He lifted his head and looked at her. The white zinc on her nose and orange bug-eye goggles were as ridiculous as ever, but her eyes met his with clarity and calm acceptance, as if she could see this thing between them with a perfect understanding that he as yet lacked. Her lips beneath his had felt every bit as good as Rosa’s, but with Kelsey there was something else, as well; something that added a richer layer compared to the sheer pleasure of Rosa.

  Kelsey would not disappear with the dawn. She was as real as real got, a woman literally of the earth. And when he was with her, he realized now, he felt the peace and joy that had eluded him for so long. It wasn’t the garden that Kelsey built that would bring him happiness: It was Kelsey herself.

  “Kelsey,” he said in faint surprise, “I think I’m falling for you.”

  “You think or you know? Make up your mind, Jack.”

  He chuckled. “You’re not a romantic, are you?”

  “I’m not fond of ambiguity when it’s my heart on the line. You think or you know?”

  “Is your heart on the line?” he asked, his own heart beating faster with the sudden question of what her feelings were.

  “You think or you know?” she repeated softly.