“I want you so much I can hardly breathe,” she murmured, her voice breathless.
His own breaths sawed past his lips in a fast, furious rhythm as he withdrew his hand and reached for his zipper. He was so hard that the button wouldn’t budge on the first tug.
“Dammit,” he growled, yanking. The metal popped off and flew across the room. He reached for his zipper. The teeth hissed open and his jeans sagged onto his hips. His thick erection sprang forward.
“I want you so much I feel dizzy,” she went on, her words feeding his desperation. “And so hot.”
The sensitive head of his penis brushed her slick heat and he groaned. His hand dove in his back pocket for his wallet and the condom stashed there. She grasped him, her fingers closing around his pulsing thickness, stroking. His grip on the wallet faltered.
“And my heart is pounding so fast. And so loud.”
He knew the feeling. He could hear the drumming of his own heart. Bam, bam, bam! Followed by the voice, “Is everything all right in there—”
Wait a second. A voice?
Austin’s fingers on the wallet halted as reality pushed past the lusty haze consuming his senses.
“It’s pounding really loud,” she murmured.
Regret washed through him. “That’s not your heart, Thumper. It’s the door.”
“The door?”
“Someone’s at the door.”
“Someone’s at the door?” Her eyes fluttered open and she stared past him. Her gaze widened as reality seemed to hit her. “Someone’s at the door.”
“It’s Pastor Standley,” a muffled voice called. “I can hear you all in there. Is everything okay?”
“F-fine. Just a minute,” she called back. She frowned as she watched Austin stuff his massive erection back into his pants. “Talk about rotten timing.”
“Or divine intervention.”
“If that’s supposed to be an ‘I told you so,’ save it. This is not a sign from anything higher than the second floor.” At his raised eyebrow, she added, “Uncle Spur. He’s pressing charges against the pastor’s mother for propositioning him. I’m sure that’s why he’s here now.”
“You can press charges for that?”
“Don’t even think it. You want this as much as I do.”
He eyed her a moment more. “Actually—” he pressed her hand to the bulge in his pants “—I want it more.” He gave her a quick, hungry kiss before pulling back and helping her off the table.
He turned away then, leaving her to straighten her own clothes while he went to answer the door. Otherwise, he was sure to lose what little control he had, press her back onto the table and finish what they’d started.
He wanted to, but he didn’t want to want to.
He wanted to concentrate on finding himself a nice, wholesome, respectable girl and winning his bet with Miss Marshalyn.
Unfortunately, the notion didn’t seem half as appealing as it had before Madeline Hale had come rolling back into town, back into his life and right into his hottest fantasies.
8
MADELINE CLOSED the door after reassuring Pastor Standley that she would talk to Uncle Spur about dropping the charges against his mother.
She walked back over to the table and sat down. The past evening rushed through her mind, right up to the point where she’d had the best orgasm of her life.
The best, and the first when it came to oral sex. Sure, she’d been on the receiving end before. But no man had ever pleasured her to the point of explosion. The guys she’d been with had been too intent on their own pleasure, too eager to get to the actual act to hold off just for her benefit.
Austin was different. He gave new meaning to the word foreplay and she couldn’t wait to see in what other ways he’d outperform the few lovers in her past.
Unfortunately, she was going to have to wait. He’d made some excuse about having to get up early and then left right after opening the door to Pastor Standley.
But he’d promised to be on time for their next session.
She recalled his earlier words: “Actually, I want it more.”
A smile curved her lips as she gathered up the saucers and headed for the kitchen. While she hadn’t actually seduced him—she’d been the one to have an orgasm—she’d at least driven him beyond the point of denying the attraction between them. She knew now that he truly did want her.
Just as she knew that he liked red, despite his earlier denial. He’d gone over the edge after sniffing sample number four—the lilies and jasmine scented with succulent berries. It was a sensual, hot-blooded, full-bodied aroma. Passionate. Racy. Red.
Lifting the plate, she inhaled. Her nostrils flared and her stomach fluttered madly.
This one definitely drew a major response. Then again, the others were potent, as well. As she sniffed her way through the other four saucers before depositing them in the sink, the sensations in her body didn’t diminish. If anything, her blood rushed faster and her heartbeat pumped at an alarming rate. She was definitely on to something. The realization sent a rush of adrenaline through her.
She spent the next half hour cleaning the dishes, straightening her makeshift lab and making notes in her test journal. Then she headed upstairs. After peeling off the red dress, she stepped beneath a cold shower. Water sluiced over her heated skin, but it did little to ease the desire still pumping through her body.
Because she didn’t just want her own orgasm. She wanted to come along with Austin. To feel him slide into her body and explode in her arms. To feel his heart pound the same fast, furious rhythm as her own. To know deep in her heart that she was the one responsible for his orgasm. That she truly had changed into a woman that Austin Jericho couldn’t resist. He was the last doubt that lingered in her mind. Her one regret.
But not for long.
Tomorrow night she would make sure there were no interruptions. Just sex. Mutually satisfying sex.
THEY WERE NOT GOING to have sex.
Austin told himself that for the umpteenth time later that night as he turned onto his left side and did his best to get some much-needed sleep. He clamped his eyes shut, but she was there, the memory of her in that next-to-nothing red dress, her body tight and slick around his finger, her cries of ecstasy echoing in his ears.
He opened his eyes and stared at the wall. The tree outside his window cast a shadow there, the branches trembling with a small breeze.
The temperature outside had dropped a few degrees, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cool the heat that burned him up from the inside out. Even a cold shower and several glasses of iced tea had offered little relief. He was still hot. Still horny.
Still crazy.
Despite the fact that he knew Madeline was all wrong for him, he still wanted her. In the worst way.
He shook his head, sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. After yanking on a pair of jeans, he walked down the hallway of the sprawling, one-story ranch house. When he’d first built the place, he’d done it with a loan from the bank. But after a few successful years with his cattle, he’d had enough to pay off his loan. He owned it outright now. All five bedrooms with an equal number of bathrooms, a massive kitchen with fully stocked cupboards and every modern convenience, and a comfortable den complete with a gigantic fireplace.
It was all his, and it was a far cry from the ram-shackle old house with the sagging porch where he’d spent his youth.
He walked into the den, over to the large window that overlooked the back forty. A small dwelling sat in the far distance, barely visible from where he stood.
But Austin didn’t have to see it with his eyes. He saw it in his mind. The rotting walls, the wood completely decayed in several spots. The No Trespassing sign nailed to a tree out front. Though it stood vacant now, the place had changed little from the house he’d grown up in.
Most of the windows had been boarded up to keep the cold out. Austin and his brothers had hammered the wood into place themselves one day with nails t
hey’d pried out of old Mr. Waller’s fence. The noise hadn’t even stirred their dad, who’d been snoring from the front porch where he’d passed out hours before after yelling and cussing up his usual bitter, drunken storm. He’d been as immune to the winter weather as he was to the high heat of summer. He’d felt nothing except the liquor flowing through his veins, and heard nothing, not even the cries of his three boys who’d been cold and hungry and desperate.
Austin had stopped his crying early on. Tears didn’t do any good. They didn’t put food on the table or make warm clothes appear or force a bitter man to give up the bottle, so Austin had stopped praying for all three. He’d stopped worrying about tomorrow and wondering why things were so messed up for him and not for the other kids in Miss Jacobs’s kindergarten class.
Instead, he’d started to take what he could get. He’d eaten when he could and worn whatever hand-me-downs he’d managed to scrounge up, and he’d stayed away from his father as much as possible. He’d stopped caring about what he didn’t have. He’d stopped caring, period. Because he’d never had anything to really care about.
Until he’d swiped a bucket of freshly picked apples from Miss Marshalyn’s back porch and gotten himself caught. She’d hauled him into her kitchen with the intent of calling the sheriff. Instead, she’d given him a lecture about respecting other people’s property, along with his first good whiff of candied sweet potatoes.
From then on, he’d been hooked. He’d started picking the apples for her and setting them on her porch in the hope that her back window would be open and he would get another whiff. After a few bucketfuls, she’d invited him inside and given him a bowl of those famous potatoes.
For a price, that is. Nothing came for free, or so she’d told him over and over, and she’d made him whitewash her front fence in payment. The chores had started then. Every day he would show up and she would give him a new task, and an overflowing plate of supper when he finished.
Even more than the food on his plate—two-thirds of which he’d always saved for his two kid brothers—he’d simply liked sitting in her kitchen, smelling the smells of a real home and feeling the warmth from the stove.
First Miss Marshalyn had filled his belly, and later she’d filled his head. With notions that anything was possible if he worked long and hard enough. She’d even given him a taste of what it was like to actually have something of his own.
Austin’s gaze went to the bookshelf in the far corner and the kid’s faded metal lunch kit that sat on one of the shelves.
It had been a hot Sunday like any other and he’d spent the early part cutting her grass while she was at church. When she’d come home, she’d not only fed him lunch, but she’d presented him with a brand-new, gleaming red Dukes of Hazzard lunch kit.
To an eight-year-old boy who packed his lunch in a used paper sack—when he actually had something to pack—it was like getting a cherished toy at Christmas.
But it wasn’t a gift, she’d told him. He’d earned the kit with his hard work. Even more, he’d earned the lunch she proceeded to pack for him every day thereafter—more than enough for him and his two brothers.
He turned his attention back to the window and the house that sat in the distance. While Miss Marshalyn and her lunch kit had made his childhood less bleak, it hadn’t really changed anything. It had merely slowed him down on the destructive path he’d been following.
He’d still been the oldest of the no-good, no-account, troublemaking Jericho brothers, and his father had still been the town drunk.
Trouble.
That’s what the sheriff had called Bick Jericho every time he’d pulled the man in for public intoxication.
“You ain’t nothin’ but trouble, Bick Jericho.” And since Austin, Houston and Dallas had been Bick’s boys, the sheriff, and a good majority of the townsfolk, had been dead certain the brothers were no better than their old man.
While Austin, himself, had never been much for drinking, he’d grown up every bit the hell-raiser his father had been. Bitter because the world had dealt him such a shitty hand. Angry because he’d been stuck with a sorry excuse for a father.
“Born trouble, that’s what you are,” Sheriff Gentry had told Austin the night he’d landed behind bars after totaling his souped-up Harley and nearly killing himself in the process.
He’d been roaring down Main Street, a little too reckless and much too fast, and he’d lost control. He’d crashed into the sheriff’s parked car, sending it straight to that great big Chevy lot in the sky.
“You were born one-hundred-percent trouble just like your worthless old man.”
He’d believed the sheriff, until Miss Marshalyn had shown up to bail him out. She hadn’t put a price on her help that night. She hadn’t bargained for good behavior. She’d simply said, “You have a choice. This—” she’d pointed to the bars “—or that.” She’d pointed to the door.
She’d given him not only a choice that night, but a chance, and he’d realized then that trouble was something a man made, not something he was.
It was a choice, not a birthright, and so Austin had decided then and there never to make trouble again. Instead, he’d set his sights on making a real home for himself, and a family.
He had the home. Almost. Since Miss Marshalyn’s husband, Jim, had passed away, she didn’t need all that property. For Austin, it would complete his spread and give him enough size to compete with the big-boy ranches.
As for the family…any of the handful of nice, respectable women he’d narrowed his choices down to would do. All he had to do was pick one and take things to the next level by asking her out.
That’s what he needed to do.
But what he wanted to do was watch Maddie Hale get all hot and flushed and make those tiny moaning sounds in the back of her throat when he licked her hot slit just so….
HE STIFFENED—in more ways than one—and sank down into a leather chair. He touched his mouse pad and watched his computer spring to life. Typing in his code, he brought up the vaccination charts on the newest additions to his herd. He needed to stay focused. To think about work and the future and the fact that he didn’t have time to waste on a woman who didn’t suit his needs. Particularly a woman who was so…temporary.
Maddie was out of here soon, and so it stood to reason she would only be interested in sex. But Austin wanted more. He wanted the morning after.
His head knew that. Now if he could just get a certain throbbing body part to agree.
HE WAS LATE AGAIN.
Not that it mattered. She knew he would come tonight. In more ways than one. And so she took the extra time to prepare for the evening ahead.
She touched up her fading makeup again.
She took yet another look at her now-drooping hair.
She watched the clock while she felt drops of sweat sliding down her bare arms, the ninety-something Texas heat and the fact that she’d been slaving away in a hot kitchen all day causing her discomfort.
Drawing in a deep breath, she adjusted her off-the-shoulder, red lace tank top. Sexy and alluring had been the idea when pulling on the outfit over two hours ago. Instead, she’d wound up damp and sticky. And hungry.
At least when she’d baked at her dad’s shop, she’d had a whole oven of goodies to look forward to, so the experience had seemed worthwhile and rewarding. Mixing up lotions was definitely not the same.
That’s the point, she told herself. She was doing something far different now. Far, far away from her desperately small hometown. And the result of her hard work—a promotion and a prestigious position with V.A.M.P.—would last longer than the ten seconds it took to savor a cookie or a muffin or a brownie.
She would take power and prestige over a rush of sugar any old day.
At least that’s what she told herself as she sat on the sofa, her stomach grumbling and her thighs aching as she waited for Austin Jericho.
She blew out a deep breath and busied herself rearranging the test samples. Each one had
been formulated to create a different sensation upon contact with the skin. The first tingled, the second tickled. Number three heated, while four cooled. A fifth had the wet, slick feel of water.
Then again, she could do the tickle first, then the tingle. Next the cold, then the hot. Water last.
Or cold first. Hot. Tingle. Tick—
The thud of footsteps on the porch stalled her thoughts. She bolted from the couch, her heart pounding as if she’d just discovered the fountain of youth itself.
Hel-lo? She was a grown woman. She’d dated men. She’d touched. She’d hugged. She’d kissed. She’d even slept with a few. She wasn’t a shy, overweight, nerdy Chem Gem anymore, even if she had answered the door in her bunny slippers the night before.
Tonight she wore a pair of strappy sandals with a thick heel that made her arch her back just enough when she walked to give her breasts more perk and her bottom a nice lift.
“You’re late,” she blurted several moments later as she opened the door. Her annoyance took a temporary vacation at the sight of him.
He filled up the front porch, looking so tall and dark and handsome in nothing but a simple black button-up shirt, the cuffs rolled up to his elbows, faded jeans and worn cowboy boots. He smelled of leather and soap and hot, aroused male, and her nostrils flared in response.
He pulled off his cowboy hat and ran a hand through his short, dark hair. The muscles in his arms bunched and stretched his sleeves and her breath caught.
His grin was slow and easy and so damned self-assured, as if he knew the effect he had on her. “Hello to you, too.”
“Let me guess.” She stepped back, motioning him inside. “Another trapped cow.”
“A fence came down. I’ve spent all afternoon hammering up barbed wire.” He followed her into the living room and perched on the edge of the sofa. He eyed the display of samples on the coffee table. “Looks like you had a busy day in the kitchen.”
The Sex Solution Page 10
