Outlaw Cowboy

by Nicole Helm

  He cursed under his breath as he got back into his truck. It was wrong. Wrong. She shouldn’t have to live like that because she had a bastard of a father. And it had been wrong to let the thing with Tyler make him forget that.

  If it came down to it, he’d just have to explain to Tyler that Delia’s presence wasn’t anything that would threaten the lease. He would explain, rationally, that he was being the good guy here.

  Mostly, he’d just be careful and hope it didn’t come to that. Besides, if he kept himself so busy trying to make everything right, maybe he wouldn’t give himself a chance to screw it up.

  Or you just really, really, really want to have sex.

  Well, he couldn’t rule that totally out.

  He bumped across the yard between the house and the cabin. The world was completely dark now, except for the stars and the hint of moon behind a wispy cloud. The cabin was a dark shadow against the velvety air of night.

  He stepped out of the truck and gathered the supplies he’d collected. It was cold without a shirt on under his coat. It was cold, period. Cold and dark and silent, and inside that cabin was a woman who was none of those things.

  He took a moment to breathe in and out. It felt like something else entirely waited on the other side of that door. A different road than he’d been on. It might not have been in the forefront of his mind the past two years, but for a long time there his life had purposefully not intersected with Delia’s.

  And now, if he walked through that door, he was very purposefully intersecting. He could still turn around. He didn’t have to do this.

  His brain told him that. Everything else in him moved for the door, turned the knob, and opened it.

  The room was dark, so he put down the food he’d packed into a little cooler and used that free hand to flip on the flashlight he’d brought.

  He trained it on the couch, and she was still sitting there, the blanket pulled around her shoulders. He did a quick check to make sure her shirt was still on the floor next to his. Hallelujah. He hadn’t totally screwed this chance yet.

  “I’m going to start a fire.”

  She made a yawning noise—exaggerated, he hoped. “I’m going to fall asleep and pretend I never invited you in to be a raving disappointment.”

  He used the flashlight to check the chimney flue. Satisfied with the state of the chimney, he set the logs in the hearth. “Then why didn’t you get dressed?”

  She was silent in response, which made him smile as he fiddled with getting the fire started. Once it was satisfyingly crackling to life, he brushed off his hands and turned to face her, still crouched down by the stone some ancestor of his had laid.

  In the low, flickering light, he could just barely make her out, sitting on the couch, looking completely unimpressed with him.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She scowled. “Are you serious?”

  The fact that she was getting irritated by his stall tactics made them that much more enjoyable. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d good-naturedly messed with someone. “Maybe I’m trying to build your strength.”

  She rolled her eyes. “How about this…” She got to her feet and slowly let the edges of the blanket fall through her fingers, and then to the ground, which eradicated any desire to make her eat right now. Eating could wait until they were both as pants-less as they were shirtless and exhausted from finally doing this crazy thing they shouldn’t do.

  Why not? Why the hell not?

  “I’m going to walk into that room. I’m going to take off all of my clothes. I will give you approximately two minutes to join me, and if you do not, I’ll take care of myself.”

  He didn’t make a move—mostly because he was trying to process the two parts of that sentence: her naked and taking care of anything…and the fact that she was talking about his deceased grandfather’s bedroom.

  “There is something not right about you, Caleb,” she muttered, stalking toward the room in the back. But when she tried to walk past him, he managed to kick his brain into gear, and his hand closed over her ankle.

  She glared down at him, so he smiled up at her, still crouched near the warmth of the slowly building fire. The upward curve of his mouth felt foreign, intoxicating. When was the last time he’d smiled at a woman, charmed a woman, without alcohol pumping through his blood, helping him forget who he was?

  He didn’t want to forget who he was with Delia. He wanted to make himself better. So he stroked a finger up the surprisingly narrow ankle and kept smiling. “Don’t go in there.”

  “Dear Lord, Caleb, if you don’t want to have sex with me, don’t have sex with me. Putting it off—”

  He released her leg, but not long enough for her to get away, only long enough so he could get his arms around her waist, pull her down, and mostly gently pin her beneath him.

  “What the fu—”

  He grabbed each wrist as she tried to hit him, keeping her legs still by clamping them tight between his knees. “Say that again.”

  “Say what again?”

  He tugged her hand toward his straining erection, releasing one hand so he could pry the fingers of the other out of the fist she held them in. “Say the part about me not wanting to have sex with you.” He pressed her palm to him then, because he didn’t trust his words to show her just how wrong she was.

  Everything about her stopped fighting, so he released her completely. If she wanted to, she could escape from in between his knees. She could end this right here.

  Of course, he knew she wouldn’t.

  “I…” Her finger traced the length of his erection, and he bit back a groan when she licked her lips. “Okay, so I miscalculated,” she said with an ineffective shrug.

  “Big time.”

  “I can give you compliments about your size later. Why don’t you put yourself to work?”

  He pulled over the blanket she’d dropped, laying it close enough to the fire to keep them warm, but far enough away for safety. Then he got to his feet and began to pull off his boots.

  Delia crossed her arms behind her head. “Now, this is a delay I can get behind. When you get to the pants, take it real slow.”

  He shook his head as he got his feet free of boots and socks. Then, because the ground was awfully hard and cold, even with the fire going, he grabbed another blanket off the couch and laid it over the first, then plopped a pillow at the top. “Get on the blanket.”

  “I have never seen a guy put so much unnecessary work into getting laid.” But, only somewhat grudgingly, she scooted onto the makeshift bed.

  “Well, you’ve slept with a lot of the wrong kind of guy.” Not that he was the right kind. With anyone else…he wasn’t sure any of this would have gone down this way. No, it’d probably be done and over, but if he was going to cross this line he’d promised himself he wasn’t going to cross, he was at the very least going to do it right.

  The firelight made her skin glow like the mountains at sunset, and he wanted to take the time to appreciate that. Remember it. So, he did make the removal of his pants as slow as he could manage, but the way she bit her lip and let her fingertips trail across her breasts sped it up a little bit.

  “Are you going to get down here and get this show on the road or what?”

  “You, Delia, need to work on your patience.”

  “I prefer to get my mistakes over with quickly. Like taking off a Band-Aid or drinking a shot.”

  Something about that didn’t sit right. The word mistake. Oh, he knew it probably wasn’t a great idea, but he wasn’t going to speed through it. And he wasn’t going to have her wishing she hadn’t been with him.

  So he did exactly what she asked. Got down there, covered her body with his, let that electric shock of being skin to skin settle through him. It took great effort to look her in the eye, but he made himself do it. “I’m not going to d
o this with you if you’re going to view it as a mistake.”

  “Stop being so…noble about it!” She pushed him, but just enough so she could get her hands to the snap of her jeans. “Just fuck me, okay?” She started pushing the pants over her hips, mumbling about him being an idiot. “All I want is an orgasm. The rest you can shut up about.”

  It had worked well enough earlier in the evening, so he grasped her chin again, with a little more force than necessary, but everything about this was…forceful. Important. Weighty. “If that’s all it’s going to be, we would have done it a long-ass time ago.” And then he crushed his mouth to hers, because for all his grand proclamations, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could breathe without being inside of her.

  * * *

  She tried to get her pants off, but Caleb’s kiss was doing a lot to make her hands not quite listen to her brain. She wanted to feel every inch of him. Currently, her hands were busy smoothing over and then grabbing his tight ass as she arched against him.

  It was not the most seductive she’d ever been, but it didn’t seem to matter. For all his fire-starting and food-suggesting, the wall of that control seemed to have broken. His mouth claimed hers—lips, tongue, teeth—and his hand, in some amazing feat of dude-about-to-have-sex contortion, managed to slide under the half-undone zipper of her pants and the hem of her underwear.

  She wasn’t cold any longer. She wasn’t even sure she remembered what cold felt like. She was all liquid heat—hell, even her bones felt something less than solid. She’d spent her life being an impenetrable wall. A protector. A savior.

  It was such a release to let that go. To drown in desire, in something she’d wanted and denied herself far too long.

  When his finger slid inside her, she was convinced she saw stars. She’d love to blame that on a sex drought, an emotional breakdown, or a million other things, but she knew, as much as she didn’t want to admit it, that Caleb was different. Because if he wasn’t, he was right—they would have done this a long time ago.

  His mouth left hers, and she tried to stifle the protest, but it didn’t quite work out. The groan that escaped her mouth was nothing if not protest.

  Luckily he was immediately tugging at her pants, taking her underwear with them over her hips. At this point, she was pretty sure she could lie here naked for close to eternity and remain warm.

  Once he’d divested her of all her clothes, he smiled down at her, and her heart did that weird, extra-thump thing it did whenever the corners of his mouth curved upward, whenever he seemed happy or pleased, and somehow the twin emotion surged from her heart.

  Oh, he was such a problem, but he kept touching her, smiling at her, and she couldn’t muster the concern to do anything about it. Not when his hands resting at her waist slid up over her rib cage. She could forget her name if he kept touching her like that, gentle but with the scrape of work-hardened hands, reverent but possessive.

  As a woman who’d spent her life feeling like nothing really belonged to her, that nothing could stay or be hers, she couldn’t mind being possessed. It meant more care than she’d ever been offered.

  The fact that her eyes were burning was sign enough there could be no more of this lazy touching. “I left the condom on the cou—”

  “I won’t be needing that yet.”

  “But—”

  He kissed her shoulder, between her breasts, down her stomach. His lips were soft, featherlight brushes, and her skin relished the attention. Every tension she’d been holding on to released into this.

  He laughed against her hip bone, and she had to fight the urge to arch up, to find his mouth. All she could think about was the tight coil of pleasure building inside of her unwinding. Unfurling.

  “Remember that thing I said about patience?” he murmured, running a fingertip along her thigh before grasping her leg and leveraging it over his shoulder.

  She squirmed, trying to get him to move a little faster. She was tired of talking, thinking, and worst of all, feeling anything in her heart. All she wanted was doing. “Remember that thing I said about an orgasm?”

  His eyes met hers. “One isn’t very ambitious, is it?”

  She didn’t want to smile back at him or laugh or let him think that he had the upper hand here, because…she didn’t even know why. He had all the power—or it felt like she had none—and for the first time, she didn’t care. Let him have the power and do the work. If it brought her pleasure, if it gave her over to physical feeling, so be it.

  He held the one leg over his shoulder and ran his palm up the other, moving up her inner thigh with lingering kisses. A lick so she’d sigh, then a nip so she’d squeak. She could all but feel his cocky grin against her leg, and then her.

  When his tongue touched center, she nearly leaped off the blanket, but his hand clamped on her hip and held her to the ground, which somehow made everything even more…more. She couldn’t move, couldn’t squirm, and yet he seemed to know exactly where to go. No leading or nudging needed—Caleb found all the right spots.

  She tried to use the blanket as some kind of anchor, twisting her fist into it as Caleb’s mouth tortured her closer and closer to release, always pausing right before she’d fall off the edge. But even with him clamping her in place on the floor, she needed something more to hold on to.

  She needed him to hold on to, and once her fingers threaded through his hair and not-so-gently tugged, he didn’t stop until the orgasm waved through her, a crashing storm of intense pleasure.

  Good. Lord.

  He kissed her inner thigh again, then her stomach, and she just barely managed to untwine her fingers from his hair. He moved up her body until he was holding himself above her, a very, very self-satisfied grin on his face.

  “All right. Where’s the condom?” he said, only a little breathlessly.

  She ran her fingers over the curve of the bicep currently holding him above her. Happily sated, she could trace the lines of his body in the flickering firelight for much longer than she’d ever wanted to spend with anyone naked. Sex could be great, but the in-betweens, the quiet moments, those she’d never been fond of.

  It was no shock that it was different with Caleb. She could be naked and satisfied and not need to rush to the next moment. Everything would always be different with him. Scary, but not shocking. It simply was.

  “Delia.”

  She should answer him. Instead her fingertips drew down his chest, following the trail of fine blond hair to a very impressive erection. Still using only her fingertip, she trailed down the length of it.

  He still held himself above her, but the locked arms bent when she closed her hands over him. Like by touching him she’d stolen some of that strength that kept him off of her.

  His chest just barely brushed hers, and she could feel his breath on her neck, hear the sharp intake of it near her ear. “I want to be inside you. I want to feel how wet you are. I want to hear you whimper my name when I make you come again. So, I would suggest divulging the location of that condom if you’d like any of that to happen.”

  “O-on the couch,” she said on what sounded way too close to a gasp. Holy crap he was good at the dirty talk.

  He pushed to his feet and walked over to the couch.

  “You have such a nice ass. It’s a shame you don’t show it off more.”

  He plucked the condom off the couch and gave her a doleful look. “I don’t think Summer would appreciate me walking around in assless chaps.”

  She snorted out a laugh and hated the way it got stuck somewhere around her heart. Sex was not laughter and comfort and orgasms. Damn him.

  He tore the foil, gaze never leaving hers. She could not say the same, because her gaze dropped to watch him roll the condom on the long, hard length of him. Another dreamy sigh she couldn’t stifle escaped her mouth.

  He stood there like some kind of… She couldn’t de
scribe it. She’d been with arrogant, cocky men before. Who thought their dick was God’s gift…to them. There was something about Caleb that was self-assured and so damn certain of his gorgeousness and sexual prowess, but it was different. It didn’t feel like he couldn’t see beyond the end of his own penis—it was like they were equal partners in this. And for as much as he enjoyed her ogling him or touching him or fucking him, he enjoyed her pleasure just as much.

  Or she was desperate. She wasn’t worried about deciding which when he tugged her up into a sitting position.

  “It’s my turn to watch you do all the work,” he said, maneuvering her so he could lay on his back where she’d been.

  She smirked down at him. “That so?”

  He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Work away.”

  Oh, he thought he was so handsome and clever, and despite the fact that it was true, two could play at that game.

  She straddled him, planting her hands on either side of his head so her breasts were very close to his face, and though he tried ever-so-valiantly to keep his gaze on hers, she saw when it faltered.

  “Tsk. Tsk,” she murmured, leaning down until her hair touched his face, until she could brush her lips across the scruff of his cheek and then sink her teeth into his earlobe. “My eyes are up here.”

  “I’ll look at your eyes all day if you wear a shirt. For now?” His hands covered her breasts, thumbs brushing across her nipples until she moaned and pressed against him. “I want to be inside you, Delia.”

  “You’re forgetting the magic word.”

  “The magic word better be ‘now.’”

  She’d lost track of how many times she’d wanted to laugh, and now was not the time to think of that or anything else. He wanted to be inside her now, and that’s what she wanted too.

  She reached between them and directed him to the apex of her thighs, lowering herself slowly until he was fully inside of her, complete. His hands held her hips still.

  The tendons in his neck strained, and she went with her impulse to lean forward and run her tongue along one.