He gave her a dirty look for her dirty thoughts, clarifying, “My baby, Hailey.” Looking back up at the sky, he sighed. “You know, when I was growing up, I was one of those kids that kind of looked at my dad like a hero. He flew helicopters for the Army. That’s how he met my mom, down in Enterprise.”
“Then Aaron and Jacob are related to you on your mother’s side.”
“Yeah,” Cole nodded. “My dad didn’t really have any family, just a mom, and she passed on decades ago. That made our family really important to him, and I guess he sort of raised me with that same view. Nothing more important than family.”
Hailey considered what he said before shaking her head slightly. “I’m not following? What does this have to do with the Fastback and Bavis? And are you saying you have a kid somewhere?”
“I’m getting there, Hailey. It ain’t an easy road to trace back over.” Holding his level gaze for a moment, she nodded, giving him his room as she picked over the chicken. Cole relaxed back and looked up at the Gravey house.
“You know our house kind of looked like this place. Oh, not as grand, but we had one of those little white-plank wood houses. It had the wraparound porch with all the old mill work. At some point, somebody had added on a carport. You know the kind where you got the green plastic roof. My dad and I used to work on his Fastback under that green shade.”
The heat of the late summer sun melted the cool out of the juice bottle. It perspired, dripping long rolls of drool down its side as the birds and insects twittered all around. Just like when he’d been a kid, except nothing shaded him from the glare of light raining down.
“When I was growing up, it was always my brothers working on something in our garage.” Hailey shifted slightly, relaxing just a hair. “They were always having their friends over. Before cars it was go-karts, potato cannons, that sort of thing.”
“Potato cannons?” Cole smirked.
“Yeah, ever October they’d build pumpkin hurlers. My brothers used to invest a lot of time in building things to smash things.” Hailey smirked. “And trust me, that went with cars, too. They use to have an on-going relationship with Jerry down at the junkyard.”
“And you were there with them,” Cole guessed. “Weren’t you? I bet bothering them every step of the way.”
“As only a little sister can.” Hailey nodded, not the least bit ashamed. “I guess you could say I was one of those kids that worshiped their older brothers.”
“Not much older, though, are they?” Cole had heard quite a bit about her older brothers.
“Only a few years, but don’t tell them that. They got a bad case of parental obsession when it comes to me.”
Cole could hear the heavy burden she felt at that observation. “Never grew out of thinking of you as their little sister, huh?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Her smile warned him she meant her assurance as threat. Cole just smiled, already aware of the fate coming his way. “I will?”
“Oh, yeah. I talked to Brett not two nights ago. Him and Mike are already headed home. They’re stopping over in Vegas for some fun and should be here by the end of the week.”
“And you think they’re going to beat my ass,” Cole finished for her.
“Oh, I know they are.”
“I take it from that grin you’re not going to try and stop them.”
“I get a feeling after last night you probably deserve the beating.”
Cole’s chin lifted, and his gaze rolled back over the old plantation house looming above them. “I dreamed of owning a house like this and having a yard full of kids and commotion. I’d given anything for that, Hailey.”
He caught her glance, wanting her to believe him on this, if nothing else. Unsure if she did, she scowled back at the house. “I get the grim sense you’re about to tell me a story where you sold your daddy’s Fastback, but something went wrong.” Cutting her gaze back to his, he knew she got the point, got it on the head. “Didn’t it?”
Cole nodded. “The woman’s name was Serena. When she told me she was pregnant, it didn’t even take me a day to ask my dad if it was all right to sell the car. I even had our house picked out.”
“You must have been planning that family with her before she got pregnant to have everything so well mapped out.” Hailey’s comment held a dark tinge of pain to it, but Cole couldn’t change the past or the truth.
“Yeah, I’d thought about it, asking her to marry me, but it would have been a mistake. She wouldn’t have said yes, anyway. She didn’t even when she was pregnant, and then she wasn’t even that. I felt like a fool.”
Cole laid it out there. It would be the only time in his life he’d own up to the emotion, and he only did it to let Hailey know he meant what he said. She could have laughed at him, could have used his admission against him, and a part of him braced just for that.
With a sigh, Hailey smirked. “I guess that’s why you’ve been chasing every skirt you could, huh? Some woman broke your heart, and you use that to justify breaking any heart you want. You know how pathetic that sounds, Cole?”
“It certainly does sound sad,” Cole admitted, giving her a dirty look for taking the cheap shot. “Of course, that doesn’t sound like me. You can lobby all the attacks you want, princess, but I have never lied to a woman. I never promised, never suggested I’d commit, never gave any woman the slightest hope I’d be anything other than what I am.”
“But you did promise me four weeks of fidelity,” Hailey shot back. “And somewhere at the end of this sob story is a woman named Kitty Anne.”
“No it ends with a woman named Hailey Mathews,” Cole shot back. “If you wouldn’t be so stubborn, I’d get to that point.”
“Then get there already.”
“Fine. Bavis offered me the Fastback, but he won’t sell unless I break up his nephew’s wedding, which, by the way, happens to be in five days. Now he put that offer out there four weeks ago, and I sent Jacob and Aaron to take care of the matter.”
“Jacob and Aaron?” Hailey burped up a laugh. “You tell Kyle about this?”
“Not then,” Cole shrugged. “I figured I had it handled. Besides, I’m not buying this car to sell. I’m buying it for me.”
“So you’re still going through with this.” Hailey waved a hand to emphasize her point. “You got Jacob and Aaron on seduction duty, but something went wrong, right? I mean, I’m going to take a guess Bavis’s soon to be niece-in-law is this Kitty Anne, and if your slick cousins could finish the deed, then you wouldn’t be spending past midnight with her, right?”
“Kitty Anne is a prostitute, Hailey.”
Cole gave her credit for playing her part well. She didn’t even try to fake shock but went with a rolled eye and muttered response. “Oh, this keeps getting better and better.”
“I’m not going to sleep with her.” Cole wanted that on the table before she lit into him. “Even if you weren’t in the picture, I don’t pay for sex.”
“Well, that just makes my heart glow with warmth,” Hailey shot back. “You know, I don’t even think I need to hear anymore. Just the fact that you got involved in this crap in the first place tells me everything I need to know.”
Cole bet, given she set the whole mess up. Hailey couldn’t claim indignation at her own idea, but neither could he point that fact out to her in this moment. Still, he went with annoyance. “Why? What is so wrong? I mean, some man is out there about to marry a whore, and don’t you think he has a right to know that? Hell, I’m doing him a favor as well as myself because I want that car.”
Hailey went still, her glare beating into him with the kind of violent energy he could feel rippling in the air around her. “Why you telling me this? You want me to give you my blessing to go seduce some other woman? For a car?”
“No. Not your blessing.” Cole shook his head. “I gave that car up once for my dream and that hasn’t changed. I still dream. I dream of this house and our kids. What I need to know is if that dream has
a chance of becoming reality.”
Hailey’s head tilted from side to side in a slow shake. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I love you, Hailey Mathews, and I want to build a life with you. Now what I need to know is that what you want?”
Chapter 36
Hailey wanted to say yes, but the word just wouldn’t pass her lips. His confession swamped her ability to reason through a response, leaving her the victim of emotion. For as much as her heart swelled and pounded, it couldn’t overwhelm the fear roiling in her stomach.
He told her the truth and put the decision back into her lap, but Hailey couldn’t make it. For as much as she wanted to dream the same dream as him, she couldn’t believe it would ever be more than that. How could she?
Cole said it himself. He believed in that dream once before and it had been a mistake. What if five years from now he woke up and thought the same thing about her? What if he wished one day he had chosen the Fastback?
“Hailey?”
She couldn’t answer him. Not with words. It was his decision to make, and he would have to make it. Either way, Hailey would still love him. That wouldn’t change. The only thing that would was whether her love became the thing that made her days whole or hollow in the future.
Right now it made her desperate, painfully aware of time and how little she had left with Cole. Not wanting to waste it talking down a painful road, Hailey moved her glass to the grass and then stretched across the distance to press her answer against Cole’s lips.
The soft brush went unacknowledged and he pulled back. Hailey knew the question forming on his lips and didn’t want to hear it asked again. He would have to trust her for her to trust him. Catching the first break of sound, she didn’t give him a chance to withdraw a second time.
Devouring his mouth, her tongue plundered his meaty depths as if he were her captive. The dominant master in Cole couldn’t ignore the challenge for more than a few seconds. His question disappeared in the hands that wrapped around her head, holding her still for his retribution as he dueled her tongue back into her mouth and began his own pillaging rampage.
This was not the tender display of affection Kyle treated her to through the night and into the morning. This was an unleashing of raw, violent emotion that clashed as their hands dropped, fighting to work each other free of the clothes that kept them from each other.
The buttons on his shirt bounced off her stomach as her own whipped up over her face. The cotton broke apart their kiss, but for barely a second, and then they were skin to skin, rolling across the quilt as he fought with her bra and she fought to capture his kiss again.
Her lips collided with the hard, taught, sweaty roll of his shoulder and she sucked down on the skin, tasting and nibbling her way over the hard planes of his chest even as he grunted over the back snap of her bra. The little clasp gave him hell, distracting him enough for her to push him onto his back. With another roll, she came up over him, spreading her legs out to straddle his hips as she reared up to handle the bra herself.
A feast of tanned skin and rippling muscles, she barely spared the second it took to snap the bra open and shrug the garment free. His hands lifted, catching her breasts even as she dipped her head toward his chest. In an electrifying scrape of callused fingertips, the sensitive slopes of her breasts slid free of his grip as her mouth settled over the cut ridge of his pectoral muscle.
Licking a path that had his hands digging into her hair, Hailey discovered the pebbled disk of his nipple. Cole never let her play, never risked that much of his control. Today, Hailey punished him for it, just as he taught her how.
Calling on all the tricks he used to torment her body, Hailey nibbled over the edge of his puckered flesh, lavishing the peaked tip with long licks before she sucked hard and left her mark. Cole groaned, his fingers biting into her scalp as he tugged her lower.
Hailey knew just what urge drove him. Even as she latched down on to his nipple in silent defiance to his demand, her palm pressed down over his bulging erection, massaging it through his jeans. Over and over, she molded her fingers to the thick width and squeezed her hand down his length until Cole snarled.
Abandoning her hair and giving her the freedom to torment his other nipple, Cole’s hand brushed hers out of the way to fumble with his zipper. He had better luck with his own clothing than hers, and it took him less than a second before he was shoving her hand beneath his waistband, forcing his zipper to roll down as her bare fingers glided over his pulsing heat.
His smooth, heated length nearly burned her palm as it jerked and throbbed in her hold. Cole’s fingers pressed in over hers, teaching her how he liked to be stroked and pumped before he released her to wind him up to a fevered, panting pitch. It served him right when she stopped suddenly.
For all the times he held her helpless in his lap or in his arms, she didn’t have the ability to force her will the way he did. Hailey only got to savor her victory for a bare second before he growled, his hands shifting. Taking the power from him before he could follow that thought, she slid down, arching her own back and letting her breasts nuzzle his cock in an intimate brush.
Cole froze, his gaze focusing on hers with a sudden clarity as she repeated the motion. Lust sharpened his features, his jaw tensing in time with the slow rolling caress she treated him to. Grinding the edge of herself into his velvety strength, Hailey rubbed her breasts over his thickness until her nipple brushed along the ridge of his pulsing vein.
Right down the center of his cock, she teased her swollen bud to a delicious glide that had her lids rolling closed as she savored the pleasure. Cole muttered a cuss, his hips lifting into the motion. The slight shift had his cock slipping down into the valley between her breasts.
Hailey didn’t hesitate to capture him there. Folding her breasts around his dick, she sandwiched his hardness within her softness. Holding him there with her fingers rolling over her own tender nipples, she met his tormented gaze. Caught by the need she could see there, she slowly began to stroke her swollen globes up and down his cock, giving him the most wicked treat she knew of when she dipped her chin and took a taste of the bulbous head rising to meet her lips.
Cole gasped, his muscles tightening with every inch of skin she licked down over. Dancing over the blind eye that wept for her kiss, she tasted the earthy flavor of his desire, the heated silk of his head as it sloped toward the flared edge. Trapping the sensitive tip in her lips, she treated it, and only it, to a tongue lashing.
Her teasing ended in deep suckling pulls that had his hand fisting back into her hair. She learned in that instant Cole did not take to being commanded, and he was never without the power to force his authority.
“Lick it.” He growled, the sound more animal than human.
He didn’t leave it for her to obey but forced her mouth down over his length by the sheer strength of his hands pressing against her head. Choosing to obey in her own way, Hailey’s lips folded down, running a kiss down his length instead of trapping his heat within the kiss.
Cole snarled, sounding close to a barbarian. Before he could revert back to a primitive state, she rounded the base of his cock to latch on to the tender sacks of his balls. Then she sucked him into seeing things her way.
His hips jerked, his body going instantly tense as he panted through the torment she unleashed on him. Emboldened, Hailey licked over his balls, teasing them before letting her suckling kisses explore the interesting arc of his hardened cock. All the way to the top, her tongue led her lips on sensual journey.
Delighting in her own discovery, she gave in to the temptation to taste him, all of him, to pull his body tight as an archer’s bow and then cut him off just as he had her so many times. With that thought smiling through her lips, they parted and down she went.
“Oh, shit.” Cole’s hands came again to direct her movements, forcing her all the way down until the flared head of his cock butted into the back of her throat. Doing to him as she had to Kyle, H
ailey swallowed, and Cole cussed, his fingers digging in to yank her back up his length just so he could press her back down.
Over and again, faster and harder, he fucked her mouth with groaned encouragements and snarled curses. Hailey gave over all authority to him, letting him guide her motions even as she reveled in her power over Cole.
Just as his muscles tightened down and his body went taught, she’d have pulled free if hadn’t yanked her head clear. Dragging her up his chest, he brought her within an inch of his kiss to gasp out heated breaths over her cheeks.
“You don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing?” Cole growled. “If you want to show me how you feel, then show me. Give me all control, let me bind you, blind you, and show you true freedom. Trust me, princess.”
Tempted, she couldn’t give him what he needed. Not until he gave her what she needed, proof. Proof that he would choose her no matter what. Without that, she couldn’t trust.
“Give me the words, princess.”
Licking her lips, Hailey met his gaze and gave him what she could. “Fuck me, Cole.”
His lip curled slightly at her words, his gaze narrowing as his big hands brushed back her hair to cup her cheeks. “Oh, princess.” The gruff, gravelly texture of his voice sent wicked thrills down her spine. “You’re in for it now.”
* * * *
Cole didn’t care what stubborn reason Hailey had for holding out on him. Hailey wanted to play her game, and that was just fine by Cole because he already had every move she made countered. Including this one.
Keeping her hips bound to his with a hard grip, he rolled on until she lay pinned beneath him. Holding her gaze as he leaned back to pop the top button on her jeans, he gave her one more opportunity to save herself.
“You know, princess, I admire your stubbornness.” Her second button popped free. The frilly edge of her panties tickled the backs of fingers as he worked on the third. “But is it really worth all the pain when you could just trust me?”
Hailey's Game Page 37
