by Susan Sey
“Too many,” he agreed. “I probably would’ve worn out a thousand more but I ran face-first into you instead. And all the noise in my head stopped. It all just stopped and I fell into you. I’m still falling. I’m drowning in you and I don’t care.”
He had no idea where the words were coming from, they just boiled up and poured out. He’d been desperate and angry and defeated and she’d reached for him anyway. Her touch was a gift, unexpected and undeserved, and had lanced some wound nobody else had ever touched. And everything that had been trapped inside, poisoning him, killing him mile by mile, was released.
“I don’t know what you are, Willa, but I need it. I need you. Stay with me.”
He didn’t even know what he was asking. He hardly knew what he was saying. And then it didn’t matter because she was kissing him. Words disappeared. Thought disintegrated. Reality suspended itself and there was nothing but her mouth on his, warm and curvy and real. She was a fairy queen, kissing him with a fierce demand that sent flames rippling across his mind. He hauled her into him, crushed her body to his and she was so small in his arms, so breakable and yet so vibrant and strong. He pushed one hand up under the back of that gauzy sweater of hers, until he could spear his fingers into the living heat of her hair, thick and warm and alive against his skin. He found the delicate curve of her skull, fitted it into his palm and angled her mouth under his, searching for the fit that some corner of his mind knew was there.
Then there it was. She came up to her toes, met him in the middle and the stray flames that had been chasing themselves through the forest of his mind leapt into roaring life. Her mouth opened under his and he fell thoughtlessly into her, spinning and drifting like ash on the updraft. He’d seen this before, he thought hazily. He’d seen fire leaping from tree to tree like a voracious monkey, devouring whole forests from the crown down. He dipped his tongue into the deep, delicious curve of her upper lip, the one he’d been watching with hungry eyes since the moment he’d seen it, and then the fire was in him. It was a vicious, devouring need that created itself even as it slaked itself. He fisted his hand in the living thickness of her hair and let it feast.
Willa had never been kissed like this. She hadn’t known it was possible to be kissed like this. Some hazy bit of her mind wondered idly how that could be. If whatever Eli was doing to her was even remotely within the scope of normal, shouldn’t she have at least heard about it?
Then again, did it really matter? And why was she wasting time thinking about it when his hands were so fierce in her hair, anchoring her to his hot, hard body? And his mouth, oh good God, his mouth. It took and it took. It demanded and commanded. It reached down deep into the place where she’d buried that wild girl, the girl she’d once been who’d danced and shouted and wanted, and resurrected her. It breathed her back to life and the weight of her want was stunning.
Willa twisted her head and broke free, gasped in a whistling breath. Her mind was white and blank, her body a pulsing tangle of need. She needed to think. Oh God, she just needed a second to think, to breathe, to—
Then Eli’s mouth landed on her neck, his lips hot and ravenous on the tender, vulnerable curve where it met her shoulder, and desire detonated low in her belly. It raced outward in seismic waves, crashed over her head in a punishing blow of lust. She whimpered and clenched her thighs together against the pulsing need.
And somehow Eli understood. He understood what she wanted before she did.
Suddenly the countertop was at her lower back, and Eli’s thigh was between her own, tight against the throbbing center of her want. Stars exploded inside her head and suddenly she didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to wait and she didn’t want to even breathe. She only wanted to be closer.
She arched herself into him. Her new bra slid silky and unfamiliar over the aching buds of her nipples, and she pushed them helplessly into the broad heat of his chest. Her nervous system shattered in a shower of sparks and she gasped. Eli caught her mouth with his, his tongue hot and demanding. She met him halfway, answered his demand with one of her own.
More. She wanted more. She’d been starving and hadn’t even known it. Hadn’t understood that she wanted anything at all until she’d tasted Eli’s mouth and stood in the center of his desire. Until she’d stood at the center of his sorrow, too, and given him respite. He’d shown her what it was to be needed. To be desired. To be revered. He’d made her important, given it to her like a gift.
And he’d awoken her desire. He’d reminded her how to want, and now all she wanted was more. Whatever he needed, she wanted to give it to him. Peace, quiet, stillness, satisfaction. She had it within her power to satisfy him, and in doing so, satisfy herself. She knew it was too soon, knew it was dangerously impulsive. But she also knew that life was damn stingy with the good stuff, and Eli was unquestionably the good stuff. He’d walk out of Devil’s Kettle as abruptly as he’d walked in. He wouldn’t take her with him, and she had no desire to go. This was her home.
But this radical sense of being cherished, nearly worshipped? She’d never felt anything like it before. What if she never did again? She’d be a cowardly fool not to snatch it while it was in front of her.
Willa was no coward, and she was no fool. She was going to take every last thing Eli Walker could give her. And when he laced up his boots and walked out of her life, she wouldn’t regret a damn thing.
The decision sent a thrill of pleasure up her spine, where it twined into the darker pulse of her need. She slid her palms over the taut angle of his shoulders and into the rough scrape of stubble covering his scalp. Lust shuddered from her palms straight to her belly, to her nipples, sparkled through her bloodstream and curled her toes inside her boots. She lifted her mouth to his, offered it up and circled herself shamelessly against his thigh. Her thin skirt and silky panties did nothing to protect her from the tough canvas of his cargo shorts, and the friction was unbearably delicious.
And she wanted more.
She found his elbow, tight and trembling, and hooked her hand into it and tugged. He let go of the counter — he’d been gripping it, caging her between two strong arms and drew back. He blinked down at her, his eyes hazy and unfocused, as if he’d surfaced too fast from a deep, deep dive.
Then he zeroed in on her and leapt back. “Willa, Jesus. I’m sorry. I totally jumped you.”
“Jump me some more.” She took his hand and pressed it to her breast.
“Oh, Christ.” His hand trembled against her, and something broke inside her. Something delicate and achingly tender. He cupped her breast like it was fragile. Like he was holding something beyond value, something he didn’t deserve but wasn’t about to let go of. “I want to see.” His eyes met hers in the still-smoky air. “May I?”
She nodded and lifted her arms. He eased the sweater over her head, then nudged the straps of her tank top down her shoulders. He peeled it down to her waist and sucked in a breath, his eyes hot on the plump curves cupped prettily in gun-metal gray. And Willa, who’d had very few reasons in her life to be grateful to Georgie Davis, sent a brief mental thank you her way.
Georgie had intended the lingerie as a clever dig, of course. The bra and panties were lovely and undoubtedly expensive, falling cooperatively in line with Addy’s let’s-all-get-along agenda. But they played up the generous proportions Willa took daily pains to play down, and the color was a deliberate slap. It was a subtle reminder that Georgie would never forget or forgive Willa’s most spectacular failure. But if the appreciative hunger filling Eli’s gaze was anything to go by, even fuck you was stylish when Georgie Davis said it.
He reached out with one tentative finger and Willa stopped breathing. Her nipple beaded and begged, pushed against the fine material impatiently. And when he touched it, she felt it everywhere. In her palms, in her feet, low and hot in her belly. It unleashed a wave of desire in her that was too big, too lavish to be contained. It shattered her like a swollen river smashing through its banks, and she flowed with it.
She simply let it carry her.
Suddenly his hands were everywhere, his mouth wet and open on her skin, on her throat. He boosted her up and the counter was cool under her bottom. She wrapped her legs around him, pushed herself hungrily against the hard thrust of his desire. Her hands were greedy, too, flying under his t-shirt to find his skin, the muscles fluid and smooth under her palms. He dragged the cup of her bra down, exposed her aching nipple, and took it between his teeth. She arched into him and cried out, curled her nails into the lean muscle of his shoulder. He made some noise, something deeply satisfied and inherently hungry all at the same time, and took her other nipple between his fingers. She tugged at his t-shirt until he flung it off, then his hands were back on her. He curled them under her thighs, jerked her to the front of the counter and swept aside the fragile barrier of her panties. He pushed a finger into the needy heat at her center and she dropped her forehead to his shoulder and moaned. He added another finger and she bit him. Sank her teeth into the meat of his shoulder in naked demand.
Her core quivered for more, for release, but she didn’t want his fingers. She wanted him. She shoved him back and tore at the button closure of his cargo shorts. Worked the zipper, pushed away his boxer-briefs and hissed at the sight of him, thick and hard and hungry. For her.
“Now,” she said. “Now.” And wrapped her hand around him and put him where she needed him. He lifted her with an easy strength, put his hands under her bottom and sank into her. The breath left her body as he filled her in one hard, assured stroke. There was no room inside her for oxygen, for thought, for ideas. Everything in her — spirit and body — obeyed a single imperative.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, dug her heels into his buttocks and said, “Move.”
He did. He held her with merciless hands and drove into her with a fierce demand that sent her shooting up to a bright, tight space. She stayed there, her body suspended in an agony of blinding tension, her legs quivering, her arms shaking, as she reached, reached, reached.
Then he wrapped an arm around her waist, propped one hand on the counter behind her, and dragged her to a new angle, one that had him cursing and pounding into her with desperate ferocity. One that snapped the tension like a tightrope, sent the severed ends singing dangerously through the air and shattering her into a supernova of brilliant dust.
He shuddered and froze, his body whip-tight but curled protectively over hers, as if to shelter her from the storm that had broken over both of them. Even in his release, she realized, he thought of her. Cared for her.
If this was a mistake, it was the best one she’d ever made.
When Eli came back to himself, he realized two things. Well, three things. First, it was utterly and completely still inside his head. His body hummed lazily, and satisfaction was like warm honey in his veins. But beyond that, the low-grade buzz of guilt and shame that propelled him out of bed before the sun every morning, and kept him on his boots until he could fall unconscious back into it? It was gone. He didn’t know for how long, but he was stupendously grateful for it, and to the woman in his arms who’d granted it.
Second, he had a woman in his arms. A semi-naked, sweat-slicked woman, whose body he was still balls-deep in, whom he hadn’t had the courtesy to even fully undress before he’d taken her with all the finesse of a wild badger.
Third, he’d taken her with wild-badger finesse right next to the carcasses of the mouse family he’d killed with his potatoes.
The quiet inside his head broke, gave way to the usual hum of guilt and shame. A muted version to be sure, but it was definitely the same old song.
Willa stirred inside the circle of his arms and he immediately straightened, taking her carefully with him. He disengaged their bodies gently, handed her his t-shirt to tidy up. She simply held it and gazed at him with wide gray eyes surrounded by a halo of rumpled raven hair.
“Still so sad,” she murmured and reached out to tap a feather-light finger on his cheekbone under one eye. “It smells like rain.”
“What smells like rain?” He took the t-shirt from her hand and gently tidied her up before doing the same for himself. All he could smell was cooked mouse and savage sex.
“How sad you are.” She straightened her skirt and leaped lightly down from the counter. She went about the business of putting her bra back in place, hiding those generous pink nipples from him before he could do something stupid like stop her.
“You can smell sad?” He hitched up his shorts before his dick got any other bright ideas.
“You can smell lots of things if you pay attention.” She smiled at him, friendly and warm, and the shame inside him crested like a wave. She reached up, put her hand on his bare shoulder and he had to suppress a hiss of renewed want. He’d just had her but he wanted more. He wanted her again. He just wanted. She rose to her toes, pressed a kiss to his jaw and said, “Now where’s that corkscrew?”
CHAPTER 14
IN THE END, they ate steak and drank wine sitting on the iffy front steps of Eli’s even iffier cabin. And when the sun gave way to darkness, when loons called wildly over the water and owls went hunting in the forest, Willa set her jam jar of wine aside (the DNR’s claim of fully furnished was a little optimistic in Eli’s opinion) and leaned her shoulder into his.
“Tell me.”
Eli didn’t set his wine aside. “I don’t want to.”
“I know. Tell me anyway.”
“You tell me something first.” He was stalling. He didn’t care. “Why me? Why tonight?” He didn’t look her way. They were both giving each other the essential courtesy of not forcing eye contact. Two wary animals, circling and sniffing. “I know you don’t sleep with men on the first date.”
“I don’t sleep with men, period.”
He sent her a startled glance. “Women?”
She laughed, low and appealing in the warm darkness. “I don’t sleep with anybody. I don’t have first dates. I don’t have dates.”
Shock was a hollowness in his belly, sick and guilty. “Good God, Willa. Why didn’t you say something? I’d have—”
“I wasn’t a virgin, Eli. And I didn’t want whatever you’d have done. I wanted exactly what you did.”
“Why?” He gripped his own jam jar fiercely, wanted to crush it to dust in his hands. “What I did to you, it wasn’t—” His throat closed. He couldn’t bring himself to put into words what he’d done to her, the primitive, frantic coupling that was the farthest thing from romance he could conceive of. “Why would you want that?”
“Because you wanted me.” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder like an affectionate cat. “Because everybody else who’s ever wanted me has wanted me for something. They wanted me to do something for them, to be something for them. They wanted me to give them something, to give up something. It was a competition. Somebody would win, somebody would lose.” He felt her smile against his sleeve. “I always lost. I always do. I’m not great at people.”
The urge to punch some sanctimonious faces rose up in him again. Willa was so generous and warm, so unstinting and alive. Eli was fifty-fifty at best on the existence of a higher power but it struck him as flat-out sinful to take advantage of that generosity for some generic sex, or to rack up points in a sick social competition.
“I’m going to get arrested before I leave this place,” he muttered.
“But you,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “You didn’t want me to be anything but exactly what I was. You didn’t ask for a thing. Just being who I was, how I was, was enough for you. No, it was more than enough. The way you held me felt…reverent.” Her hand slid around his biceps, rested there trusting and warm. “You didn’t ask for my secrets, or my panties, or any other proof you could carry home as evidence you’d bagged the Lumberdyke of Devil’s Kettle.”
“Lumberdyke?”
“People are so creative, aren’t they?”
“I’m definitely going to jail.”
“Why?”
“Ne
ver mind. Go on.”
She shrugged. “The only thing you asked was for me to stay. Just stay there and let you hold me. Let you breathe me in. Let whatever stillness you find in me soothe the noise that won’t let you sleep. Do you have any idea what a gift that was, Eli?”
“To me? Yes,” he said promptly. “I don’t know what you are, but whatever it is is magic. It’s just…” He shook his head. “You’re just so still,” he said again helplessly. “I don’t know how else to describe it. You just reach out and wrap yourself around all the noise and lay it down to sleep. You’re amazing.”
She laughed again, soft in the darkness. “And that’s exactly why I wanted exactly what you gave me.” She drifted her fingers down his forearm, laced them through his own. Something bruised and dark shifted inside him and he pressed his palm to hers. “You don’t want me to change. All you wanted in that moment was me, exactly as I am. Pretty skirt, ugly boots and all.”
It was a devastating combination as far as Eli was concerned. It broke his heart that she didn’t know it. He wanted her to know it, damn it. “Keep it up and you’ll find that skirt around your waist again and those boots in the air.”
“Sweet talker.”
This time he laughed, surprising himself. It was chainsaw-rusty but it worked. “Would you believe that used to be true?”
She gave that a moment of thoughtful consideration. “You know, I just might.”
“I didn’t give you any sweet words.”
“I didn’t want them.”
“Why not? You deserve them.”
“I don’t trust them.”
“Do you trust anything?”
“Only what I can see and smell. And you, Eli Walker, smell like rain. It’s been the driest summer on record and you still smell as sad as rain.”
