Seduce Me, Cowboy (Mills & Boon Desire) (Copper Ridge)

by Maisey Yates

  “Do I? Why would I need a break?”

  “Because you’re going to get sore,” he said, maddeningly pragmatic.

  And, just as maddeningly, it made her blush to hear him say it. “I don’t really mind,” she said finally.

  “You don’t?” His tone was calm, but heat flared in the depths of his dark eyes.

  “No,” she replied, still trailing her fingertips over his hardening body. “I like feeling the difference. In me. I like being so...aware of everything we’ve done.” For her, that was a pretty brazen proclamation, though she had a feeling it paled in comparison to the kinds of things other women had said to him in the past.

  But she wasn’t one of those other women. And right now he was responding to her, so she wasn’t going to waste a single thought on anyone who had come before her. She held his interest now. That was enough.

  “There’s something else on my list,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady, fighting against the nerves firing through her.

  “Is that so?”

  She sucked in a sharp breath. “Yes. I want to... That is... What you did for me... A couple of times now... I want to... I want to...” She gave up trying to get the words out. She wasn’t sure she had the right words for what she wanted to do, anyway, and she didn’t want to humiliate herself by saying something wrong.

  So, with unsteady hands, she undid the closure on his jeans and lowered the zipper. She looked up at him. If she expected to get any guidance, she was out of luck. He just stared at her, his dark eyes unfathomable, his jaw tight, a muscle in his cheek ticking.

  She shifted on his lap, sliding gracefully to the floor in front of the chair. Then she went to her knees and turned to face him, flicking her hair out of her face.

  He still said nothing, watching her closely, unnervingly so. But she wasn’t going to turn back now. She lifted the waistband of his underwear, pulling it out in order to clear his impressive erection, then she pulled the fabric partway down his hips, as far as she could go with him sitting.

  He was beautiful.

  That feeling of intimidation she’d felt the first time she’d seen him had faded completely. Now she knew what he could do, and she appreciated it greatly. He had shown her so many things; he’d made her pleasure the number one priority. And she wanted to give to him in return.

  Well, she also knew this would be for her, too.

  She slid her hands up his thighs, then curled her fingers around his hardened length, squeezing him firmly. She was learning that he wasn’t breakable there. That he liked a little bit of pressure.

  “Hayley,” he said, his voice rough, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

  “No,” she said, “I probably don’t. But I know what I want. And it’s been so much fun having what I want.” She rose up slightly, then leaned in, pressing her lips to the head of his shaft. He jerked beneath her touch, and she took that as approval.

  A couple hours ago she would have been afraid that she’d hurt him. But male pleasure, she was discovering, sometimes looked a little like pain. Heck, female pleasure was a little like pain. Sex was somewhere between. The aching need to have it all and the intense rush of satisfaction that followed.

  She shivered just thinking about it.

  And then she flicked her tongue out, slowly testing this new territory. She hummed, a low sound in the back of her throat, as she explored the taste of him, the texture. Jonathan Bear was her favorite indulgence, she was coming to realize. There was nothing about him she didn’t like. Nothing he had done to her she didn’t love. She liked the way he felt, and apparently she liked the way he tasted, too.

  She parted her lips slowly, worked them over the head, then swallowed down as much of him as she could. The accompanying sound he made hollowed out her stomach, made her feel weak and powerful at the same time.

  His body was such an amazing thing. So strong, like it had been carved straight from the mountain. Yet it wasn’t in any way cold or unmovable; it was hot. His body had changed hers. Yes, he’d taken her virginity, but he had also taught her to feel pleasure she hadn’t realized she had the capacity to feel.

  Such power in his body, and yet, right now, it trembled beneath her touch. The whisper-soft touch of her lips possessed the power to rock him, to make him shake. To make him shatter.

  Right now, desire was enough. She didn’t need skill. She didn’t need experience. And she felt completely confident in that.

  She slipped her tongue over his length as she took him in deep, and he bucked his hips lightly, touching the back of her throat. Her throat contracted and he jerked back.

  “Sorry,” he said, his voice strained.

  “No,” she said, gripping him with one hand and bringing her lips back against him. “Don’t apologize. I like it.”

  “You’re inexperienced.”

  She nodded slowly, then traced him with the tip of her tongue. “Yes,” she agreed, “I am. I’ve never done this for any other man. I’ve never even thought about it before.” His hips jerked again, and she realized he liked this. That he—however much he tried to pretend he didn’t—liked that her desire was all for him.

  “I think you might be corrupting me,” she said, keeping her eyes wide as she took him back into her mouth.

  He grunted, fisting his hands in her hair, but he didn’t pull her away again.

  The muscles in his thighs twitched beneath her fingertips, and he seemed to grow larger, harder in her mouth. She increased the suction, increased the friction, used her hands as well as her mouth to drive him as crazy as she possibly could.

  There was no plan. There was no skill. There was just the need to make him even half as mindless as he’d made her over the past couple days.

  He had changed her. He had taken her from innocence...to this. She would be marked by him forever. He would always be her first. But society didn’t have a term for a person’s experience after virginity. So she didn’t have a label for the impact she wanted to make on him.

  Jonathan hadn’t been a virgin for a very long time, she suspected. And she probably wasn’t particularly special as a sexual partner.

  So she had to try to make herself special.

  She had no tricks to make this the best experience he’d ever had. She had only herself. And so she gave it to him. All of her. Everything.

  “Hayley,” he said, his voice rough, ragged. “You better stop.”

  She didn’t. She ignored him. She had a feeling he was close; she recognized the signs now. She had watched him reach the point of pleasure enough times that she had a fair idea of what it looked like. Of what it felt like. His whole body tensing, his movements becoming less controlled.

  She squeezed the base of him tightly, pulling him in deeper, and then he shattered. And she swallowed down every last shudder of need that racked his big body.

  In the aftermath, she was dazed, her heart pounding hard, her entire body buzzing. She looked up at him from her position on the floor, and he looked down at her, his dark eyes blazing with...anger, maybe? Passion? A kind of sharp, raw need she hadn’t ever seen before.

  “You’re going to pay for that,” he said.

  “Oh,” she returned, “I hope so.”

  He swept her up, crushed her against his chest. “You have to put it on my list first,” she said.

  Then he brought his mouth down to hers, and whatever she’d intended to write down was forgotten until morning.

  Ten

  Sometime on Sunday afternoon Hayley had gone home. Because, she had insisted, she wasn’t able to work in either his T-shirt or the dress she had worn to the bar on Friday.

  He hadn’t agreed, but he had been relieved to have the reprieve. He didn’t feel comfortable sharing the bed with her while he slept. Which had meant sleeping on the couch in the office after she drifted off.

  He just... He didn’t sleep with women. He didn’t see the point in inviting that kind of intimacy. Having her spend the night in his bed was bad enoug
h. But he hadn’t wanted to send her home, either. He didn’t want to think about why. Maybe it was because she expected to stay, because of her general inexperience.

  Which made him think of the moment she had taken him into her mouth, letting him know he was the first man she had ever considered doing that for. Just the thought of it made his eyes roll back in his head.

  Now, it was late Monday afternoon and she had been slowly driving him crazy with the prim little outfit she had come back to work in, as though he didn’t know what she looked like underneath it.

  Who knew he’d like a good girl who gave head like a dream.

  She had also insisted that they stay professional during work hours, and it was making it hard for him to concentrate. Of course, it was always hard for him to concentrate on office work. In general, he hated it.

  Though bringing Hayley into the office certainly made it easier to bear.

  Except for the part where it was torture.

  He stood up from his chair and stretched slowly, trying to work the tension out of his body. But he had a feeling that until he was buried inside Hayley’s body again, tension was just going to be the state of things.

  “Oh,” Hayley said, “Joshua Grayson just emailed and said he needs you to go by the county office and sign a form. And no, it can’t be faxed.”

  For the first time in his life, Johathan was relieved to encounter bureaucracy. He needed to get out of this space. He needed to get his head on straight.

  “Great,” he said.

  “Maybe I should go with you,” she said. “I’ve never been down to the building and planning office, and you might need me to run errands in the future.”

  He gritted his teeth. “Yeah, probably.”

  “I’ll drive my own car.” She stood, grabbing her purse off the desk. “Because by the time we’re done it will be time for me to get off.”

  He ground his teeth together even harder, because he couldn’t ignore her double entendre even though he knew it had been accidental. And because, in addition to the double meaning, it was clear she intended to stay in town tonight and not at his place.

  He should probably be grateful she wasn’t being clingy. He didn’t like to encourage women to get too attached to him, not at all.

  “Great idea,” he said.

  But he didn’t think it was a great idea, and he grumbled the entire way to town in the solitude of his pickup truck, not missing the irony that he had been wanting alone time, and was now getting it, and was upset about it.

  The errand really did take only a few minutes, and afterward it still wasn’t quite time for Hayley to clock out.

  “Do you want to grab something to eat?” he asked, though he had no earthly idea why. He should get something for himself and go home, deal with that tension he had been pondering earlier.

  She looked back and forth, clearly edgy. “In town?”

  “Yes,” he returned, “in town.”

  “Oh. I don’t... I guess so.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “I’m not asking you to Beaches. Let’s just stop by the Crab Shanty.”

  She looked visibly relieved, and again he couldn’t quantify why that annoyed him.

  He knew they shouldn’t be seen together in town. He had a feeling she also liked the casual nature of the restaurant. It was much more likely to look like a boss and employee grabbing something to eat than it was to look like a date.

  They walked from where they had parked a few streets over, and paused at the crosswalk. They waited for one car to crawl by, clearly not interested in heeding the law that said pedestrians had the right-of-way. Then Jonathan charged ahead of her across the street and up to the faded yellow building. A small line was already forming outside the order window, and he noticed that Hayley took pains to stand slightly behind him.

  When it was their turn to order, he decided he wasn’t having any of her missish circumspection. They shouldn’t be seen together as anything more than a boss and an assistant.

  But right now, hell if he cared. “Two orders of fish and chips, the halibut. Two beers and a Diet Coke.”

  He pulled his wallet out and paid before Hayley could protest, then he grabbed the plastic number from the window, and the two of them walked over to a picnic table positioned outside the ramshackle building. There was no indoor seating, which could be a little bracing on windy days, and there weren’t very many days that didn’t have wind on the Oregon coast.

  Jonathan set the number on the wooden table, then sat down heavily, looking up at the blue-and-white-striped umbrella wiggling in the breeze.

  “Two beers?”

  “One of them is for you,” he said, his words verging on a growl.

  “I’m not going to drink a beer.” She looked sideways. “At least not here.”

  “Yeah, right out here on Main Street in front of God and everybody? You’re a lot braver in my bedroom.”

  He was goading her, but he didn’t much care. He was... Well dammit, it pissed him off. To see how ashamed she was to be with him. How desperate she was to hide it. Even if he understood it, it was like a branding iron straight to the gut.

  “You can’t say that so loud,” she hissed, leaning forward, grabbing the plastic number and pulling it to her chest. “What if people heard you?”

  “I thought you were reinventing yourself, Hayley Thompson.”

  “Not for the benefit of...the town. It’s about me.”

  “It’s going to be about you not getting dinner if you keep hiding our number.” He snatched the plastic triangle from her hands.

  She let out a heavy sigh and leaned back, crossing her arms. “Well, the extra beer is for you. Put it in your pocket.”

  “You can put it in your own pocket. Drink it back at your place.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Don’t you want to tick that box on your list? We ticked off some pretty interesting ones last night.”

  Her face turned scarlet. “You’re being obnoxious, Jonathan.”

  “I’ve been obnoxious from day one. You just found it easy to ignore when I had my hand in your pants.”

  Her mouth dropped open, then she snapped it shut again. Their conversation was cut off when their food was placed in front of them.

  She dragged the white cardboard box toward her and opened it, removing the container of coleslaw and setting it to the side before grabbing a french fry and biting into it fiercely. Her annoyance was clearly telegraphed by the ferocity with which she ate each bite of food. And the determination that went into her looking at anything and everything around them except for him.

  “Enjoying the view?” he asked after a moment.

  “The ocean is very pretty,” she snapped.

  “And you don’t see it every day?”

  “I never tire of the majesty of nature.”

  His lips twitched, in spite of his irritation. “Of course not.”

  The wind whipped up, blowing a strand of dark hair into Hayley’s face. Reflexively, he reached across the table and pushed it out of her eyes. She jerked back, her lips going slack, her expression shocked.

  “You’re my boss,” she said, her voice low. “As far as everyone is concerned.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m your lover. As far as I’m concerned.”

  “Stop.”

  “I thought you wanted new experiences? I thought you were tired of hiding? And here you are, hiding.”

  “I don’t want to...perform,” she said. “My new experiences are for me. Not for everyone else’s consumption. That’s why I’m leaving. So I can...do things without an audience.”

  “You want your dirty secrets, is that it? You want me to be your dirty secret.”

  “It’s five o’clock,” she said, her tone stiff. “I’m going to go home now.”

  She collected her food, and left the beer, standing up in a huff and taking off down the street in the opposite direction from where they had parked.

  “Where are you going?”

 
“Home,” she said sharply.

  He gathered up the rest of the food and stomped after her. “You parked the other way.”

  “I’ll get it in the morning.”

  “Then you better leave your house early. Unless this is you tendering your resignation.”

  “I’m not quitting,” she said, the color heightening in her face. “I’m just... I’m irritated with you.”

  She turned away from him, continuing to walk quickly down the street. He took two strides and caught up with her. “I see that.” He kept pace with her, but she seemed bound and determined not to look at him. “Would you care to share why?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “So you’re insisting that you’re my employee, and that you want to be treated like my employee in public. But that clearly excludes when you decide to run off having a temper tantrum.”

  She whirled around then, stopping in her tracks. “Why are you acting like this? You’ve been...much more careful than this up till now.” She sniffed. “Out of deference to my innocence?”

  “What innocence, baby? Because I took that.” He smiled, knowing he was getting to her. That he was making her feel as bad as he did. “Pretty damn thoroughly.”

  “I can’t do this with you. Not here.” She paused at the street corner and looked both ways before hurrying across the two-lane road. He followed suit. She walked down the sidewalk, passed the coffeehouse, which was closing up for the day, then rounded the side of the brick building and headed toward the back.

  “Is this where you live?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she returned, sounding almost comically stubborn. Except he didn’t feel like much was funny about this situation.

  “Here in the alley?” he asked, waving his hand around the mostly vacant space.

  “Yes. In the Dumpster with the mice. It’s not so bad. I shredded up a bunch of newspaper and made a little bed.”

  “I suspect this is the real reason you’ve been spending the night at my place, then.”

  She scowled. “If you want to fight with me, come upstairs.”

  He didn’t want to fight with her. He wanted to grab her, pull her into his arms and kiss her. He wanted to stop talking. Wanted to act logical instead of being wounded by something he knew he should want to avoid.