Drunk on You

by Teri Anne Stanley

  Allie took a moment to appreciate the pine forest that surrounded the long drive into the campground. Whatever happened, right now it was still all good.

  “Are you okay?” Justin asked. “You’re awfully quiet. What did Merilee have to say on your walk to the garage?”

  She didn’t want to wreck the evening by telling him that the evil queen was still interested in him, so she just said, “I’m still processing. Nothing there we can take to the bank at the moment.”

  “Really.” He sounded surprised.

  A few yards inside the entrance to the camping area, a doe meandered out of the pitch-black night onto the road, its eyes glowing in the headlights. Allie, already driving slowly, hit the brakes until it decided to move along, up a little gravel side road that led to the parking area for a hiking trail. A buck followed without even glancing their way.

  “He thinks he’s gonna get lucky.” Justin’s chuckle stroked over Allie’s skin. She was that sensitized, that tuned into his frequencies—every sound and motion, every glance, sent hormones coursing through her body.

  She looked at Justin, and back at the road where the deer had gone. Then she turned and looked at the rear seat of the SUV. “You know, we haven’t done it in a car yet.”

  “Allie, the camper’s just about a quarter of a mile farther up the road,” he said as she turned onto the little gravel road up to a picnic area at a trailhead.

  She shot him a smile. “Bucket list. I’m starting one right now. This is on it.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” He shifted in his seat.

  She looked, and by the dashboard light she saw paradise trying to shove its way out of Justin’s jeans.

  She tucked the SUV as far back in a corner of the parking lot as she could.

  “Aren’t you worried that the psycho killer with the hook hand is going to show up?”

  She unbuckled her seatbelt. “I have the greatest recruit in the history of the Marine Corps here to protect me,” she said.

  “I have a feeling I’m going to be a little distracted,” Justin said.

  “Race you to the backseat,” she said.

  It took a couple of minutes to find the flippy thing to lay the seat flat, and by the time they scrambled into the back end of the car, both were laughing, and the urgency of the moment had passed.

  But then Justin pulled Allie down next to him and turned on his side, facing her, with his head resting on his fist.

  “I’m glad you blackmailed me into coming on this trip,” he said, tracing the line of the arm she’d slung over his waist and making her shiver.

  “And I’m glad you’re a bleeding heart who donated all of your savings to Operation Homefront, so you needed money.”

  He jerked, his surprise evident. “How did you know?”

  She shrugged. “I saw the thank-you note.”

  He leaned a little closer, and she felt his warm breath against the top of her head. “I’ve got a feeling you already know all my secrets.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She stroked her hand up his side, then back down, sliding under his shirt, feeling him quiver at her touch.

  “So you should probably tell me one of yours,” he said, running his teeth along her neck.

  He didn’t need to know what a fool she’d been when she was younger, but she could give him this much. It was the partial truth. “I had a sex dream about you in high school.”

  He groaned. “You didn’t.”

  She laughed. “Are you shocked?”

  “I feel kind of dirty.”

  “Want to hear it?”

  “Hells yeah!”

  “It’s kind of lame. You came home on leave, and we went on a date.”

  “Really?” He pulled back and looked at her. “Tell me more.”

  “Dinner and a movie.”

  “What did we see?”

  “I don’t remember?”

  “Well, then, where did we eat?”

  “Do you want to get to the good stuff, or not?”

  “Fine. But if I’d been away, I’d have liked to go to Big Buds, down on Beaver Road.”

  “Okay, then that’s where we went. But then afterward, we took a drive down Ripple Run.” Where everyone from Crockett County went to make out. “Then, when you stopped the car, you did the old movie theater yawn and reach, so you could get your arm around me.”

  “I bet I made up constellations to point out to you so you had to lean your head closer to mine to see through the windshield.”

  He pulled her close, tilted her face up to his. In the darkness she felt his breath stutter, the coiled tension under his hot skin.

  “What constellations?” Whatever her dream had been about fled under this new, better, shared one.

  “You know. The usual. Copulous Major, and Vaginus Minor.”

  Snorting, she asked, “And then how would you get me to kiss you?”

  “I’m pretty sure that at that point, you’d have been all over me,” he said, leaning back and pulling her with him.

  And so she was. She bent to kiss him and licked between his lips, met by his tongue, stroking and licking. She gasped as he nipped at her lower lip and then soothed it with his tongue, sucking it into his mouth and letting go.

  She was restless, her lower body arching toward his, and she moved her legs so that one of his was between hers. She pressed her aching core against his hard thigh, running her hands over his chest, toying with his nipples through the soft cotton of the T-shirt as he groaned.

  “I think I probably needed to explore you,” she said. “I was dying for you to feel me up, see if a big, experienced man was any better at it than—”

  “I don’t want to know,” he growled, and didn’t that just make her clench a little bit around his thigh.

  “But I was too anxious to see what you looked like under your uniform.” She sat up and straddled him, stroking herself against his erection through the layers of clothing between them. She pushed up his shirt while he lay back, arms behind his head, watching through glittering eyes.

  She stroked down his chest, from his collarbone, over his pecs, pausing at his nipples, leaning in to take each one in her mouth for a moment, loving the little helpless sounds he made. Then she moved to the center of his chest, kissing the place where his ribs met, moving lower.

  “Oh, hell,” he muttered.

  “I’d never been this far with a guy before,” she said, running her fingers through the line of hair leading to his waistband, kissing his belly button, reaching for the button on his jeans. “Oh, my,” she said, pressing down on the hard line of his cock, finding the contours through denim.

  She was drunk with arousal, completely focused on his body, imagining them ten years ago, but right there, right now, with him in her hands.

  Unzipping his jeans, she pushed the fabric out the way and freed his erection, hearing him sigh as she stroked him, loving the feel of silky skin stretched over hard flesh. She moved back, scooting down his legs, pulling his jeans to the top of his brace.

  Then she had room to work. She leaned down, nuzzling him, breathing in the musky scent of his body, feeling the way his stomach quivered when she spoke. “I was a little nervous about this part, because if I messed it up, you’d know what a novice I was. But did it anyway.” She licked him then, loving the taste of his arousal and the way he felt against her lips. She took him into her mouth, sliding him as deep as she could.

  “I’m pretty sure you couldn’t mess this up,” he said. “Jesus. Just seeing you there now—there’s no way I could have—” He moaned when she sucked and then stroked his balls, feeling them pull up toward his body. “Dammit, Allie, I’m close. And it’s your turn. If you don’t want—”

  In answer, she sucked harder, holding him steady as she moved over him, trying not to pull back when he hit the back of her throat, but not caring, just wanting to have him.

  “Oh, fuck!” Justin said. He was coming. Pulses jetted into her mouth, but then he was pulling away from her, telling her to
stop.

  She sat back, gasping, shocked, just as headlights swept the interior of the car.

  “Oh, shit.” She scrambled to help him pull himself together while turning around to…what? Try to look like they weren’t doing what they were doing?

  She peered through the window, making out the strip of lights on the top of the pickup truck that was now stopped a few yards from their car.

  She turned to Justin, who’d managed to get his pants up and zipped. “What should we do?”

  He shrugged. “Believe it or not, I’ve never been in this position,” he told her.

  “Never had sex in the back of a car?”

  “Never been busted having sex in the back of a car.”

  She laughed. “Well. At least that’s something I can say I have more experience with than you.”

  He waved his hands in front of his face. “No, don’t want to know!”

  He was determined not to know about other guys in her life. That made her feel pretty damned good. She’d wanted him for as long as she could remember; it was an amazing feeling to know he wanted her, too. For however long it lasted.

  “Okay, well, I think we should get out.”

  They both opened the doors on their respective sides of the car. The truck was parked on Allie’s side, so it was her face the park ranger hit first with the beam of his flashlight. He started to move it away and then came back to her, making her blink. Then he shone the light on Justin before aiming it out of their eyes.

  “You folks realize the park is closed after dark?” he said.

  “Um, sorry, sir,” Allie said. “We’re staying at the campground. We just, uh, saw a deer come up this way and we followed it…”

  “Um, yeah,” Justin offered, ever the helpful one. “To the backseat.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  By the time the emcee for the taste awards announced the Best New Product category, Allie had chewed off every fingernail she had and was eying Justin’s hands. Unfortunately, his nails were already trimmed down to the quick.

  “Here. Have some gum.” Justin handed her a pack of Juicy Fruit, and she tore into a piece, then carefully folded the wrapper and slid it under her plate. They’d gotten word when they arrived that morning that both Blue Mountain and Rainbow Dog had finaled in a couple of categories. Allie was through the roof.

  She wished Eve and Brandon would get here. They were supposed to come today while the older folks recovered from the cruise. At any rate, they would bear witness to her mother that she’d done something right.

  “Our last award before we have a brief intermission is the Best New Product for 2015,” the announcer said. Then images of each of the finalists were flashed on the screen behind the podium. Rainbow Dog was competing against a classic Kentucky bourbon; a vodka from, of all places, Mexico; and a rum. “And the best new product for 2015 isn’t even on the market yet. Blue Mountain’s Rainbow Dog!”

  Allie and Justin looked at each other in shock, then he stood up and pulled her to her feet, lifting her in the air and spinning her in an enthusiastic, if somewhat staggering, circle. As everyone clapped and cheered, he kissed her and dragged her toward the podium.

  He accepted the giant ice-cube-shaped trophy and pushed Allie toward the microphone.

  “Um…” she said, at a loss for words for probably the first time in her life. “I don’t know quite what to say.”

  She looked at Justin, but he wasn’t going to help her.

  Turning back to the audience, she said, simply, “I had this idea, and I told the family about it, but they all kind of patted me on the head and sent me on my way.”

  The audience tittered.

  “I told my brother, David, about it, in an email while he was serving in Afghanistan. And he wrote back and said, ‘Sneezy, it’s not what I would do, but I wouldn’t wear lipstick, either, and that seems to work for you.’”

  The crowd laughed.

  She sobered then and looked around for Justin. She grabbed his hand and continued. “David died a few days later, when his unit came under fire.” The audience was silent now. Justin squeezed her hand. She was grateful that he was with her or she probably wouldn’t have been able to talk at all.

  “I think most of my family would say that I’ve always been all guts and not enough rational thought, but I’m glad I listened to my intuition about Rainbow Dog and I think David would have been proud of me. Thanks.”

  To the sound of applause, she moved aside to give Justin a shot at the microphone, but he shook his head. “It’s all yours, babe,” he said.

  When the ceremony broke up for an intermission as they returned to their table, Allie and Justin were surrounded by well-wishers, although he pushed all the questions her way.

  But then he looked over her shoulder and said, “Don’t look now, but it’s about to be family hour.”

  She whipped her head around so fast she’d have a sore neck later. Sure enough, there was Lorena, followed by Eve a few paces behind. Her sister shot her a glance, but even with that advance warning, her mother’s gracious smile, her even, ladylike pace, her steady gaze, all screamed “Danger, Mommy’s pissed” to her daughters.

  No one else but Allie and Eve would have called it, but there was a storm brewing. Her stomach clenched, a wave of anxiety coating her insides.

  Lorena nodded to Allie, and then, almost as an afterthought, to Justin, as she pulled out her chair and sat. She crossed her elegant legs and turned the coffee cup at her place upright, and a waiter filled it immediately, as though he’d followed her from the door. He probably had.

  The awards ceremony started again before she had a chance to speak to her mom, and Allie clapped politely when everyone else did, but didn’t really pay too much attention to who won what.

  She had a big chance to make her name and launch Rainbow Dog, but how much rain was Lorena going to dump on her parade? Justin took her hand on the other side of the table, under the cover of the tablecloth, and rubbed his thumb over her knuckles, soothing her and yet making her hyperaware of how much her hands were sweating.

  When the waiter held the coffee carafe up in a silent question, she shook her head no. Even decaf would send her heart rate into the danger zone right now. She had a bad, bad feeling.

  The nominees for small batch bourbon of the year were announced, and Allie sat up, smiling along with her mother, Eve, and Justin. “And the winner is, another entry from Blue Mountain Bourbon—Sean McGrath’s Small Batch.”

  Lorena’s smile was frozen for only an instant, but it was enough for Allie to realize that she’d caught the “another entry” comment from the announcer. As far as Lorena knew, the only entry should have been Sean’s Small Batch. Bad enough Allie had brought Rainbow Dog for people to taste. But to dare put it in the competition? The shit was about to hit the fan.

  …

  After the awards were distributed and the final thank-yous were said, Justin followed the McGraths to the lobby for a press conference.

  They posed for a couple of photos for trade magazines and Kentucky news websites, and then a reporter asked Lorena the question of the day. “Blue Mountain Distilling has always been such a traditional bourbon-only distillery. What made you all decide to take the leap into the world of trendy drinks?”

  Lorena laughed, and if Justin didn’t know better, he’d think Allie’s mother didn’t have a care in the world. Unfortunately, Lorena could camouflage her anger and bring it out when one was least expecting it. Eve stepped back, eyes wide in alarm. “Well, it’s all been an interesting experiment, hasn’t it? You can be certain that the quality and tradition that Blue Mountain represents will be always first and foremost when you see the Blue Mountain name on a label.”

  Ouch. Allie flinched, just barely, but it was enough that he noticed and pulled her close. Lorena didn’t miss that, either. With the barest of raised eyebrows, she looked at him and turned away. Had he just been warned?

  Finally, the damned party was over and they were abl
e to leave. Justin gathered a copy of the program and the Rainbow Dog trophy, while Eve picked up the one for the Sean McGrath.

  The original plan had been for Allie and Eve to get ready for the fancy-ass dance while Justin and Brandon waited in the bar, but Brandon was nowhere to be seen. Repeated texts had gone unanswered.

  “Why didn’t Brandon come?” he asked Eve.

  “I don’t know,” Eve said. “Brandon jumped ship in Puerta Feo. And your folks went back to Blue Mountain to check on things.”

  If the look on Allie’s face reflected surprise, his own must have been the Google Images result for Shock and Awe. Brandon didn’t “jump ship.” Ever.

  He pulled out his phone again—he’d have to actually call. “Hey, I’m going to try to reach him. Can I catch up with you in a few?”

  “Sure. We’re gonna go to get Eve checked into her room now, okay?”

  He nodded and limped toward the bar. Before he called Brandon, he texted Merilee. Allie still hadn’t told him what went down between them last night, and he was itching to find out.

  Did you offer to invest in Rainbow?

  It only took a moment for her reply.

  Not exactly. Can you meet to talk about alternatives?

  Huh? What alternatives?

  Allie’s busy right now. What time?

  Not with Allie, just want to talk to you.

  What the hell? Not his decision. At all. But he supposed he’d better talk to her, find out what she had up her sleeve.

  He pulled out a barstool and thought about ordering a drink. He’d been sober for over a week now, but today seemed like a good day to break the habit.

  “Justinory.” He looked up to see Lorena bearing down on him. “I think we need to have a talk.”

  “What can I get you?” asked the bartender, putting a coaster and a bowl of peanuts on the bar.

  “Double shot of Cuervo Gold,” he said. If they’d had Rainbow Dog, he’d have ordered a pint.

  “Tequila?” Lorena asked, raising an eyebrow. To the bartender, she said, “Club soda with a lime.”

  “What can I do for you, Lorena?” Justin said. Funny. He’d never harbored animosity toward Allie’s mother before, even though he suspected she blamed him for Dave’s enlistment. Truth be told, it had been Dave’s idea. Justin had been bitching about his dad, about how much he didn’t want to work at Blue Mountain just because it was expected of him, and Dave had said, “So let’s do something else for a while. Something useful.”