Forty years!
I couldn't help from raising my eyebrows. They looked to be in their late forties at the oldest.
Ignacio's father Filipe, let out a booming laugh at my reaction.
"Love keeps you young, Pepper," he said with a wink at me. "That really is all you need."
He reminded me of Dad a bit. In a more cheerful, less hardass, kind of way.
"I'll remember that."
My mind drifted to Reagan again before pushing the thought away. What we had was explosive, intangible and unlike anything I felt before. But it wasn't love. It couldn't be.
"So what do you do, Pepper?" Elisa asked me.
"I, uhm."
I cleared my throat and tried to stand up as straight and proudly as possible. If these people would judge me for the kind of work I did, they weren't worth my time.
Or so I tried to tell myself as I willed my hands to not shake and drop my glass.
"I'm a farmer. I live and work in Cloverville."
"Ah, we love Cloverville!" Felipe gushed enthusiastically. "Don't tell anyone here, but not even Napa beats their organic produce. I can't decide if I like Cloverville cherries or apples more."
"That's from me!" I squeaked. "I run Sage Organic Farm."
"You're kidding!" Elisa exclaimed. "We love your produce! We make a trip every weekend down to Leonard's just to stock up."
"Really?" My voice was lost and the pride I sought to find a minute ago now overwhelmed me. "That's so wonderful, thank you!"
"Thank you for doing what you do," Felipe said. "It's tough work being a farmer. We both come from farming families in Argentina."
"Yes," Elisa agreed. "We came here with just the clothes on our backs to give our son a better life." She beamed at her husband. "Seems like it all turned out okay, didn't it?"
"Si, but if only Nacio would stop running around and settle down with a nice girl," Felipe said with an eye roll and a wink at me. "Maybe he'll learn something from Pepper and Reagan here, no?"
I giggled politely as I sipped my drink and looked around for Ignacio’s response. Sure enough, he left our conversation to chat up an attractive blonde a few feet away. Standing directly behind her was a woman who looked somewhat familiar. I craned my neck a little to see better. Perhaps she was another customer at the farmer’s market and I’d have more people to talk to at this party.
But as she turned slightly and I got a clearer look at her face, my whole world turned upside down.
My hand shook so hard that my drink spilled over the edge. I didn’t know if I would throw up or faint. My voice only had the strength to squeak out a one-worded question.
“Mom?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
REAGAN
"Charlie it was great running into you," I said, clapping my former client on the back for the tenth time. "But I've really got to find my date--"
"Of course, Reagan! Wonderful to see you! I'm serious though, let's set up a meeting this week. I want to talk to you about some fantastic investment opportunities. Did I tell you about this private island in the Philippines I've got my eye on? Oh, I know you have to go but just let me show you a few pictures..."
I sighed as Charlie patted his breast pocket for his reading glasses and unlocked his iPhone screen with the speed that rivaled that of a drunk tortoise.
As he scrolled through his camera roll with similar speed, my eyes darted around the room for Pepper. I felt like an asshole leaving her side in a strange place, especially since she was so nervous, but I knew she'd be in good hands with Ignacio.
Across the room I spotted her talking to his parents, smiling and laughing. She looked comfortable and relaxed, as I knew she would be.
See, babe? Our worlds aren't so different, I thought. We can live and love harmoniously, straddling our two lifestyles just as well as you straddled me in that truck bed.
My dick stirred at the first thought of being inside her. I needed her, craved her again. We could totally bang out a quickie in some random closet or bathroom in this house. With all the rooms and corridors and high ceilings in this place, no one would ever know.
I'd have to see how much she'd be up for it whenever I got away from Charlie. But if he was serious about this private island investment, I could afford to listen to him drone on for a while.
I returned my gaze to his phone screen, giving cursory oohs and aahs over his photos. When I looked up again, Pepper was speed walking toward me and I never saw her look so upset.
Her jaw was clenched, the vein in her forehead pulsed, and her hands were balled into fists at her sides. But her eyes were what killed me. I never saw her look so hurt, so defeated.
"Hey, what's wrong?" I demanded, placing my hands on her shoulders. She shook like a leaf and appeared seconds away from either screaming or crying.
"I need to leave," she said through gritted teeth. "Now."
"What? Why?" I blinked, confused. She seemed to be having a good time just mere seconds ago.
"There's someone here I can't speak to," she growled, already marching to the front door. "I can't look at her or be in the same room with her or I will do something I regret."
"Alright, alright but hey, just look at me." I grabbed her and pulled her into my chest. For the first time, she felt stiff and rigid as a board. Gone was the sweet softness of her body against mine. Every nerve in her body was fired up but not in a good way. She was in pure fight or flight mode.
"Tell me what’s going on. Let me help you," I whispered into her hair.
She hesitated before saying weakly, "It's my mother."
I blinked. “Your mother? Here?”
“Yes.” She yanked her head out of my chest and looked at me with narrowed, furious eyes. The vein in her forehead throbbed just as angrily.
“I can’t face her. You don’t have to come with me but I can’t stay.”
Before I could answer and say of course I was coming with her, a voice rang out and seemed to silence the whole room.
“Pepper?”
We both looked up at the source of the voice, an attractive woman in her mid-forties with the same dark hair and eyes as Pepper. Those eyes watered as her carefully plumped and drawn lips parted to speak again.
“Pepper? Is it really you?”
Pepper turned away from her mother, burying herself against my chest and shaking with either rage or sorrow. My arms went around her protectively and I could feel how much she wanted to shrink into a little ball and disappear.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. This isn’t a good time,” I said firmly, turning my body and Pepper’s toward the door.
Pepper’s mother looked at me like she noticed me for the first time.
“I don’t think you understand, sir. That’s my daughter,” she said in a loud, threatening voice.
This time, the room really did go silent. People stopped their conversations mid-sentence to turn and stare at us. Even the quartet band stopped playing and craned their neck to look at the train wreck happening before their eyes.
“He understands perfectly!”
Pepper twisted around in my arms to look at her mother, tears already streaming down her face and her mouth twisted into a pained grimace.
“He knows all about how you left us!” she hissed, unleashing the full venom of the hurt she held onto for so long. “How you abandoned your teenage daughter and your husband with cancer!”
“Oh Pepper, my sweet daughter...”
Her mother took one tentative step toward us but stopped abruptly when I shook my head no at her. I inched toward the door but Pepper no longer seemed eager to leave. She felt rooted to her spot, standing strong like a boulder but still within the protective barrier of my arms.
“Pepper, I’ve wanted to reach out to you for so long,” her mother tried again, stretching her arms out. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“Bull-fucking-shit!” Pepper screeched at the top of her lungs.
We had the full attention of the party now. In the distance
, I saw Ignacio and his parents regarding us curiously from across the room.
“You never even tried to be a mother to me after you left!” Pepper went on, unleashing her full rage like a broken dam. “In ten years I never heard from you once! Did you even know that Dad died a year ago?”
Her mother’s tense expression said it all. She had no idea.
“Janice? What’s going on? What’s all this commotion?”
The crowd parted for a large, elderly gentleman who barely squeezed into his suit and wore a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. My heart sank when he stopped at Pepper’s mother’s side and I recognized him instantly.
“Hux?” I said, barely above a whisper.
Alfred Huxley, one of my top investors and long time executive board members regarded us with suspicious, beady eyes.
“What’s the meaning of this, Sells? Why does my wife look so distraught?” He looked at the trembling woman I held in my arms. “Who is that?”
In that moment, I felt like I absorbed some of Pepper’s anger and morphed it into my own. Hux was always a blind fool. That was why he needed my company to tell him where to invest his money.
But how could he not know? How could he not see what was unfolding right before his eyes?
“Doesn’t matter, Hux,” I said tersely, half dragging, half carrying Pepper out the front door. “It’s ten years too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
PEPPER
We drove home in silence.
I don't know how I fought the urge to scream and pound my fists on the dashboard. It felt like Reagan's hand on my thigh as he drove was the only thing keeping me tethered to sanity. If he let me go, if he wasn't there with me, who knows what I would have done.
I wanted to unleash ten years of heartache and abandonment onto her. I wanted to scream in her face. Hit her and spit on her and demand an answer.
When I saw her new husband, the old, warty toad of a man she left us for, I wanted to cackle uncontrollably like an evil witch. She couldn't even bother to be original. It was such an overdone cliche.
By the time we pulled up to my house, the anger and rage coursing through me subsided into numbness.
"Do you want me to stay with you?"
Reagan's voice sounded so far away. I felt the pressure of his fingers squeezing around my knee but I didn't actually feel anything.
It was like seeing her took away my ability to feel anything good. That raw, intense, openness that jolted my nervous system whenever Reagan touched me. She had to magically appear in my life again and steal that from me too.
I leaned across the console and kissed him. Hard.
My teeth sunk into his bottom lip and he jerked away in surprise.
"Pepper?"
"Yes, stay with me," I murmured drunkenly and pulled him back to me with a rough hand on the back of his neck.
I grabbed both of his hands and placed them on my chest. When he didn't squeeze my tits hard enough, I closed his fingers over my nipples.
Yes, there it was.
Feeling. Sensation. A jolt of sensitivity from my nipples to my pussy that made me moan for more.
We tumbled out of the car devouring each other. Reagan slammed my back against the front door and pinned me between the wood and his hardness. On any normal day, it might have hurt. But right then I was desperate to feel anything.
He spun me around and took firm hold of my ass through her ivory Gucci dress, which I wanted to take off and burn like it was made by evil spirits.
Somehow I unlocked the door through his groping, kissing, sucking, and manhandling. When we crashed through and into the living room, he already pushed the hem of the dress above my hips.
We made it to the couch and I pulled it over my head and tossed it on the floor like a dirty rag. Reagan was already working my panties over my hips and down my legs.
He kissed my pussy lips gently at first, but I bucked my hips up against his mouth and tugged at his full head of hair.
“I need to feel you... don’t stop. Don’t you dare fucking stop,” I moaned deliriously as he ate me out with a hunger that I never felt from any man before.
But it still wasn’t enough.
I brought his hand up to my chest to make him pinch my nipple until I squealed. He used his other hand to fuck me with his fingers as he devoured my clit.
“Harder,” I begged with a whimper. “Oh, please give it to me harder.”
Reagan moaned into my entrance as he stretched me out with another finger, curling them up inside me to bring more life, more feeling into my numbness.
When I came under his fingers and mouth, it felt like the tiniest blip of life on a flatlined heart monitor. It was good but I needed more. I couldn’t let her make me numb to what once turned my world upside down.
I tore his belt apart the moment he sat up. I needed his cock ramming the back of my throat like I needed air to breathe.
“Fuck, Pepper. What’s gotten into you?” he groaned when my lips slid over his hardness in one greedy slurp.
“Fuck my face,” was all I told him in reply.
He obliged, winding my hair up in his fist and surging his hips forward into my awaiting, eager mouth.
“Is this what you need?” he asked me, his voice dark with lust as I gagged and choked on his thick cock. “You need to be fucked hard like a bad little slut?”
I gurgled over his shaft in reply. He yanked his cock out of my mouth and grabbed my face in his hands.
“Answer me,” he demanded.
“Yes,” I replied breathlessly. “I need it hard right now. So fucking hard.”
He nodded his approval and released me.
“Turn around,” he ordered.
I did as he instructed, facing away from him on my hands and knees. The anticipation of waiting for him sent my body surging with sensation. Eagerness, need, desperation. And just a hint of fear.
His hand came down hard on my ass without warning. I yelped at the stinging tenderness and again when he slapped my other cheek hard. It stung so sharply it brought tears to my eyes. And yet I still craved more. Every moment I didn’t feel him allowed for the numbness to creep in. I needed him. I needed to keep feeling.
He pushed the whole length of his thickness inside me in one deep thrust. It filled me up deliciously but I was so wet that it barely hurt at all.
“Fuck me hard!” I wailed. “Spank me more!”
Reagan alternated slapping each of my ass cheeks as he rammed into me with all his might. I knew I’d be a bruised mess once we were done, maybe even a bit bloody but I didn’t care.
“You want me to tear this pussy apart?” he growled, nipping my earlobe with his teeth as he yanked my head back by my hair. “You want my cock to own every inch of you?”
“Yes, please,” I cried, tears streaming down my face. “Make it hurt. I need it!”
Reagan never held back or hesitated. He bit the ever-living hell out of my back and it was the most sensual thing I ever felt. He pinched and pulled my nipples until I screamed and assaulted my clit until all the orgasms were too much to bear. All the while fucking me hard and relentlessly.
When I collapsed from exhaustion, my whole body twitching from every nerve being frayed and overstimulated, he grabbed the back of my neck and yanked my face next to his cock, coated in a thick layer of my juices and achingly hard.
“Finish me off,” he ordered. “And swallow it all.”
I opened my mouth obediently and felt his thick pillar covered in velvety skin slide past my lips. I was so exhausted, I leaned against his thigh as he fucked my throat until he released. He came so hard but I didn’t spill a drop, swallowing and cleaning him off eagerly.
“You’ve never looked so beautiful,” he groaned between ragged breaths, caressing my cheek. “With your makeup running and my marks all over your skin. You’re mine, Pepper.”
“Thank you, Reagan,” I said robotically. He looked up at me with a question in his eyes, wondering if my thanks was fo
r the compliments or what he just did to my body.
I padded barefoot and naked to the kitchen, feeling the soreness between my legs that he put there. I never wanted that to go away. My skin throbbed with dull pulses and I relished in those feelings too.
As if on autopilot I filled a glass with water from the sink and sipped it at the counter, looking at the moon illuminate my farm in silver light through the window.
Reagan’s bare feet padded on the creaky floorboards behind me. His steps were cautious, like approaching a wild animal. His hands returned to my waist but with a gentle touch this time.
No. Don’t be gentle with me. I don’t deserve it. You need to hurt me.
“Pepper, are you okay?” he asked, dropping a kiss to my shoulder.
“Thank you, Reagan,” I repeated flatly. “But you need to leave now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
REAGAN
My fist sailed through the air with all my weight and power behind it.
Thump!
The force of my punch made the heavy bag jerk and swing in the opposite direction.
My knuckles cried out with soreness and my arms felt like lead. But I wasn't done. I could never be done.
I'm not giving up on you, Pepper. But fuck, you've got to let me back in.
Maybe I should have seen it coming after that night but it was the last thing I expected.
At first, I thought she just wanted to be alone. But I was experienced enough to know that aftercare is critically important after rough sex like that.
I offered to spend the night and kissed her neck where it used to make her shiver and melt against me. But this time she stood rigid and cold, just like when she saw her mom for the first time.
And told me to leave and not come back.
Thump-thump! Thump-thump!
I unleashed a barrage of one-two punches to the heavy bag, ignoring the screaming in my muscles. If I didn't let this out now, I'd be taking it out on my office walls later.
Cocked and Loaded: A Billionaire Romance (Small Town Bad Boys Book 4) Page 10
