“Do you have any last words before I officially prove you oh so very wrong?”
She scoffed at him. “I don’t think you have it in you, sir, to do something as bold as that.” His eyes narrowed in on her, and in the next second he flipped her so she was lying face down on the rug.
He put a knee into her back without putting too much pressure and held her in place. “Hey, what are you doing!” She wiggled beneath him.
“Now, I’ve been putting up with a lot of you’re smart talk here lately, but I think this just might put an end to it.”
He placed one of his broad hands across her bottom and cupped her through her blue jeans. His hand was warm and firm and Lizzie felt a lick of heat curl through her system. “Just hang on, you’re in for a mighty wild ride.” And with that he gave her one sharp little smack on her bottom.
“Uh, Payton? I’m just letting you know that I don’t go in for that whole kinky spanking thing.” His smile said he didn’t really care. He flipped her over onto her back and stared down at her.
“That was just a warning shot.”
“Oh.” She, of course, had something far more brilliant as a retort in mind, but just as she’d been gearing up to shout it out he’d done this delicious little trick with his fingers that made her brain derail. “I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought. What were you saying?”
His green eyes said it all. “Nothing. It wasn’t important.” His fingers drifted slowly along the edge of her shirt that had shifted up around her belly button. He did a little exploration of the rim of her blue jeans. Lizzie took a deep breath.
“What’s the matter, Liz? You’re not getting turned on, are you?”
“Who me? Uh-uh.”
“Maybe I’ll have to work a little harder then.” He flicked the button on her pants open and slowly slid the zipper of her pants down so it conveniently made a little V over the delicate pink panties she’d worn. His hand slipped inside her shirt and made its way upwards to the front clasp of her bra. Lizzie let out a little squeak when one thick finger flipped it open and ever so gently flicked across a nipple. When he circled the opposite side and cautiously moved inwards towards the center, Lizzie killed him with a low moan of desperation.
Payton groaned and forced his fingers to retreat back to her belly button where he dabbled a little more, chuckling when Lizzie protested. “Sorry, sweetheart, but I seem to recall someone saying something about me needing some pointers.”
“I think I could be convinced to change my mind.” Payton ran a finger over the top of her lacy panties. “Yep, I think I could definitely be convinced.”
“Take your shirt of Lizzie. And the bra, too, while you’re at it.” He leaned back on his knees and watched. “Fantastic. Now, the blue jeans need to go and I’ll show you a few new tricks I’ve learned.”
She stopped her strip show and eyes him cautiously. “If they were learned by a certain someone named Lou Ann, I’m not interested.”
Payton shot her the same look right back and folded his arms across his now naked chest. “First of all, I didn’t sleep with her, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be the one getting the pointers.”
Lizzie kissed the tip of his nose. “Okay, coach. Take it easy before you give yourself a stroke.”
Lizzie finished stripping off her jeans then leaned back on her elbows with her feet warming in front of the fire. The golden glow from the flames highlighted her breasts and the flat plains of her belly. She cocked her head up at him. “I’m all ready, stud muffin. Let’s see the master at work.” She put a finger over his lips when he bent to kiss her. “First, though, return the favor and let’s see you strip.”
“As you wish.” His slow show in front of her made Lizzie want to jump up and drag him down to her so he could send her up in flames.
As if reading her mind he threw the last piece of clothing behind him and came over her, his strong arms holding him suspended. “This,” he said, his voice husky, “this is exactly what I’ve been dreaming about.” He drove into her, purposefully and possessively. And they both lost themselves in the feel and sensations that had been lost to them eleven years before.
A very, very long time later Lizzie curled up next time him, the bear rug soft underneath them. She stared up at the wood rafters above them. “Payton?” she asked, turning to him as she wrapped an arm over his body.
“Hmm?” He watched her with those emerald eyes and kissed her forehead.
“Do you realize that in all the times we’ve made love we still haven’t done it on a bed?”
He paused as if checking his own records. “You know, I believe your right.”
When he sprang to his feet and swept her into his arms, she let him. It wasn’t everyday that a woman got carried by a gorgeous hunk like him, and she wasn’t about to protest the very thing he did in all of her best dreams.
“I guess we’re just going to have to resolve that little issue right this minute.” And just like that he was carrying her up the stairs to his bedroom.
Over the next several weeks, Payton found excuses almost every single day to spend time with Lizzie. He needed her to help him pick out new designs for t-shirts for the booster club. He’d run out of groceries and wasn’t exactly sure if he should try a new brand of orange juice or if he should stick with the same. His mother’s birthday was coming up and he wanted Lizzie to pick out a present with him at the mall.
On the days he didn’t seek her out, Lizzie found excuses to go find him. Her oil conveniently needed changing after Larry’s Auto Shop had closed one evening. She wanted to start a new exercise program and needed him to create it for her. She wanted Skipper Junior to become a tracking dog and she thought he should learn how to track Payton’s scent trail first.
As a result they wound up spending a little part of each day with each other, and Lizzie grew accustomed to seeing him and getting to know how he would react in different circumstances. Say for instance when she just happened to need to practice putting on plaster casts and Payton’s was the only convenient arm she could find. He’d looked at her like she was insane, shook his head, then patiently sat and recited new football plays to her while she wrapped his arm.
And it just so happened that in all those evenings they spent together, Payton managed to thoroughly convince Lizzie that she was oh, so wrong about his method of lovemaking. Payton liked to point that out to her on a regular basis just so she knew that there wasn’t a man out there that could satisfy her cravings better than him. Lizzie never bothered to tell him that she had already figured that out way before they’d even done it the first time.
Late in October she came home after a particularly nasty day at the hospital and found a clown’s red costume nose in her mailbox along with a note.
The fair’s in town. I need to blow off some steam tomorrow night, and unless you want to be my target practice, meet me there. 8 o’clock, by the Ferris wheel.
-Payton
She wondered about that note all night and through work the next day. Until now they’d both come to each other with excuses to spend time together so they hadn’t ever officially been out on a date. But she didn’t know how to define this event. She called Grace on her way home from the hospital.
“He’s not offering to pick you up. It’s not a date.”
“But he asked me to meet him there.”
“Sounds more like an ultimatum, if you ask me.”
“Hmm, target practice doesn’t sound like a very romantic alternative does it?”
“Come on, you’ve been saying yourself that if he doesn’t get around to it soon then you’re going to do it for him. Just pretend that it’s a date and see where it goes from there.”
Lizzie chewed on her already short fingernails. “I don’t know, Grace. Last time I just blindly fell for him he broke my heart.”
She could almost see Grace rolling her eyes at the other end of the line. “Please, Bean. I’d hardly call this time around blind love. Besides, that was eleve
n years ago, y’all are both bigger, better people now. If I didn’t know you better I’d think you were just being chicken about this.”There was a pause on the line, and a deep sigh. “What are you waiting for, Lizzie? You know he’s the one for you. He loves you, I know that for a fact. And even if I didn’t I’d still say the same thing: Sometimes you’ve got to love like you’ve never been hurt before and see where it takes you. Don’t you think it’s time you try?”
Lizzie let out a slow breath. “Maybe you’re right, Gracie. Maybe you’re right.”
Grace smiled. “Of course I am. Now don’t forget to call me tomorrow and give me all the sordid details. I’m living vicariously through you, you know.”
“I know.”
She might be going out there to give him her heart and hope he didn’t smash it a second time, but she sure as heck wasn’t going to let him see that she’d gone out of her way to do it. She dressed in her oldest pair of blue jeans, an old flannel button-up shirt, and a baseball cap with the Atlanta Falcons logo on it. She showed up at 8:15 just to make a grand entrance, and possibly to show him she didn’t dance to his tune all the time.
Just most of the time.
He was leaning against the make-shift barricade between the flow of traffic and the Ferris wheel, focusing on something in the distance when she rounded the corner from the ticket sales. She drank him in, faded blue jeans, flannel shirt, and a baseball cap. She laughed at the irony. Here she’d gone out of her way to make him think she was trying to dodge him, and instead she’d shown up looking like his twin.
“You’ve got good taste in clothing, I see,” she said as she stopped in front of him.
He turned to look at her, his lazy, summer green eyes taking her in with a slow, wonderful perusal. “You, too. Though, I suppose that’s where those extra fifteen minutes went. You were trying to read my mind and see what I was wearing.”
“Not quite. I was torturing your dog for the details instead.”
He laughed. “Poor dog.” He stood and took her hand in his. “Want to go shoot water guns with me? I’ll win you a stuffed animal. Come on, it’ll be fun.” She nearly tripped over her feet he was dragging her along so quickly.
After he’d won her a medium sized stuffed blue and red polka-dotted dog he drug her to the petting zoo, the house of mirrors, the haunted house, back to play more games, and they finished off the evening by riding the Ferris wheel.
They had just rounded to the top of the loop the Ferris wheel made when it jolted to a stop again to unload the next set of passengers. Lizzie had thought about it all evening, and as she looked out over the lights of the fair she still couldn’t make up her mind. She decided she didn’t have anything else to do at the moment, so she might as well ask him.
“Is this a date?”
At first he didn’t answer, just reached out and took her hand in his. He looked over, studying her curiously. “Do you want it to be?”
“You didn’t pick me up, or ask me if I wanted to go.”
“Is that what makes it a date?”
“It can.” He took her answer seriously and regarded her intently.
“What else?” Lizzie felt the first twinges of nervousness that she’d felt all evening and tried her best to squash it.
“A goodnight kiss.” Where had that come from she wondered?
“That can be arranged. I certainly don’t mind.” He bent over as the Ferris wheel set back into motion and touched his lips to hers like a perfect gentleman.
“It’s not the end of the night yet.”
“That was just practice. And I was hoping for a little more than just a kiss when I take you home.”
“Well, you see, that’s going to be a problem.”
“How’s that?”
“First off, I don’t sleep around. And if this is a first date, I don’t go past first on the first date.”
“Not even for me?”
“Not even for you.”
That shouldn’t have taken Payton by surprise, but it had. Somewhere along the way he’d forgotten that she was an old-fashioned sort of girl. She liked being courted and dating and not being taken advantage of by horny men. She didn’t say much on the way home and he knew that somehow he’d offended her. He decided to make it up to her as he walked her up to her front door.
They stopped in front of her door, and suddenly he was a nervous high school teenager waiting to give the girl her first goodnight kiss. “I had a good time tonight, Liz.”
She studied her feet, apparently just a nervous. “Yeah, me, too.”
He ran his hand through his hair and waited a beat. “Look, I was wondering... well, would you like to go out with me sometime? Like, on a date.”
Her head shot up, her eyes rounded with excitement. “A date? You want to go out on a date with me?”
Payton smiled, his eyes lighting up. “Yeah. It’ll be fun. How about, I don’t know, next week sometime?”
“That sounds good.”
Before he turned to leave he leaned in and kissed her goodnight. No other ulterior motives, nothing.
Just a kiss.
Goodnight.
Lizzie closed the front door behind her, and waited for the sound of his truck to pull off down the street. Then she ran to her bedroom, screamed into her pillow like a giddy high school girl, and hit speed dial 1 on her phone as fast as she could.
“Guess what, he asked me on a date!” She screamed at the top of her lungs when Grace answered. And they talked on the phone until 3 in the morning.
Chapter Thirty-three
Payton pulled the truck off the road at an old, rutted dirt entrance that ended at a barb-wire fence and a cattle grate. He shut the engine off and let the sounds of the truck cooling off mix with the various sounds of the southern, fall night.
She arched an eyebrow at him and studied him curiously. “What are we doing?”
His eyes had taken on a dark and dangerous tint to them in the pale light of the quarter moon. He looked big, strong, and wonderful sitting on the opposite side of the bench seat as her, and just a little mad when his lips twisted up at the edges with a wicked smile that sent sparks shooting through his emerald eyes.
“We’re going cow tipping.”
She blinked. “Cow tipping?”
“Yep.” The look he shot her said he knew she had been hoping to do just that very thing.
“I’m wearing a designer skirt and you want me to go cow tipping.” It was a statement more than a question since she could obviously see that he expected her to go along with his idiotic plans.
“You were expecting something a little more romantic perhaps?” His half cocked smile told her that he very well knew that was what she expected. “Oh, come on, Lizzie, you wouldn’t be happy with boring old candlelight dinner romance and you know it.”
“How do you know since you’ve never tried it on me? And besides, when a guy says, ‘want to go out sometime?’ I generally assume it means more than just out to go tip some stupid sleeping cows.” She folded her arms and stared out the passenger window.
“So you do want a candlelit dinner?”
“No.”
“Let me get this straight. You don’t want a romantic dinner, you don’t want cow tipping. What do you want, Lizzie?”
She turned to study him in the moonlight, giving him a skeptical stare. She’d been in a bad mood all day long. Ever since some poor kid had come in to the hospital battered and bruised so badly from his father’s abuse she’d been aching for a fight with someone. This was definitely the final straw. “You have to ask? Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do if you have to ask what I want.”
The truck filled with silence as they watched each other across the vehicle. After a long minute Payton finally filled the void with a soft chuckle. “That is so stupid. And typical for a woman to say, I might add.” He laughed even harder when she turned her lip under in a childish pout. “No, seriously. Just because I choose the wrong thing to do on a date doesn’
t mean I don’t know you. But,” he paused and shot her a winning wink, “I had a hunch this cow tipping thing wouldn’t work out. So, buckle up and hang on.”
He threw the truck in reverse and bumped and bounced the truck back out of the rutted dirt road and onto the main road leading back to Edenville. After a few minutes of driving through open countryside, they passed her house on the left and then Granny’s on the right and finally he pulled to a stop in the middle of the parking lot at DixieAcademy. She studied the empty building, a thousand memories from long ago creeping back to her as she studied the tall red brick building in the moonlight.
“Well, I must admit this is an improvement over cow tipping, but it still isn’t dinner at the Ritz.”
His lips twitched at the edges. “Dang, I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” He quickly exited the truck and walked around to her door before she could offer up any further complaints. When he’d finally dragged her halfway across the parking lot he paused and held out an old, well-used bandana.
“Sorry, this was all I could find on short notice, seeing how you rejected the cow tipping and all. Put it on, please.”
She studied him quizzically, her head slightly cocked to one side with her eyebrows drawn together. Quickly he bent and brushed her lips with a kiss good enough to stop the wheels from grinding further in her head.
“Just put it on.” He bent and brushed her lips again. “Please, no questions.”
She grabbed the bandana from him and started to tie it around her eyes. “Okay fine. Just promise me you won’t try something stupid like leading me out into the middle of the auditorium stage with a room full of people staring at me.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her then laughed. “Hmm... tempting, but I’ll save that for another time. Now hold on to my arm and we’ll be there in a minute.”
“Where are you taking me anyway?”
“Do you always have to ask so many damn questions?”
“Yes. Now where are you taking me?”
“If I told you it wouldn’t be any fun. Just relax and enjoy the stroll. We’ll be there in a minute.”
The Heart Will Lead You Home Page 36
