Lay It Down

by Cara McKenna

  No man had ever done this to her and made her feel so much. He told her things with each stroke and taste and nip. Promised things. Demanded, Where else do you want to feel this mouth?

  She kissed back and let him feel every ferocious thing he roused in her. He moved between her legs, taunting thrusts that lit her up, drew her arousal tight. She wanted him inside her with a need she’d never felt before, a hunger so deep it ached in her bones.

  His lips were soft, his shoulders hard against her kneading hands. His excitement was a steady, rough insistence, an intruder demanding entrance, if only that were on the menu. She imagined taking him in her mouth, hearing him getting hotter and hotter above her, feeling whatever those hands would do—urging or forcing, fisting her hair or cupping her head.

  She broke her lips from his, gasping. “Get your pants off.”

  He sat back on his heels, and those big hands working his buckle was the most erotic thing she’d ever seen. With a clink of metal and a hiss of leather leaving denim, his belt hit the floor. Those fingers had his fly open, his jeans pushed down, then his shorts. Then it was just him, right there. The bare, brutal evidence of his excitement, presented.

  That bossy hand wrapped hers around him. She smothered a moan at the heat of it, breathless as he pumped her hand up and down tightly, soft skin sliding over rock-hard flesh.

  “Yeah,” he murmured, still forcing her motions. “Like that.”

  Her blood pounded to see him this ready. His excitement was searing her palm, gleaming at his crown.

  “You like it?” he asked.

  She nodded, words gone.

  “Tell me.”

  She licked her lips, swallowed. Nodded again. “I like it.”

  “Big as you imagined?”

  Such a tacky question, yet coming from this man, undeniably hot. She gave him what he wanted, and she didn’t have to lie.

  “Bigger.”

  “Tell me what you want to do with it.”

  “Whatever you tell me to.”

  His hand stilled hers. “I like that answer.”

  He got her fly open, tugged her jeans down as far as he could get them; then she brought her legs in and let him peel them the rest of the way off.

  “Shirt,” he ordered. As she stripped it, she felt rough fingers at her hips, cool air against her fevered sex. A little gasp escaped her, but all at once he was slipping her panties from her ankles. She closed her thighs reflexively, but he coaxed them open with slow hands.

  “Lemme see you.”

  His lips parted as her sex did the same, his gaze going glassy. After a long moment’s study, he left the bed to get his jeans kicked away. Kim sat up, returning the scrutiny. Good God, what a body. He gave his thick length a long stroke, eyes on her bare skin.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” he murmured.

  Kim offered a suggestion, reaching behind to unclasp her bra. She’d imagined that so many times, the last couple days—those callused laborer’s hands cupping her softest flesh. He was on her before her bra found the floor.

  He lay on his side and hauled her against him, their legs crossing and his cock pressing along her lips. She gave a little cry, shocked by the sensation. He was right there, and she was so ready—no mistaking that from the way his skin slid against hers. Between them, he claimed her breast. Rough, dry palm grazing her nipple; slick, smooth flesh coursing against her clit, every point of her pleasure drawing tight and stiff.

  She swore at his throat, then kissed the spot. Her fingers curled against his back, nails scraping and spurring his hips. She’d never made a dumb, selfish, reckless mistake in bed, never said fuck it to a lack of protection and just gone for it . . . She understood now how those terrible decisions got made. How the need to feel a man inside you could become a woman’s oxygen in moments like this. She ached so badly for him, the wanting could almost drown out reason and get its way. Almost.

  He spoiled her other breast until she was panting against his neck.

  “C’mere,” he said, tugging at her arm. He sat cross-legged and directed her to straddle him, his cock beating hard against her belly. One strong forearm slid between them and his fingers sought her clit. She wrapped her arms around his neck as the pleasure sparked, another stifled groan trapped in her throat.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, shifting to kneel. “Lemme hear it.”

  He didn’t know what she needed. He didn’t ask what she needed. His fingertips were big and graceless—marauding things—and the way they touched her was nothing like the caresses she’d have requested, had she been given a say. Yet the contact was everything it should be, with this man. Pushy and coarse, and overwhelmingly, brutishly male. Like the motorcycle, the sex felt like a ride she was scared to take . . . and yet as with the bike, she was as curious as she was frightened to see where he was taking her.

  “Touch me,” he ordered. “Hold me. I want my cock in your hand when I make you come.”

  His demand folded her excitement over on itself, deepening the taunting pangs. A demand, and a promise. She clasped him in one hand, kept the other on his face. She felt his pulse against her wrist, felt him throbbing in her grip. This hot-blooded man, everywhere.

  “Nice and tight,” he muttered, and Kim squeezed, earning a low moan. “Yeah. You think about that, when you come. All the places you wish I was.” His fingers dipped inside her, a mean reminder of what she couldn’t have tonight.

  She uttered his name without thought, and it changed him like a flipped switch. His hips sped, cock fucking her hand quick and frantic, and his moan seemed to echo through the room.

  “I could come from just this,” he muttered, working her grip up and down with his free hand. “Can’t believe how good you feel.”

  Pride burst inside her, flooding her with heat. Her hand had to be the opposite of his, clasping his erection. Smooth skin, slender fingers. Had to make his dick feel that much bigger, filling her small palm. In turn he felt huge to her—powerful. Masterful, the way he dictated her pleasure and his. He moved with crude instinct, hands working them both with confidence.

  She’d never felt this with a man before—known like this. As though they’d been lovers for months, not minutes.

  Christ, she was close. She was there. She’d have slowed this touch, had it been her own hand. Drawn it out. But Vince’s sex wasn’t a savored flute of champagne. It was a pounded shot—strong, fast, designed to obliterate. He delivered it with racing, rough fingertips and a low, rhythmic, rising moan. The sound deepened right along with her pleasure, and as she came undone, that voice seemed to vibrate through her, surely as the tremors rocking her flesh.

  His hands slowed. Without meaning to, she sighed a helpless, “Oh,” and wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders.

  “Good,” he murmured through panting breaths, big body going still. His cock pulsed against her mound, hard and impatient. “Real good.”

  Chapter 14

  Vince let her come down for a minute or more; then Kim sat back to meet his eyes. Secretly she hoped he might kiss her. Reward her even, a touch of sweetness in exchange for her giving in. Because that was what this had felt like—something she’d submitted to. But it was a dangerous thing to crave, something as romantic as a kiss. An ill-advised trick of the orgasm. In any case, he didn’t give it to her. He gave her words instead, gruff as those fingers had been against her clit.

  “Hands and knees,” he ordered.

  Dizzy from the orgasm, she obeyed without thought.

  “Legs together.” Impatient hands urged her to draw them flush. She felt the fronts of his thighs against the backs of hers as he straddled her calves; then that thick cock was easing along the length of her sex.

  There was friction at first, but by the third slow thrust he was gliding, slick from her. As hot as the friction were his hands—one clamped to her hip, holding her still, the other at her mound, guiding his cock and keeping it pressed tight along her lips. With every stroke the blunt ridge of his
crown taunted her clit. The lack of penetration didn’t matter anymore. Nothing could ever be as explicit as this, no physical intrusion as intimate and dirty and intense as what he was giving her.

  Beyond the friction was the sound of him—harsh breaths and grunts, shameless moans and guttural groans. She heard their bodies, too, just as she’d imagined. Slapping skin, bumping flesh.

  It was both that sealed her fate—the contact and the ferocity. It was this man, feeling so perfectly essential. Like this was what his body had been created to do. All her resistance was burned up, and as another orgasm began to blossom, she teased it out. She echoed his motions with her own, making the sex rougher, faster, needier. More of everything she felt from him, mirrored by her own body, doubled. It wasn’t lost on him.

  “Do it,” he said, voice as tight as the hand clamped to her hip. “Take it.”

  Take his cock, or her pleasure? Fuck, whichever. Both. The excitement solidified, as physical as a muscle inside her, stroked by the relentless glide of his arousal. She imagined watching this, watching him sinking inside. Vince, above her, strong thighs spread wide between hers, thick cock claiming her. And that face. That mean, mischievous face . . .

  She craned her neck and caught a glimpse of those eyes, his parted lips, flushed skin. Arm taught and corded from the way the held her. The release was a tether snapping, a hard, honed ache quenched by a flood. Her arms shook. Her back arched. The pleasure turned excruciating as the orgasm crested, but Vince’s driving cock kept surging.

  A choked “Oh” told her he was close. God yes—after all this pushiness, nothing excited her more than the promise of his losing control.

  “You look good,” he growled. Straight-up growled. “You look so fucking good.” He palmed her ass, the touch shaky, hips pounding. “Yes. Fuck, baby. Please.”

  Please. Like she was doing this to him, not the other way around.

  Maybe I am. The idea electrified her.

  His excitement came to a head with a harsh suck of breath, then a moan, suppressed, hissing through gritted teeth. Those punishing hips locked. He released between her belly and his own cupping palm, and after three hot lashes, she felt him rubbing her skin—rubbing his come there in a slow, jagged circle. Crass and possessive.

  Like he’s marking me. That’d be just like him, and funny how the idea got her hot all over again.

  She turned over when he did, the two of them collapsing on their backs in unison. Kim straightened her glasses.

  Vince let out a happy huff of breath. “Fuck me, I needed that.”

  She could’ve been offended by how incidental the statement made her feel—as though this had all been as impersonal as a hot shower or home-cooked meal. But in truth, that was exactly what it needed to be. For Vince, a slaying of frustration, following whatever qualified as a dry spell in his world. For Kim, a bit of guilty rebound pleasure, plus a curiosity satisfied; maybe she could finally get a grip on reality, without the question mark of Vince’s body and sex hounding her common sense.

  So in the end, she simply said, “Me, too . . . Though I hope the entire motel didn’t hear.”

  “Your honor’s safe with me. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them we were rehearsing a play.”

  She whapped him limply on the chest and let her hand rest where it fell, liking the feel of his silent laughter jumping beneath her knuckles. Rough fingertips tickled her palm.

  “Don’t worry,” he said earnestly, turning to flash that little-boy’s smile across the covers at her. “We didn’t technically do it. We’re still virgins.”

  She snorted at that. “That’ll be news to my exes,” she said, and sat up. “And half the women in this town, if my player-radar hasn’t deceived me.” She found a dirty tee shirt she’d tossed in her open suitcase and wiped her belly. The bed creaked as Vince propped himself up to sitting in her periphery, and she awaited some crack that’d counter her man-slut jab.

  He surprised her, his voice soft and satisfied. “This was good. Really good.”

  She nodded. “Yeah.” She turned to meet his eyes. He’d made her come twice with absolutely zero instruction—no point pretending it hadn’t been exceptional. “For not-quite-actual sex, that might be the best sex I’ve ever had.”

  “Just the dry run,” he teased. “Wait till you get me for the real deal.”

  “Oh, aren’t we confident?”

  “Hey, I was here,” he said, waving his arms to encompass the bed. “If you want this to happen again even a tenth as bad as I do, we’ll be lovers by breakfast. If you don’t, better lock your windows, case I get ideas in the night.”

  Aren’t we lovers already? He hadn’t penetrated her, but come on. If nothing else ever happened between them, Vince would still cast all of her exes in shadows, this nonintercourse more indelible than any experience she’d had.

  And that’s insane. Surely it was a fluke—a by-product of how desperate this entire trip was feeling. And some kind of dark, petty, vengeful anger at Ryan for that patronizing phone call. It was all blown out of proportion, scaled up to match the size of this brash man’s body. If they did collide again before she went home, she might discover tonight was just a trick of the adrenaline. She almost wanted to end it right now, freeze and frame history’s most epic dry-humping and leave it at that.

  She studied him, that body so much more gorgeous than she’d let herself expect. Beautiful chest, hard stomach. The way he sat formed narrow rolls of skin at his bent waist, but little else. All muscle and tendon. Extraordinary. Who needed a gym membership when you could break rocks full-time?

  “Hate to love you and leave you,” Vince said as he swung his legs to the floor, “but I’d better relieve Nita on caregiver duty. Plus, I promised my brother a very overdue conversation.”

  She shrugged, faking the apathy she wished she felt.

  “But this is totally happening again,” he informed her, rising to pull on his shorts.

  “We’ll see,” Kim said casually, and snapped an elastic around her sex-mussed hair. She tugged fresh underwear up her legs. A bra, her lounge pants. She watched Vince dress in turn—jeans, belt, tee, holster, socks. All the blasé calm she was imitating, dressing in front of him as though it didn’t make her self-conscious . . . Vince didn’t fake that. He didn’t need to, not built the way he was. Plus, from what she’d come to know of Fortuity, he’d probably grown up skinny-dipping in the creek with all his shameless peers. An adolescence so far removed from Kim’s sheltered, snotty upbringing, they could’ve been from different planets. The acceptance of sexuality that she’d worked so hard to cultivate . . . surely as natural as breathing to Vince, or his brother or Miah or that Raina woman.

  Raina. Her stomach knotted again. A million dollars said Vince had fucked her, at some point or other. That made the back of Kim’s neck prickle—an ugly, hot sensation. For all his subtler faults, Ryan had never once made her doubt his devotion, never given her cause for jealousy. The emotion felt gross, like biting down on sand.

  Or was that guilt? After all, she’d broken up with Ryan two days ago, and she’d just gotten off with a near stranger—one she’d imagined getting off with from pretty much the moment she’d first seen him.

  “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, crossing her arms. “To meet Miah’s folks or whatever the plan is. Though I need to shoot in the morning.”

  “Perfect. I got shit to take care of first thing, too—inform my work I’m gonna need a few days off. Then my rendezvous with that Welch prick from Sunnyside. But I’ll find you in the afternoon.”

  “Cool.” Oh shit, what now? No way they were kissing good night, right? “See you then, I guess.”

  Boots laced, Vince came around the bed, grabbing his jacket and wallet off the floor. Exhibiting none of the cagey uncertainty Kim felt, he curled an arm around her waist and leaned down, just about purring against her throat. She flushed all over, fingers fisting his shirt without her say-so. Then the butt of her hand skimmed a hard leather strap, and
she pulled back, the mood broken.

  “Your holster weirds me out,” she told him.

  “I’ll leave it at home tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.”

  He leaned in and spoke right in her ear, every word vibrating with his energy. “See you real soon.” A nip of teeth, and he was going, shirt slipping from her hand as he strode to open the door, jacket in hand, body swallowed by the harsher light of the parking lot.

  Kim took a neglected breath and flopped back across the mattress, blinking at the ceiling.

  “See you.”

  • • •

  The earth out here was hard, the sky black like the bottomless pupil of a watching eye.

  Though the digging was brutal, the man had managed to get a good four feet down, four feet across. It was rough on his knees, with pebbles biting through his pants, and a blister on his palm had burst, dust stinging. His kingdom for a backhoe, if only discretion weren’t the name of the game.

  Though night had fallen and the temperature had dropped, he felt overheated, suffocated by his clothes and by the smells in the air—the dry clay scent of the dust, plus the terrible stink of those bones, so nauseatingly reminiscent of burned pork.

  With the last of them tumbled into their final resting place, he began sweeping the clods and dirt back over the heap, pebbles rattling against bone. There was no earthly reason anyone would think to look for them here . . . though the fact that anyone was looking for them at all was worrisome. But it’d pass. This soul would go quietly forgotten in the ground. It sounded kind of peaceful, actually.

  The man’s phone made a twinkly noise from his breast pocket, and he reached for it with grimy fingers.

  Shit.

  Just a glance at the area code and he felt the sour stress sweat prickling the back of his neck. He hit TALK with a shaking finger. “Hello?”

  “Color me shocked,” said a raspy, too-familiar voice. “I didn’t expect you to answer. We were beginning to wonder if you’d rather conveniently misplaced your phone.” A call from the top dog among his creditors was never good—the woman wouldn’t dial a debtor directly unless she was growing impatient. Very impatient.