Once again, a muscle twitched in Marc’s jaw. Women who stood up to him were rare. Women who bested him were even more unusual. He was glad that there wasn’t anyone else around to have witnessed the open defiance. He wasn’t used to anyone defying his wishes, and certainly not a woman.
Heated memories of having his arms wrapped around her shapely thighs and spreading her legs apart as he devoured her pussy came flooding back.
“I’d rather you didn’t. We’ve got some unfinished business.”
He saw a half-smile touch her lips. “Well, unfinished for you, maybe.”
He smiled at the comment. “Precisely. It’s a situation I’d like to amend.” He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and looked away. “Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”
Colleen looked away for a moment, and it was clear she was fighting to suppress a smile. She shrugged, and the loose fabric of her chemise and shirt allowed her breasts to tremble. The glowing ember of lust that had come to life within Marc suddenly blazed into a conflagration.
“You like things to be easy,” she said, her gaze meeting his directly. “You especially like your women to be easy. But I’m not like all those other women in your life.” Her grin was impish. “I suppose that’s an unpleasant surprise to you, but there it is.”
Colleen turned her back to him and went to the hayloft rope. It was used to carry large swathes of hay from the ground up to the hayloft by use of a pulley system, then by way of a trolley rail deeper into the barn.
“You keep taunting me like that and you’ll deserve a spanking.”
“And you’re just the man to give me one?” She issued a small laugh. “I’m a little old to be put over your knee.”
“My friend has to be looked in on,” Marc said, his boot heels thumping against the wooden floor of the hayloft as he advanced. Colleen was teasing him. Though he was grateful that she obviously wasn’t resentful of his previous evening’s seduction, it still rankled that she wasn’t taking him more seriously. “I have to speak to you alone. Therefore, I have no choice but to make sure that you’ll still be here when I return.” He looked at the rope and grinned. “And I know just how to keep you here.”
Colleen spun toward Marc as he advanced rapidly. “You wouldn’t dare!” she exclaimed, her emerald eyes glittering with mischief. “You’re a beast!”
Chapter Nine
“Hey, knothead, you going to sleep the day away?” Marc asked, giving the carved footboard of the big bed a jovial kick. He was behaving as though this day was no different than any other, hoping desperately that, in fact, it really wasn’t.
He watched as Frank’s eyelids fluttered briefly, like a butterfly preparing for flight, before opening. An overwhelming sense of elation swept over Marc when his friend looked up at him with a decidedly annoyed expression. All Marc had to do was look into Frank’s ice blue eyes and see the inner fire to know that, though injured, he would recover completely.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Frank took the pillow from beneath his head and put it over his face. “Have you any idea what it is like waking up with both a hangover and a bullet to the head?”
Marc had seen his friend enough mornings after intemperate nights to know, with absolute certainty, that he would soon recover his health and his fighting spirits. With that certainty in mind, his next goal was to return to the barn as quickly as possible.
Marc felt distinctly caddish. One did not see one’s best friend get shot in the head in the evening and then in the morning wish his friend would go back to sleep so that an assignation could occur.
Through the pillow came a muffled, “Did you bring Doc Hamms with you?”
“Couldn’t. The doc is helping Mrs. Kroeger have another baby.”
“How much help could she need? What’s this, her twentieth baby by now?”
“That figure’s a bit high, but she and her husband obviously have figured out how that whole procreation thing works.”
“Good. We can let them take our place in the baby-making line, and you and I can remain bachelors.”
Marc chuckled. Frank was getting back to form very quickly, indeed. “I couldn’t agree with you more, my friend. Now put your head back on that pillow and go back to sleep. There are some things I need to do.”
“Sure you don’t need any help?”
“Not from you.”
Moving the pillow, Frank sighed when he set his head upon it. “Sure?”
“Positive.”
Frank closed his eyes and turned his face aside. “In that case, I suppose I could use some more…”
He was asleep before finishing the sentence. Marc wasted no time in getting out the door.
His stride was long and purposeful as he returned to the barn. When he ascended the short ladder leading up to the hayloft, Marc moved slowly, staying quiet. He wanted to see Colleen before she saw him. Now that he had a new appreciation of her, he was seeing her in an entirely new way. Each moment he could look at her while she was unaware of it was time to savor. One did not gulp gluttonously of Colleen O’Malley’s visual charms, at least not to begin with. Initially, a connoisseur’s sense of leisurely appreciation was in order. First satisfy the gourmet, then indulge the gourmand.
He took his hat off, letting it rest against his back, dangling from the neck cord, then eased his head slowly through the square opening leading to the hayloft. When he saw Colleen, a spontaneous rush of lusty heat went through his veins, rushing straight to his cock.
She was looking out the open door. Her hands bound together, held above her head by the trolley rope. With her arms over her head, her breasts were lifted high, the round, heavy mounds rising and falling with her breathing. Her body, magnificently curvaceous and lusciously feminine, aroused every masculine instinct in Marc. As he looked at her, he found it shocking that less than twenty-four hours ago he had found slender women preferable to more voluptuous ones. But there she was, wearing trousers and western-style boots like a man. He loathed her masculine attire, but there wasn’t a thing about her that didn’t electrify his senses. Even if she tried, she couldn’t be anything other than spectacularly arousing.
The sound of his boots drew her attention.
“You’re back.”
“You’re right.” He smiled. “Did you miss me while I was gone?”
“Marco Andollini, you’re impossible!”
Marc’s smile broadened. The only time anyone referred to him by his complete first name was when he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t. Calmly, almost conversationally, as he walked closer, he replied, “I’ve missed you. More than I think you know.”
He watched as her gaze shifted from his face down to the rapidly swelling bulge in his black trousers. Her eyes widened briefly, then traveled quickly back up to his face.
“It’s easy to see,” she replied, “how much you’ve missed me.” Her gaze went to his burgeoning erection again. “So the secret to your success with women is rope?”
“Not previously. You’re a first for me,” Marc said as he unknotted his neckerchief. “In a lot of different ways. Have you any idea how much time I’ve spent thinking about you? I’ve never been a man to daydream about women...”
The next words drifted away unspoken, their importance such that they caught in his throat. He’d almost said, “Until last night.” Had he said that, he’d have admitted that Colleen had a significance in his life greater than he was willing to admit.
Colleen said, “And you obviously don’t like it very much.”
Marc took off his hat and dropped it onto the neckerchief on the floor of the hayloft, then began unbuttoning his shirt.
Colleen squirmed, and her breasts swayed beneath her shirt. The visual stimulation caused Marc’s cock to reach full and painful extension.
“I’m going to make you beg me.”
Colleen gasped. “I won’t say it!”
“Yes, you will,” Marc replied laconically as he unbuckled his gun belt. “I’ll see to it.�
��
In a softer tone, Colleen asked, “Is…is it because I didn’t satisfy you last night?”
Marc paused a moment, thinking carefully about her question before answering. “Actually, no, that’s not the reason. Even if you had satisfied me last night, I’m quite certain I’d still be as excited by you right now. No, that’s not the right word for what I’m feeling, now is it?” He balanced on one foot and pulled off a boot. “Enraptured? Yes, that’s it. Enraptured.” He removed his other boot. “That’s what I feel because of you. Rapture. Isn’t that where it’s an almost religious experience? It’s like you’re in your body, but not really. And everything, absolutely everything, is more exciting, more arousing than ever before. Almost mystically so.”
He unbuckled his belt and was amused that her eyes were riveted on his hands as he performed the task. “I’ve had nearly a permanent erection since the last time we were together.” She gave him an incredulous look. “Well, almost always.”
He opened his trousers and pushed them down to his thighs. His cock, fiercely rigid, tented his underwear. Marc issued a small sigh of relief as his erection, at last, could reach its natural posture.
“I’d forgotten,” Colleen confessed in a breathy whisper, “just how big you are.”
Marc stepped out of his trousers, unbuttoned his underwear, let them fall down around his ankles, then stepped out of them. His hard cock angled upward, thick and solid, the conical crown a ruddy hue.
“Forgotten? Really?” An eyebrow lifted. “I’d rather hoped to be more memorable than that.”
He stripped off his white socks, depositing them onto the pile of clothes. His cock wiggled from side to side with his steps. The fact that Colleen apparently couldn’t drag her gaze away from his cock was a source of great amusement to Marc, and he nearly said something about it but kept this knowledge to himself.
“See what you do to me?” Marc’s right hand curled around the shaft. “But then, this isn’t the first time you’ve aroused me into an erection, is it?”
“I’d be a lot more impressed by that if half the women in the territory hadn’t already experienced it before me.”
“You haven’t experienced it.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “I felt it. Just not inside me.” The tip of her tongue moistened her lips. “Frank’s getting out bed last night and taking that nasty fall provided a nice excuse for me to leave, didn’t it?”
“So you were looking for an excuse, were you?”
He watched color come to her cheeks. “Sorry. I guess I got a little scared at my reaction to you. Are you going to untie me?”
“Did I mention last night,” he continued, stepping to the side to look at her in profile, “that you’ve got the most delicious pussy in the world?” Colleen gasped again. Marc’s smile broadened. His right hand moved a little faster over his pulsing erection. “I could have pleasured you from sundown to sunup, and still I wouldn’t have had my fill of you.”
“Are you going to untie me?”
Marc shook his head, stepping closer. “First I want to hear you beg me to make love to you.”
“Can I just ask nicely?”
“Nobody teases me like that.”
A single eyebrow lifted. “Obviously, that’s not true.”
Marc’s hand moved on his erection, his fingers closing around the shaft. “Tell me you want it.”
“Now I can just tell you? Two seconds ago I had to beg.”
With her arms up, her underarms were unprotected. Abandoning his erection, he brought his fingers to her underarms and started tickling.
“Don’t! Don’t!” Colleen screamed between pealing laughter. “I hate being tickled.”
“Tell me what I want to hear and I’ll stop.”
She screamed, laughed, and squealed in protest as his tickling fingers went from her underarms down to her stomach and then back again, with a brief stop at her breasts to squeeze quickly. Her nipples had gotten visibly erect, adding stimulation to Marc’s already overheating senses.
“Beg,” he said, his fingers at Colleen’s sides, just beneath her ribs. Her laughter rang through the hayloft. He stopped tickling. “I want to hear it.”
Colleen gulped in air, sighing as her laughter subsided. She shook her head, glittering mischief in her eyes. “I can be just as stubborn as you.”
“Is it any wonder I tied you up?”
“If you hadn’t, I’d never have been here when you returned.”
“And that’s exactly why I tied you up.” He grinned. “It gave me a great sense of pleasure to know you’d be waiting here for me.”
“I wasn’t waiting,” Colleen replied, her breathing rapidly returning to normal now that she was no longer being tickled. “Nearly dangling from a hayloft rope isn’t the same as waiting.” She caught her lower lip between even, white teeth. With mocking defiance, she finished, “And I’m not going to beg.”
A drop of milky fluid formed at the tip of Marc’s erection. He said softly, “Let me hear you say it.”
“Oh, I should kick you!”
Colleen tried to kick him, her boot arcing upward toward his shin. Marc was ready for it, and he caught her foot easily, dancing to the side then cupping his hand around her ankle. The move caused Colleen to lose her balance, and she briefly swayed with the rope. She hopped three times on one foot before regaining her balance while Marc continued holding her foot up against his hip. What little slack there was in the rope vanished. It now quivered tautly.
“Such a hellcat!”
“Damn you!”
Marc tossed her foot to the side, forcing Colleen to spin from the rope. An instant later, he was directly behind her, his arms sliding around her middle, his naked chest against her clothed back, his cock pinned between their bodies. Marc’s arms wound around Colleen, and he buried his face in a mound of thick, silken hair at the nape of her neck that smelled of lilac-scented soap.
“All night long,” he whispered, holding her tightly, “I couldn’t get the scent of you out of my nostrils. You’re like,” he inhaled deeply, “the first flowers of spring.” He inhaled deeply again. “You have the clean smell of soap with the tang of a woman’s passion!”
Marc bent his knees, sliding his body down Colleen’s back until his erection slipped between her thighs. The hard flesh moved between her legs, and she gasped, clamping her thighs together, trapping him there. Marc straightened his legs again, and the crotch of Colleen’s trousers forced his erection to not angle so sharply upward.
“Damn,” Marc whispered, his cock throbbing with tension. He dipped his head to kiss Colleen’s temple at the same time his hands slipped upward to cup her breasts. He found her nipples through the thin barrier of her shirt and pinched the passion-peaked nubs firmly. Her squirming intensified. “You intoxicate me!”
He released her breasts, and Colleen stopped struggling. With his hard cock still trapped between her thighs, Marc reached for her shirt buttons, unwilling to allow any barrier between himself and the woman who had become the focus of all his most ardent emotions.
He had caught the uppermost button and unfastened it before Colleen let out a squeal of mock indignation. Almost dangling from the rope, she twisted her shoulders left and right, making it impossible to Marc to unfasten the buttons as he stood behind her.
With his lips close to her ear, brushing against coppery tresses, Marc said through a growl, “Tell me you want me! I want to hear you say it.”
His long-fingered hands caught Colleen’s blouse between her breasts and, an instant later, pulled apart. Every button of Colleen’s blouse popped off, dropping to the floor of the hayloft as her breasts, now naked, jiggled and swayed freely.
“Oh, God!” Marc’s hands closed over her naked bosom.
“Beg!” Marc said as his fingers pressed deep into the lush mounds. He pushed his hips forward, sliding his cock between her thighs. “I never should have let you go last night.” He released her breasts, his hands sliding down over her naked stomach
toward her belt. “I should have made love to you until you knew you were mine.”
The words burned in Marc’s ears. They weren’t the carefully crafted love words that he used to calm the troubled nerves of a woman suddenly having second thoughts about inviting him to her bedchamber. They were words that bubbled unbidden from a source deep inside himself, a wellspring even Marc hadn’t realized existed.
Chapter Ten
Colleen nearly climaxed when Marc ripped her shirt open. It was a response to him that she hadn’t anticipated. She watched, open-mouthed with shock and desire, as he filled his hands with her breasts, catching her nipples between forefingers and thumbs.
The words burned in Colleen’s ears. She tried to step forward to get Marc’s cock out from between her thighs. She couldn’t manage even half a step before running out of slack in the rope that bound her wrists. Trembling with passion, she watched as Marc’s hands swiftly unbuckled her belt and released the buttons of her fly. An instant later, he was on his knees behind her, and her trousers were being yanked down.
“No drawers? I guess you wanted to be ready for me.”
“You flatter yourself.”
With her trousers at the tops of her boots, her legs were now bound as securely as her arms. Marc’s hands were tight on her thighs, holding her securely. He was chuckling as he kissed the cheeks of her ass, first one and then the other, pressing his face firmly against the mounds. A moment later, she heard him chuckle softly, then felt his teeth as he nipped at her flesh. She let out a squeal.
“Are you crazy?” she sputtered. She was creaming now, her cunt readying for Marc.
“Only for you.”
Colleen let out another squeal when Marc took her by the hips and spun her around. She lost her balance and would have fallen had her hands not been tied. Looking down between the trembling mounds of her breasts, Colleen gazed at the kneeling man, marveling at his sheer physical beauty.
Marc smiled and leaned forward to plant a smacking kiss upon her lower abdomen, then tilted his head back on his shoulders, looked up into her eyes, and said, “You don’t mean that.”
Maxwell, Brandi - Colleen's Desire [The Lost Collection] (Siren Publishing Menage Everlasting) Page 9
