by Vivien Vale
“Avery,” Jack grunts suddenly, staring at my pussy with intense concentration.
“Yes, Jack?”
“Stop fucking grinding against me,” he says, his voice hoarse.
I look down, my mouth falling open into a soft little O as I watch my hips moving my cunt against his fingers wantonly.
When our eyes meet again, I look coyly embarrassed. Jack looks vindicated and smug.
“Please?” I ask him. “Just…just a little one.”
Jack snorts again, but I swear—somewhere beneath that scraggly beard of his, a smile forms.
“Fine,” he relents. “Can’t fucking say no to you.”
Jack rises, his fingers slipping upwards to my clit as he does. The combination of my wetness, his cum, the healing salve, and the throbbing of my clit makes it hard for him to pin it down. Instead, he traps it between two fingers, stroking it up and down like he’s petting me.
In return, I close my eyes, and I fucking purr.
“No,” Jack grunts, winding a fist in my hair and pulling me tight. He leans in close to me, his forehead resting against mine. “Fucking look. Look at me, Avery. You’re gonna fucking look at me when you come.”
I gasp. My hips thrash. This man—this rugged, gorgeous, terrible fucking bastard of a man—can make me come at will now, apparently.
My pussy clenches, throbs, and keeps clenching. My breaths each come rougher and more ragged than the last.
But I look at him while I do it. I look into those deep black eyes the entire time, and reflected in them, I see my own.
My voice rises to a shrill little shriek when the orgasm mounts to its highest point, and Jack traps the scream between our lips in a hard, tongue-locked kiss.
He leaves me panting, breathless, and trembling when he’s finished with me. I sit there on the counter, staring at him in ragged disbelief, and he stands back, sucking his cunt-soaked fingers into his mouth and looking proud of himself.
“Boof!” says Buck, trotting out of the kitchen and going in to sleep by the fire instead.
Poor guy. Probably couldn’t figure out why no one was paying any attention to him. I’ll have to go give him some apology belly rubs soon.
“Dishes?” he suggests, raising an eyebrow.
As he does it, I watch one of his bulging pectorals twitch with it.
“Yeah.” I laugh, winded and overwhelmed. “I think a little washing up might do me good.”
Chapter 27
Jack
I watch her curled up on the couch, her fingers still curled in Buck’s shaggy black hair. She looks like an angel.
Her blonde hair is half covering her face. Her chest heaves in and out a little in a steady rhythm, confirming she’s asleep.
Part of me wants to just stay here and watch her, make sure nothing is going to happen to her and be here when she wakes up.
But there’s a dead fucking bear out there, with fucking good fur to be carried back to the cabin and skinned. I didn’t feel good about killing that bear, even if I had to do it.
Best make the most of its death, then.
The longer I’ve thought about this, the more I’m warming to the idea. It will be a surprise for her. And the best part will be that I’m the one who fucking made it.
What better time to go and get the dead beast than now. Avery’s asleep, and by the looks of her, won’t be waking for a while. I guess she’s still getting over the injuries from the car crash, not to mention some of our wild sex antics.
Before I go though, I tiptoe over to her and lean down to give her a gentle kiss on those delicious lips.
She purrs when our mouths meet, but stays asleep.
Fuck. It takes all my inner strength and willpower to drag myself away. Now that I’m this fucking close to her, I just want to lie down next to her and watch her sleep.
Then Buck snores, long and loud, and I’m reminded of what I’m wanting to do today.
Come on Jack, the fucking rug won’t get made if you lounge around here all fucking day.
At the door, I grab my coat and throw one last longing look at my diamond.
Outside I grab my axe and some rope.
The rope is to strap the bear to me and the axe in case I meet some other wild animal that’s gotten to my kill first. Chances of this happening are pretty fucking slim, but you never know what might go down when you go out into the woods alone.
It’s not hard to retrace my steps to where I killed the bear. I know these woods better than the back of my own hand.
He’s exactly where I’ve left him, face down.
With this snowstorm, the last few days and the freezing temperature, he looks for all world as if he’s sleeping. I know fucking better.
I take a moment to stare at this skinny bear. Where was his mate?
It’s unusual for a bear to be out here on his own in the middle of winter. But from what I can tell, he was a loner.
Maybe his clan had turned him into an outcast.
“So my friend, what crime did you commit?” I ask him as I get ready to lift him up and throw him over my shoulder. “I bet you weren’t responsible for losing an entire fucking squad in a war zone, huh?”
Silence.
Instead of dragging him over the ice, I manage to hoist him onto my back. He’s rather light despite his size. I don’t want to damage the fur so it’s better that I carry him.
“You and I are alike, you know,” I continue my conversation with the silent beast. “We’re both outcasts. Only I’ve been lucky to meet someone, someone I really care for. Maybe if we hadn’t run into each other the other day you might have met someone too.”
The thought saddens me. Suddenly there it is again, the feeling I’m nothing better than a savage brute. I led my team to a total failure of a mission and certain death and then I go right ahead and kill an innocent beast.
Images of Avery being attacked by this very bear push other thoughts aside.
“Of course, if you hadn’t attacked my mate, I wouldn’t have had to kill you.”
I ponder my own words.
Maybe I’m not as bad I think I am. I didn’t kill the bear for sport. There are plenty of people who would have, but not me.
What a fucking joke. How can hunting be a sport?
You hunt because you need to eat. You kill because if you don’t, it’ll kill you first.
With all this navel gazing as I’m walking, I’m back at the cabin in no time at all.
Before I go and take the creature into my shed, I stop to check on Avery. She’s still asleep on the couch.
Carefully, I place the bear on my worktable.
It takes a lot of skill and craftsmanship to skin an animal like this. Sure, if you don’t want the skin or only bits of it, any old fool can butcher him, but if you want the skin in one piece you need to fucking know what you’re doing. And I want the skin in one fucking piece.
With the beast on his back, front paws stretched out, I go to the back wall of my shed.
I’ve got plenty of tools. I don’t own any of those fucking power tools men with small dicks own. I don’t need to compensate in that department.
No, I own real tools.
I’ve got every sort of tool you could want or need to build a cabin, kill an animal, skin it and sew it back together if you need to.
I’ve got tools most men would look at and go dumb at the sight of. When you come into my domain, you’re in tool fucking heaven.
Everything is hanging up and labeled. It’s in order, in my kind of order, and my eyes are now zeroing in on my four-inch flexi-blade knife. The smaller knife means I’ll have more control over what I’m doing, even if it means the whole job will take a little longer than if I were to use a bigger one.
I want to make absolutely fucking sure I get the skin in one fucking piece.
Like a surgeon, I prepare my patient.
As I examine the creature on its back in front of me, I see Avery’s naked body in my mind. She’s so delicate I still ca
n’t believe she lets me anywhere near her.
Every time I touch her I fear I might break something. I’m much more comfortable touching this bear here on my table, knowing I can’t do him any more harm.
There’s nothing fucking fragile about a bear. But Avery, her arms are thin and made of porcelain. So is her neck.
Christ, her swan-like neck is the most delicate part of all. When my fingers stroke her, I’m afraid I might bruise her.
Come on Jack, you need to concentrate on the fucking job ahead of you. If you daydream about skinning the animal, it’ll never happen.
Chop-chop, don’t stop.
I take a deep breath and go to my starting point.
The first cut is made on each paw toward the neck. Next, I slice my knife from the neck right down the center to the tail. And now I work my way toward the outside.
It’s slow work and it’s fucking hard work. Around the skull I have to exercise extra caution. The fur is thin in this area and cuts will show real easy.
At the claws, I pause. I need to make a fucking decision. I’ve got the choice of working around the claws, pulling them out with pliers and stitching them back in, or I can forget ‘em completely.
I stop and think. Does it matter?
In the end, I opt for no claws. Nothing that fucking Avery can find some way to accidentally hurt herself on.
The next tricky areas are the ears and the nose of the bear. I slow right down. By now, my back’s aching a little from bending over.
I straighten up and examine my handy work so far. I can already picture Avery’s face when I present her with it.
A present for my prize.
My eyes stray to the rear of the shed where I’ve got a dead deer waiting to be skinned as well. If Avery stays asleep, I might get both animals skinned today.
The skinning is only the first part of course. Next, I’ll need to coat the skin with salt to dry it out.
Coating the skin in salt…
Now that’s a thought. Now that I’ve got Avery all to myself, I picture coating her body in…something. Not salt.
What would I coat her in? Molten chocolate. If I coated her with molten chocolate, I would need to lick it all off, every last drop.
This woman must have cast some kind of spell over me. It isn’t like me at all to be thinking along these lines.
Whatever the fuck Avery is doing to me, I don’t think it’s doing me any harm.
But how long will it last?
Will the magic wear off and she’ll get sick of me and living up here in the mountains?
Now I’m even starting to think long fucking term. I know there’s definitely something wrong with me.
It is only day five with Avery and I’m acting as if we’re going to get fucking married.
Fuck.
With my inattention, I’ve slipped off the skin and cut my finger. Blood drips out and I curse some more.
Better stop all this fucking thinking, Jack, and keep your mind on the fucking job.
Chapter 28
Avery
I wake up all curled up on the couch Jack first laid me on when he rescued me from my car crash. My body doesn’t ache like it did that first time I woke up here. Actually, it feels pretty nice. Like my legs are made of jiggly, wobbly Jell-O and my pussy is made of whipped cream.
Before Jack, I never thought about my pussy this much in my life. Now, I can’t get my freaking mind off of it. Pussy, pussy, pussy—that’s all I ever seem to talk about anymore.
Maybe it’s because when Jack’s around, my previously dormant pussy is just plain loud. Jack will say something—something totally innocuous, even—and my clit will jump to attention like it’s been trained to the sound of his voice.
That man could tell me, “Come,” and I’d be too busy moaning to ask, “How many times?”
He’s saved me from certain death twice now. Stopped me from doing something that would end up with me getting myself killed several times more. He’s fed me off his own rations, washed the smoke and oil off my body, laid me to sleep in his bed…
He’s done things to me that only a husband is supposed to do. But the man who was supposed to be my husband is a fraud and a traitor, and Jack…Jack is good. He’s got some idiotic notion that he’s anything but—I can see it, feel it—but he’s wrong.
I feel like I was surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves before Jack scooped me up in his big, burly arms. Men who only wanted to shuffle me around for the sake of their own power and position. Hungry women who wanted to eat me alive.
Now that I’ve given myself to this huge, shaggy bear of a man, I’ve never felt safer in my whole life.
Suddenly, I know exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life when I leave this mountain: nothing. Because I never want to leave at all.
Maybe it’s naive. I keep telling myself that I’m not an idiotic little girl anymore, but I know how it must sound. The fantasy of it is so enthralling that I find myself lost in it, though.
Jack has been out here for a decade. He’s off the grid—off the everything—and knows this mountain like the shrapnel scars on his chest. He’s almost completely self-sufficient by my standards—only needs to go into town once every few months for a few necessities like toiletries and a little food.
There’s no reason that on one of those trips, we couldn’t pick up a marriage license and pop into a little church—or, hell, we don’t even need to get married. Maybe it would be better that way. I could just fade out of existence and into Jack’s arms. Give him a whole bunch of little mountain babies—more than he can count.
Adam would never find me here. Neither would my father. And I would never—never ever ever ever—have to sit through another boring freaking state dinner ever again.
It’s a nice fantasy.
One that I don’t quite want to let go of yet.
I never imagined being anyone’s wife in the way that I suddenly want to be Jack’s wife. In my world, wives start getting Botox at twenty-five and breast implants immediately after giving birth to the obligatory 2.5 children. In my world, wives are expected to look pretty, dress perfectly, entertain the French ambassador’s wife with vapid small talk while the husbands do business over wine and dessert, and look hurt but supportive as they stand by their man while he apologizes for his inevitable sex scandal.
In Jack’s world, that’s all out the door.
I look around the cabin, trying to imagine my role in this newly imagined life.
It’s a beautiful cabin. Maybe a little dirty, but gorgeously built.
Cleaning…that’s it! What this place needs is a good cleaning.
It takes me a little bit to gather supplies. Truth be told, I’ve never even cleaned my room before. We had maids for that. But eventually, I’ve got the soot cleaned off the mirror in the foyer and the corners cleared of cobwebs.
I’ll have to see if Jack has any little red bandannas I can tie my hair back with. Once spring comes, I like the idea of giving these floors a nice, hard scrub. I know it sounds stupid, but I actually feel good about doing the work. For the first time in my life, I’m actually feeling useful. It’s quite a satisfying change.
But once that’s done…well. You know what they say about idle hands…
I know I’m being bad. I’m not an idiot, even though I know I act like one from time to time. I move up to Jack’s bedroom under the guise of cleaning, but I know good and well what this really is.
Snooping. I’m snooping around Jack’s house like a hungry dog sniffing out treats.
The back of his closet is surprisingly barren, save for Buck, who’s curled up inside gnawing on one of Jack’s boots and bolts when he gets caught.
Jack is the ultimate minimalist. I don’t even find any dirty magazines or questionable VHS tapes beneath Jack’s mattress.
Everything he owns seems to have a purpose. No sentimentality. No useless junk. A place for everything, and everything has its place. Even his military medals are exactly where J
ack wants them: tucked away beneath his wool socks, out of sight and out of mind.
But then, I try the bottom drawer of his dresser.
It sticks in place the first time I try to yank it out. But when I leverage all of my meager weight on it—and pay the price by tumbling backward as a result—finally, it gives.
The drawer doesn’t contain much. Jack’s old high school yearbooks—I do a quick flip through to look for him, but he went to one of those massive schools, and without even realizing it, I haven’t bothered to get his last name. I delve deeper and bring up a gorgeous wooden box, latched but not locked.
I know just holding it in my hands that Jack made this box.
What I couldn’t have possibly expected was what it contains within.
A photo album. Not pictures like the ones from his military days that need to be hidden way—no, this book has remained closed and unintentionally forgotten for a good long time. I blow the dust off it and nearly knock myself backward with the force of the sneeze that follows.
But then I open it, and the first picture inside nearly knocks me backward of its own accord.
There’s Jack—just a young man, fresh-faced and beardless in a brand-new uniform. He looks about as old in this picture as I am now. The man and woman standing behind him must be his mother and father. Their faces aren’t familiar to me, but they’re a handsome couple. They look like lovely people.
Lovely in-laws, maybe, the greedy voice in the back of my head sing-songs.
Shut up, I pout, like it’s teasing me for being so silly.
When my eyes land on the second half of the photograph, though, not even the greedy little voice in the back of my head has anything to say.
My parents. My parents are in this picture. There’s Mommy in her demure pencil skirt and blazer. Daddy in his power suit. And there at their legs, grinning up her best toothpaste ad grin, is…me. Just a little kid—little enough that I hardly remember this photo being taken.
There’s a caption beneath the photo, too. It’s the caption that really does me in.
Oh no.
Oh no.
