She froze. Her eyes popped full open, then she snapped them shut and dropped her head back. Wait? Was he kidding? “No.” She hadn’t been here in so long. Too long. And now, he was taking it all away.
And chuckling about it while he pulled back.
“Natalie.” He traced a finger up the lace edge of her panties, then pressed his lips back to the hollow in her neck, sparking her nerve endings and nearly making her come right there. “Logistics, honey.”
He shifted and pulled one arm away, then shifted again, then did a little shimmy, and suddenly the denim was gone from his hips and her legs were wrapped around hot, slick skin, the head of his penis rubbing her lace panties.
“Oh, God, yes,” she moaned.
He chuckled again, but it ended in a strangled noise when she thrust against him. “Wait,” he said.
“You are such a tease.”
A wrapper crinkled. She dropped one arm from around his neck and reached for the condom.
“Hold me.” He hissed out a breath, but he anchored her tight against the car, staring into her eyes, unblinking, unflinching, while she used shaky fingers to roll the condom down his hot, hard length.
“Now, please,” she said.
His fingers dipped into the side of her panties, and she gasped out his name. He pushed the lace out of the way, and then he was in her, filling her, spurring her body to feelings and emotions she’d missed for so long, she almost couldn’t remember what they were supposed to feel like.
Everything about making love to CJ felt more. Rougher. Stronger. Better.
“Nat,” he gasped. Her whole body clenched around him, spasming too soon, too fast, too intense.
Too right.
He followed her over the edge, breathing hard but holding her steady against the side of his car, in the middle of the night, while party noises and soft lake sounds drifted over from the real world.
Natalie’s legs had all the consistency of chiffon. She struggled to catch her breath, and she could feel CJ’s heart pounding against her rib cage along with the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “Oh my God,” she said.
“Yeah.”
He was still inside her, but real life was slithering back.
He wasn’t hers. He couldn’t be hers.
That grief made it more difficult to breathe than the physical exertion had. She shifted, lowered one hesitant leg to the ground.
He pulled back and looked at her. Even in the darkness, she could see the affection, the hope shimmering in his unguarded expression.
She should’ve stayed home tonight.
She needed to ask him to take her home. Right now.
Instead, she closed her eyes and leaned into him, pretending—just for a few more minutes—that he could be hers.
WHEN CJ HAD woken up this morning, he hadn’t expected to end the day perched up on the hood of his car under the moonlight overlooking Harmony Lake, telling old family stories to a firecracker of a woman who was a hell of a lot more everything than he would’ve given her credit for in a confessional a couple of weeks ago. He wasn’t entirely sure what to make of her.
But he didn’t need to know.
All that mattered was that tonight felt right.
She was laughing again, wrapped in his coat, her shapely legs curled up against him while she leaned into his shoulder. Those eyes of hers turned up to him in the moonlight, and he was hit with an unexpected happy peace.
“Nuh-uh. You honestly expect me to believe you’ve milked goats?” she said.
“What, you haven’t?”
Her laugh got him every time. Throaty, but with a ring to it. Sent his blood pulsing south. Again.
“Seriously,” she said.
“Sure. We all milked the goats. Except Margie. Scared her when she was little, and she never got over it.”
Natalie’s fingers tiptoed up his thigh. “How’s she fit with the others? Rosemary and Pepper and Ginger and Basil…?”
“Short for Marjoram.”
Then she got The Look. The one he would’ve recognized half a mile away in a blinding snowstorm in the dead of midnight in northern Alaska.
She wanted to play the name game.
He sighed and shook his head, but with her so relaxed and free and fun beside him, instead of uptight and guarded, he couldn’t stop his smile. “Don’t do it.”
She squinted hard, then tipped her head back in another laugh. “I am the worst cook. I can’t come up with a single guess.”
“That makes you about my favorite person on the planet.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Worse.” He tugged her fingers to his lips and brushed a kiss over her chilled knuckles. He should take her home.
But he wasn’t ready to let go. Not tonight.
Maybe not tomorrow either.
“You want to be my stand-in wife?” CJ said.
Her eyes went wide, and every bit of her stiffened. “You—who—what?”
Horrified disbelief wasn’t the answer he was hoping for.
“Will you be my partner in the Golden Husband Games?” he repeated.
It was too dark to catch the nuances of her expression, but he heard the brain grinding. Smelled the what’s-his-angle questions.
Felt the yes he knew she wanted to say.
But there was a dam going up. Frost tickling the edges of the warm atmosphere between them.
He wasn’t wrong. She wanted to say yes.
But she was shaking her head no.
“You have so many better options than me.”
Maybe. Maybe not. What did he really know about Natalie?
Not much.
Not enough.
“I don’t have a lot of experience being a good husband, and you irritate the shit out of me half the time, but you and I, we have something I can’t fake with anyone else.”
Nat rubbed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “CJ—”
“I’m not asking for a commitment,” he said. “I just need a partner. And the thing is, you—you’re the only one who gets it.”
She did. She understood marital failure. She understood not fitting into her own life.
But she wasn’t saying anything.
“Hey, we’ve already got that blindfolded kissing thing down,” he said.
He expected an eye roll. An irritated huff. Maybe a good shove in the ribs.
Instead, he got a shaky breath, a swipe of her eyes, and the feeling that she was sliding further away.
Smooth, jackass. “Sorry, bad joke.”
She shook her head. “It was a very good joke.”
She was stroking his ego. Bad sign. “Got lots more where that came from. Think about it. A whole month and a half of this guy right here for your personal entertainment.”
He didn’t like begging. Wasn’t his thing. And she was right. He had several options.
Her lips slanted up, just a hint at the corners, and in that moment, he would’ve done anything to see her full-on smile.
She was a different person when she smiled. Friendly. Approachable. Damn near perfect. Because even smiling, she kept her stubbornness. She’d push him when he needed pushing. She didn’t think he was any more special than the rest of the world, and she treated him that way.
Everything he needed from the woman who would stand in Serena’s place.
“Plus you’ll get to boss me around.” No way she could resist that.
Her smile crept higher. But when she tilted her head up at him, her eyes were still bleak. “These are my mom’s last Games.”
There was something significant in her statement, something he was apparently supposed to understand. “Then you should be up there too.”
Her lips parted. He waited for the yes. It was just a breath away.
“Natalie?”
“You need a real partner for the Games.”
“What’s real?”
“Someone your family and your in-laws won’t be ashamed of.”
He tensed. He wanted to shake
her. “The only person ashamed of you,” he growled, “is you.”
“You don’t know a thing about me,” she growled right back.
“I know you’re hurting more people than just yourself by letting some Queen General dictate who you should and shouldn’t associate with. What kind of example are you setting for your son?”
Some of her spark flared back to life. “Line. Crossed.”
“Truth. Hurts.” And the truth was, he wasn’t making his case to her. He was pissing her off.
In his admittedly limited experience, a pissed-off Natalie wasn’t a cooperative Natalie.
It was a sexy, desirable Natalie, but for once, he wanted the cooperative part back.
Abruptly, she drew back. “You don’t understand.”
“Explain it to me.”
She pressed her palm to her forehead above her eye. “I will not create another scandal in my mother’s Games. Especially not the Golden Husband Games. Bliss needs this, and they need it right. They need you to be right. With someone who can shine for Bliss. And that’s not me.”
She was the most irritating female he’d ever met, and that was saying something. “You could shine.”
She shook her head.
As if she didn’t want to shine. As if she liked being the black sheep in Bliss.
Far cry from the girl who had wanted to be the Queen General. From the girl who called this place home.
“You could,” he said, stronger. “You could shine. Might find out you still belong. You made your choices. Got a pretty great kid out of it. But you keep letting a moment in time, a signature on a couple pieces of paper, and a bully’s opinion of you define who you are and what you can do. So maybe you’re right. Maybe you can’t shine. Until you’re willing to fight for yourself, no one else will either.”
She didn’t look at him, but instead slid the rest of the way off the hood. Her shoulders sagged like she was trying to hold up the damn wedding cake monument all by herself. “I need to go home.”
He didn’t want to take her home. He wanted to pull her back up onto the hood of the car and talk some sense into her. Failing that, he’d take kissing some sense into her. Nuts as she made him, mad as she made him, he wanted to take care of her.
To prove to her that she wasn’t alone.
He might’ve been hiding from himself all over the world, but he’d always known his family was waiting for him. She had her sister and her dad, one little boy who counted on her to be his everything, and a whole damn town of people who were afraid to stick up for her because of one bully of a woman. “Nat—”
“I understand if you’d rather I walk.”
He slid off the hood and caught her at the waist. She pulled back, her wariness chilling the night and chasing away her soft scent. “I’m tired, CJ.”
He was too. But he couldn’t let her go.
Not yet. Not like this.
He needed to kiss her. Softly, with no demands, no expectations, no delusions, letting his lips warm hers one last time. Hold her tight and solid, so she could lean on him.
And for a brief moment, she let him. One last time, she let him kiss her, let him caress her, let him try to be enough to take care of all of her.
Too soon, she pulled back. Dashed her hand over her cheeks, then wordlessly climbed into his car.
He didn’t want to, but he drove her back to her dark house. Back to the real world. They were silent most of the way. Before he let her go, he gripped her hand. “Let me help you.”
“CJ—”
“Promise if there’s anything I can do, you’ll let me do it.”
Her sigh sounded less like surrender and more like an indulgence in humoring him. “There won’t be, but thank you.” She turned her dark eyes on him for the first time since they’d left the lake, and she squeezed his fingers. “Thank you for tonight. It—it meant the world to me.” She brushed a quick kiss against his jaw. “Good luck finding a partner.”
Then she was gone, dashing out into the night and up the stairs to her real world.
Leaving CJ to ponder his own world.
Chapter Thirteen
CJ WOULD NEVER go so far as to say he was smart about women, but after growing up with eleven sisters, he liked to think he was no dummy.
He was about to prove otherwise.
Even knowing he was about to prove otherwise wasn’t enough to stop him.
He gave himself every opportunity to chicken out. He walked instead of driving. He passed a few donut shops he could’ve stopped in. He passed half a dozen churches he should’ve stopped in. If ever there was a time for divine intervention, it was now. But his feet carried him through the streets as Bliss slowly came to life, churches opening for Sunday services, robe-clad residents yawning over steaming mugs of coffee and plucking their papers off their porches, dogs and cats and birds doing their business, until he stopped in front of a neat two-story apartment building in a functional part of Bliss just south of downtown.
A smart man would’ve kept walking. A not-dumb man would’ve at least spent five or ten more minutes debating with himself.
But CJ walked right up the sidewalk, said a good morning to the elderly gentleman who held the door for him, and then made his way to apartment 2A where he knocked with all the ignorant confidence of the idiot that he was.
The door swung open—of course it did, because he wouldn’t have planned his own self-destruction at a time when fate could’ve intervened—and Kimmie’s already round blue eyes went rounder.
“Oh! Oh, no. Did I forget to pay last night? Ohmigod, I’m so sorry. I’m always doing that. Hold on. I’ll get money.”
“Kimmie. Wait. I’m not here about the bar.”
She paused, her body halting awkwardly with one arm mid-air and her hips off-center. Bafflement clouded her eyes, and her wavy hair seemed to stand at an extra level of confusion. She twisted back toward him, lowered her arm, and swung around, expertly avoiding the pile of cat toys on the floor. “You’re not?”
The way she wrinkled her nose reminded him of Cinna trying to puzzle out some of the more mature—or rather, immature—jokes he and Cori and Pepper used to make before she was old enough to get them. “Nope. Wanted to ask you something.”
She kept gaping at him.
He could appreciate that. He’d felt the same a few hours ago. Except when Natalie threw his world off its rotational axis, there’d been some hurt thrown in with the disbelief.
He should’ve been grateful she shut him out, because holding her, touching her, knowing her—it might’ve inspired ideas. Sneaky little ideas about family and forgiveness and acceptance. With some love and laughter and light thrown in.
Screw that. He had some rocks in Utah to climb. Marriage and family—it wasn’t his thing. Especially not with someone who didn’t know any more about it than he did.
“Can I come in?” he said to Kimmie.
“Oh!” She pulled the door wider and kicked a pile of clothes out of the way. “Yeah. Um, don’t mind the mess. Darn cats, right?” She gave an awkward half-laugh, half-snort.
He could’ve done worse. If his biggest objection was who her mother was, then he didn’t have any real objections. She wasn’t always predictable, but her heart was in the right place. That counted for more than what anyone else wanted him to do.
She led him past an efficiency kitchen and into a living room strewn with clothes, books, and cake magazines. “Your cats left the toaster alone?” CJ asked.
She flushed. “Yeah, they were good.”
One of the felines in question, a gray tabby, darted from beneath the sunshine orange couch to lick her paw in the window. Kimmie shoved a pile of kitchen towels off the matching recliner and gestured for him to sit. “You want some breakfast? I have these toaster pastry thingies in the freezer. Or cupcakes, but they’re not exactly decorated for company.”
He wasn’t sure what constituted decorated for company, but now he wished he’d looked closer at her kitchen.
Wa
sn’t why he was here though. He settled into the chair and tried to decide what to do with his hands.
Didn’t fit right on his knees. Or hanging between his knees. He thrust one through his hair. “I’m good. Thanks.”
She flitted about the room like a hummingbird. “Coffee? V8, maybe? Everybody needs their vegetables.”
“No, thank you.” He pointed toward the couch. “You mind sitting?”
“Oh! Right. Sorry.” She plopped down, tucked her hands in her lap, then smoothed them down her lime green pants, then folded them again.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
“I haven’t had any more dreams about you.” A half-frown dimmed her vibrating energy. “At least, I don’t think the vampire cow was you. Pretty sure that was somebody else.”
“You having trouble with somebody?” That, CJ could solve.
“Oh, no,” she said quickly.
Too quickly.
With too much emphasis on wagging her head back and forth.
“You sure?”
“No, no, no trouble at all,” she insisted. “I just—yeah. No trouble. Everything’s fine.” She stood, shot a nervous glance at him, and sat again. “So. You’re a morning person?”
“Sometimes.” He gave her an easy smile, but he couldn’t tell if the flush on her neck meant it was working or not. “How about you?”
“Depends on the dreams.”
He opened his mouth. Then closed it again.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend I’m normal.”
“Normal’s overrated.”
“Can you tell my mom that?”
“Ah—”
“Never mind. She wouldn’t listen anyway. Unless you’re like the second coming of Prince Leopold.”
“Prince…?”
“Leopold. Father of the modern wedding cake. Kind of. When he got married—sorry. You’re not here for a cake history lesson, are you?”
No, but it was infinitely easier than talking about why he was here. “Always happy to learn something new.”
“If you stay too long, my mom will start to get ideas.” She lowered her voice. “And believe me, she hears everything.”
CJ swallowed a smile. “I’ve noticed.”
“So?” Kimmie said. “What can I do for you?”
Blissed (Misfit Brides #1) Page 19
