“I wouldn’t push you for something you’re not ready for,” he said.
She nodded. Nibbled on her lip. “I have a scar. Well, two of them because of the spiked bra. But the one on my breast is really ugly.”
“It’s still healing,” he pointed out. Which was another reminder of why sex couldn’t happen. “Most scars fade with time.”
Another nod. “I don’t have the same body I did when I was eighteen. I’m...jiggly in places.”
Shaw wanted to say if that was meant to put him off, then she’d failed miserably. He was instantly interested in any and all parts of her, especially the ones that jiggled. But he didn’t think that was the way to go here.
“We’ll just have a drink,” he said. “At the end of the drink, if you want, I’ll drive you home. And FYI, my body’s also changed in the past fifteen years.”
She made a little snort of laughter. “Right. You’ve gone the exact opposite of jiggly. You’ve muscled out.”
Shaw wasn’t sure that was a compliment. He’d never given much thought to his body and didn’t own a single piece of exercise equipment. Still, it was hard not to gain some muscle when you worked on a ranch. And speaking of the ranch, he drove past the main house and threaded his truck through the narrow road that ran parallel to the pasture fence. They were close now to his place, and he began to prep himself to keep his hands off her.
One drink and then he’d take her home.
He stopped in front of his house. Not the sprawling place where he’d been raised. His was more of a cabin, though he’d had it built with white limestone to offset some of the logs. He’d also situated it just back from the creek. Not close enough to flood during a storm, but he still had the view of it from his kitchen window and back porch.
Since the step-off was high, he helped Sunny from his truck, and they started for the front door, which wouldn’t be locked. No lights on, either, but there was enough moonlight that they didn’t stumble on the path that led from the driveway to the porch.
“It’s not a big place,” he said, so she wouldn’t be surprised by the size as most people were.
It was one bedroom, one bath and a combined living, eating and kitchen area. Plenty enough space for him and the rare overnight guest he would sometimes bring there. But it practically screamed that it wasn’t a place to raise a family. Which suited Shaw just fine since he practically screamed that he was not a man to raise a family. Cleaning up after his father had seen to that.
He opened the door and stepped in, automatically reaching for the light switch. But Sunny’s hand caught his, stopping him.
“Just leave it off,” she said, setting her purse on the porch.
She didn’t move. Didn’t add anything else. Sunny just stood there, and the only sound she was making were several deep breaths.
“Hugh told me I was lousy in bed,” she blurted out.
Shaw had considered what she might say, and it sure as heck hadn’t been that. He was totally out of his element here as to how to respond so he went with his gut. “It takes two people to have lousy sex.”
He wanted to have managed something better.
She shrugged, making him wish she’d laughed or issued a “damn right” so it’d let him know that Ryan’s shit bag of a father hadn’t put some dings and dents in Sunny’s confidence.
“Hugh told you that after you broke up with him?” Shaw tried again. He hoped that was the case so he could then point out to her that guys with broken hearts could be dicks.
She turned and looked at him. The moonlight was angled behind them, almost like a spotlight. Enough for him to see her face. He couldn’t figure out what that expression meant.
Then she kissed him.
It came quick and sort of sneaky, like the kiss he’d given her outside the diner to renew the heat between them. This kiss did the same thing to him. It also confused him.
Shaw couldn’t help kissing her right back, couldn’t help feeling the kick from it. Couldn’t stave off the instant pull it had to make him want to take her where she stood. However, he didn’t want that if Sunny wasn’t ready for it.
He waited, continuing the kiss, and he let it go on even after he felt her tongue in his mouth. He didn’t break the lip-lock until they had to gulp in a breath.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
Or at least that’s what he’d intended to say—it came out sort of garbled because she’d scrambled his brain. Instead, it was more like “you do this?” But at least he’d managed to make it sound like a question rather than the ramblings of a man who wasn’t thinking straight.
“Do this,” she answered. No question mark. And just in case Shaw had any doubts about that, Sunny dived back in for another kiss.
Good grief. The woman certainly wasn’t lousy at this, and it didn’t help that her stomach bumped against the front of his jeans. It was a reminder that it’d been way too long since he’d been with Sunny.
Shaw tossed his Stetson on the nearby table and took her by the shoulders to slow things down a bit. Also, so he could move her and shut the door by ramming it with his boot. The odds of a ranch hand coming out here at night were slim, but it did happen, and he’d already had enough of people gawking at them.
“No,” she mumbled when he reached for the light switch again.
He wasn’t sure how she managed to have that come through loud and clear, especially since she was still kissing him. But if darkness was what she wanted, it’s what she’d have. Shaw simply anchored her back against the door and had her mouth for supper.
Sunny did some devouring, too. And touching. Just as she’d done earlier, she slid her hand between them, moving her palm over his chest. He wanted to do the same to her, but even the suddenly raging ache in his groin wouldn’t let him forget that he could hurt her.
Shaw repeated that last part to himself, and it was sinking in.
Sunny’s hand didn’t stay on his chest. Those clever artist fingers went to the front of his jeans. Her mouth went to his neck. Either she had a good memory as to how sensitive that spot was for him or else she got it right on the first try. Of course, she’d been getting a lot of things right. He wanted her, bad.
Since touching anything above her waist was out, Shaw gripped her hips and moved her closer for some zipper-to-zipper contact. That sent the wanting-her-bad up a few notches, something he would have savored a whole lot more had she not been torturing him with tongue kisses on his neck. Since that was going to make him very, very needy way too fast, he turned the tables and kissed her ear. He remembered that was her sensitive spot...
Still was.
He got verification of that when she cursed him and arched her hips against his. That was clearly an invitation for some deep contact, but her breasts weren’t exactly small, which meant he had to get the angle right so he wouldn’t smash them with his chest.
Shaw stepped to the side to do that and knocked right into the table by the door. His hat, some keys and the housewarming gift from his mother all fell to the floor, but it was the gift—an alabaster spirit goddess figurine—that bounced off his knee. Since it was basically rock, that’s what it felt like when it bashed against his kneecap, somehow ricocheted off his shin and dropped onto his boot.
“Are you okay?” Sunny immediately asked, probably because he hadn’t been able to muffle a grunt of pain.
His first thought was to say something along the lines of Sunny, this would be safer if I could see. But he didn’t. Because that would put an end to this. It didn’t matter that something or someone should put an end to it. Shaw wasn’t ready for that, and he didn’t think Sunny was, either.
“I’m fine,” he said, though his knee was throbbing like an abscessed tooth.
So that she wouldn’t press him on that lie, Shaw kissed her ear again and made up his mind as to how to handle this. It didn�
�t take him long since he knew he couldn’t be the one to lose control here or Sunny could pay the price for it.
He went after her zipper.
Shaw slid it down, opening the fly of her jeans and shimmying them down her hips. Just enough so he had no trouble getting to her panties. Which took him a second to find because they were low and barely there.
He groaned.
His eyes ached to see what his hands were touching. These panties certainly weren’t anything like what she’d worn when she was eighteen and in the hayloft with him. Those had been cotton and sensible. These felt more like lace and—in the very best sense of the word—smut. The exact kind of underwear that spurred fantasies and hard-ons.
At least that’s what they were doing to Shaw.
Too bad this particular hard-on was going to be wasted because he couldn’t risk the body-to-body contact, especially not when he was this revved.
Biting off another groan, he flicked her earlobe with his tongue and kneed her legs apart. In the same motion, he moved his hand into her panties. Not that he had to go far since there was only about an inch and a half of fabric. And there he encountered another surprise. Not a nest of womanly curls. Instead, it was slick skin.
She must have felt him freeze because she stopped kissing his neck long enough to say, “I had a Brazilian right before my surgery.”
“It was just an impulse decision,” she added as if embarrassed.
Shaw wasn’t embarrassed. He was intrigued. So intrigued that he wished again for some light. He’d been with another woman who’d chosen that particular form of grooming, but that’d been years ago. And again, this was Sunny. It seemed much more interesting on her.
“If it turns you off...”
Shaw kissed her so that she couldn’t finish that. Because it didn’t turn him off. Like the tiny panties, it made him ache to be inside her. His dick started to beg for that, which was a bad sign. He needed to regain control of himself. He did that with his tongue and his fingers.
His tongue went in her mouth though he did consider it might be more fun to use it on that Brazilian. For now, though, he went old-school and slipped his fingers inside her. Judging from the silky moan she made and the way she pulled his hair, he thought that’d been a good decision.
Shaw stroked, kissed, nudged and bumped, and soon Sunny’s moans turned to little pleas for release. So, that’s what he gave her.
He located the most sensitive part of her and went to it, sliding his fingers through all that slick wet heat. Rubbing. Going deeper. And rubbing some more. She bucked against his hand, but he kept it up until he felt the spasms of her climax.
There.
Shaw couldn’t help it. Even though he was in pain, he grinned like a fool.
Maybe it was fifteen years late, but he’d finally managed to send Sunny flying.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THAT WAS CERTAINLY better than her virginal impaling.
That was Sunny’s first thought. Well, her first thought when she actually could think. Before that, everything in her head was more primal. Feels good. So good. So very, very good.
And Shaw had been responsible for that especially good feeling.
She let herself come back to earth, mentally tiptoeing first to make sure she wasn’t going to fall flat on her face. But there was no chance of falling since Shaw still had one of his hands anchored on her hip. As if he, too, were tiptoeing, he eased his hand from her panties, sliding it around her back. Then he kissed her. It was a dreamy kiss that nearly made her forget that all the recent pleasure had been completely one-sided.
Sunny’s dreamy-induced eyes flew open, but there wasn’t enough light in the room to see his face, which was what she’d requested since she hadn’t wanted him to see her body. Now it put her at a disadvantage because she didn’t know if he was smiling in satisfaction over giving her an orgasm or if his expression was somewhat pained because he was hard and throbbing against her thigh.
She decided that it was likely a combination of the two and acted accordingly. Sunny slid her hand over the hard and throbbing part of him. “Let’s do something about that.”
“No,” he said. His voice was husky and strained. “I think we need to give this some more time to heal.” He leaned down and pressed a whisper of a kiss on her left breast.
She wanted to argue that. Yes, she was feeling fantastic, but the feeling could be expanded to include Shaw.
“More time to heal,” he repeated as if he’d heard the argument she’d been about to give him.
“We wouldn’t have to do missionary,” she pointed out. She didn’t move her hand even though his clamped over hers. “In fact, I could do to you what you just did to me. I wouldn’t need to use my breasts for that.”
Again she wished she could see his face. She thought there might now be some temptation in his expression. If so, it almost certainly faded when they heard the sound of a vehicle approaching his house.
“I’ll get rid of whoever the hell that is,” Shaw snarled. He moved Sunny to the side and she gave her clothes a quick adjustment. Shaw had to do some adjusting, too, because his erection was seriously testing the strength of his zipper.
“Nuckle Shaw!” someone, obviously a child, called out. A second later, another little-girl voice belted out the same greeting. That was followed by the pitter-patter of tiny running feet on the porch.
“The lights are off. Are you still up?” another voice asked. Definitely not a child or a girl. This time, Sunny knew it was Shaw’s brother, Austin, which meant the earlier greetings had come from his three-year-old twin daughters.
Sunny turned on the light, nearly blinding them both. They probably looked like moles emerging from the ground when Shaw opened the door and they peered out. Austin stopped and grinned when he saw her, but the girls kept barreling forward, practically climbing onto Shaw as he scooped them into his arms. They each gave him sloppy cheek kisses complete with giggling and excited wiggles.
Austin just stood there and smiled like the contented dad that he was rumored to be. But not a contented man, not since he’d lost his wife to cancer. After Sunny’s brush with it, she could relate in some small way. But then, she’d never lost someone she loved, and that had to slice Austin all the way to the marrow.
It’d been years since she’d last seen Austin so, of course, he’d changed. He was thirty-three now, the same age she was, but he’d obviously managed to hang on to the Jameson good looks. Tall, lanky and gorgeous.
“Remember, we can’t stay long,” Austin told the kids. “It’s already way past your bedtime.”
That brought on a chorus of protests and flat-out refusals. Amid all of that, one of the girls leaned in to Shaw and whispered in a loud voice, “I cutted Gracie’s hair.”
“I noticed,” he said.
“Daddy didn’t like it,” the other one remarked. “Granny Lenore neither. She dropped a bowl on her toe and said a bad word.”
Cutted didn’t tell the whole story. The second girl’s hair had been shorn like a sheep. Even though Sunny had never seen Austin’s girls before, she assumed that the shorn child had once had dark blond curls like her identical twin sister.
Once again the stylist child leaned in and put her mouth close to Shaw’s ear. “The bad word Granny Lenore said was—”
“Don’t repeat it, Avery,” Austin warned her, but the corners of his lips twitched a little in amusement.
Austin came closer and pulled Sunny into a hug. “It’s good to see you,” he whispered to her.
“Good to see you, too,” she whispered back and held him in the hug for several moments.
“I’m guessing this is a bad time?” Austin asked when he eased away from her. His gaze skimmed over Sunny, then Shaw and then the strange little statue on the floor. It was of a white robed woman, her hands lifted in the air. So, that’s what had fallen on the
floor.
Shaw did some nonverbal communication with his eyes, as well. He gave his brother one of his mean stares but was all smiles when he blew raspberries on the girls’ necks. They giggled like loons.
Sunny suspected any kid would giggle when on the receiving end of a raspberry, but the fact that Shaw had done that puzzled her. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want kids yet he seemed so at ease with his nieces. And that put just a slight glimmer of hope in her heart.
Stupid glimmer.
Stupid hope.
Because they were at an impasse when it came to this particular subject. She wanted kids. Desperately wanted them. And even if she somehow could change his mind on this, it wouldn’t be fair. It would be similar to the children that the irresponsible Marty had thrust on Shaw over the years.
When Austin strolled inside, Sunny noticed he was carrying a plastic bag, which he handed to her instead of Shaw. “Slackers Quackers,” Austin explained. “When I told Avery and Gracie that you drew the pictures, they wanted you to sign the books. Actually, they wanted you to read every one to them, but I convinced them that an autograph would have to do. They’re big fans.”
Sunny always had a double reaction when a parent of young children told her something like that. Number one was that she hoped the children weren’t aware of Slackers’s penis-like feather. Number two was that she filled to the brim with pride. She had drawn those pictures, and just like with her sketchbooks, she’d put little pieces of herself into them. It never got old to hear that someone—especially children—enjoyed them.
“Crackers!” the girls squealed in delight, and they began to make duck noises. Obviously, that was their pronunciation of the lazy duck.
Sunny beamed at them and set her purse on the table so she could glance in the bag. There were at least a dozen of the stories inside. “I’d be happy to sign them. And read them to you.”
Reading to kids was something she loved doing. She’d frequently done readings in the children’s section at Hugh’s bookstores. That had been very popular, especially after Sunny had learned to do voices for the various characters.
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