by Pippa Grant
Yeah, eating her turns me on.
But this is about her.
Not the animal in my pants.
“Hope—” I gasp out as she circles my head with her thumb.
Her eyes lift to mine, full of vulnerability and need. “I want all of you tonight.”
“I’m yours. All yours.” And I’m already fumbling for a condom in my wallet, because though I could happily wait all night—despite what my cock currently thinks—I want to be ready when she is.
“You make me feel things I shouldn’t,” she says as she continues to stroke me, making my eyes cross while I resist the urge to thrust into her touch. “But I don’t want to fight it tonight. I’m tired of fighting.”
“You never have to fight it again, baby. Not with me.”
“I believe you,” she whispers, and then she takes the condom from me and rolls it down my length before swinging her leg over me and bending to kiss me while she takes me deep inside her.
Fuck, this is heaven.
Sheer fucking bliss.
I groan against the intense need to come just from being buried in her slick pussy.
“God, I missed this,” she gasps as she lifts up and slides down me again.
“So much,” I agree.
“Can’t get enough.”
“It’s been too long, but never again.”
I cup her breasts and press them together, then lick the seam as she rides me, and I can already feel her body gripping my aching cock.
I’m so ready to come, but I hold out until I feel the first spasms of her orgasm squeeze me tighter, and we come together in a sky full of fireworks, Hope straining, her neck long and her head tilted back, giving me the most glorious view of her ecstasy and making my release so powerful, I don’t know if I’ll ever quite recover.
She collapses onto me, panting, as the last of her tremors leave her, and I wrap my overcooked spaghetti arms around her. “I love you,” I whisper to her.
Probably not the best timing, I realize, as she immediately goes stiff.
Fuck…
But I get it.
She’s scared. I’m not sure why, but I want her to know she can trust me.
“Blake—” she starts.
“Shh.” I stroke her back. “Don’t say it. Don’t feel like you have to. I just want you to know…I’m here for you. I don’t need it back to give it. And you can pretend I didn’t say it if that helps.”
“Really?”
“Really.” I stifle a yawn as she starts to relax against me again. “I just want you to know…that you’re perfect. To me.”
She is.
She always has been. Even when I was pissed as hell at her for bailing on our first marriage, when I had to come to her rescue doing odd jobs and pretend like it never happened, when I thought I was nothing to her, I still wanted her. Loved her.
But I’m not nothing to her.
I never have been, or we wouldn’t be here.
She just needs time.
And I’ll give her all the time—and orgasms—in the world.
For as long as she’ll let me.
Sixteen
Hope
* * *
I wake up, and for a moment I have no idea where I am.
But my mind, accustomed to racing to fill in the blanks when I wake up in an unexpected place, quickly pops answers into the gaps in my sleep-fogged memory.
I’m on a wooden floor with only a thin barrier beneath me, my shoulder half numb from being smashed against the hard boards.
So there’s only one place I could be—curled up in the pantry in my childhood home, the only place far enough away from my parents’ master suite that I can’t hear them scream when they had one too many old-fashioneds at a charity event or I broke a remote control again, causing their quiet feuding to erupt into something more violent.
Instantly I’m flooded with the hot-cold feeling of shame and anger mixing together beneath my skin and a sour taste floods into my mouth.
Because even though I know it’s not my fault my parents seem to loathe each other, or even if it’s my fault that I’m clumsy, I don’t really know that at all.
I’m an only child, and not because Mom has fertility issues. I’ve heard her grumble beneath her breath often enough—wishing she’d waited until she was older to become a mother—to know I was probably an accident.
Or at least a less-than-welcome surprise.
And then, there were no more surprises or accidents.
No brothers or sisters.
Just me, alone, the only kid in a house filled with priceless treasures I was terrified to touch since I couldn’t even look at a radio without it malfunctioning, and parents who apparently felt the same way about me.
The therapist I saw for a while, after I fried one too many university-owned computers, failed out of vet school, and was so low I couldn’t see a way forward that wasn’t tainted by failure and regret, thought my parents were probably scared to mess me up. That’s why they were so distant.
Neither of them had easy childhoods—Dad’s parents were even chillier and more withdrawn than mine, and my mom’s dad was an alcoholic so violent and unpredictable I was never allowed to meet him.
So they really had no idea how to do the happy family thing right.
But as a kid I didn’t know that. I only knew that I was rarely held, rarely touched at all, and that it created a bone-deep hunger inside of me that could only be filled by one thing.
I was four years old the first time I held a puppy in my arms, a poor, wormy little thing I discovered crying in the ditch near our front gate.
Dad was sure someone had dumped it there on purpose, hoping a well-off family would take pity on the starving creature, and resented being targeted. He hated being manipulated, and neither he nor my mother had a soft spot for animals—Gram didn’t start her farm until later in life, and I never knew for sure if she liked the animals or if it was just a passing hobby—but for some reason I still don’t quite understand, they let me keep it.
And love it.
And nurse it back to health.
And name it Jane, because at four I named everything Jane, even a boy puppy destined to grow into a massive golden mutt with the deepest bark you’ve ever heard.
And then Jane was joined by two kittens I found in a garbage can in second grade—Oscar and Weiner, because at eight that was hysterical—and by the time I graduated high school I had three dogs, four cats, and a ferret. All someone else’s castaway creatures that I’d rescued from one miserable situation or another.
All creatures that I never hurt the way I broke microwaves and ceiling fans, who made me feel normal when I knew I was anything but.
I had a hell of a time rehoming them all before I went to college.
I didn’t want to rehome them. I wanted them to stay in their cushy digs in the back yard, in the swanky shelters and play yards I’d built for them with my own two hands because Mom refused to have animals in the house.
But I knew my parents wouldn’t take care of them. They would feed and water them, sure—they aren’t monsters—but they wouldn’t play with them, listen to them, or spend time soaking up all the priceless wisdom animals give away for free if you pay attention.
They wouldn’t truly care for them so the best thing I could do for my fur friends was to find people who would.
Letting go of Jane was the hardest. He was so old by then, rickety in his bones and so sore some mornings I had to squat down, leverage both hands under his hips, and deadlift his one hundred and fifty-pound body into an upright position. But I finally found someone wonderful—a CrossFit teacher a few towns over who let him hang out at the gym with him and his buddies all day and fed him way too many treats—and I let him go.
Because I loved him.
Utterly. Completely.
Unselfishly.
As I push into a seated position on the hard floor where Blake sleeps peacefully on the sleeping bag beside me, there are tears
in my eyes. Even though I know by now that I’m not a little girl anymore—I’m not trapped in the pantry or in a house where I can’t beg, borrow, or steal enough love to keep from starving—I’m still haunted.
My mother’s second voicemail today didn’t help.
I’m letting them down again and embarrassing them and causing headaches that could be handled so much better, according to her.
All this time, since the morning I woke up in Blake’s bed in Vegas, and realized I’d gotten married in a pheromone-wasted stupor, I’ve been telling myself that it was a mistake because I don’t believe in marriage.
I am anti-marriage and Blake is pro-marriage, a simple formula that explains why it can never work between us.
Horse plus cow can never equal goat.
It’s against the rules of nature.
But here in the dark, with nothing but the two of us and a big empty room filled with the echoes of all the sweet things we did together a few hours ago, there’s nowhere to hide from the truth.
It isn’t that I’m anti-marriage. It’s that I’m terrified to let him love me.
I don’t know how to be loved.
Even if he were the kind to be happy with something more casual—a girlfriend or a friend with benefits—I still would have pushed him away.
Because I learned the hard way what it’s like to beg for love and be denied, to hurl myself at the shut doors of my parents’ hearts again and again until I was bruised all over, and to keep going back for more punishment because I was a child who needed love like I needed air. I needed their arms so badly it took years of dutiful snuggles from Jane before I felt anything close to okay.
And I know I could come to need Blake’s arms even more, so much that, if he decided to let me go—and he would, because I never learned how to love any better than my parents did—it would destroy every tender thing left inside of me.
I would fall and fall and never quit falling.
The thought of that deep, dark hole of guilt and ineptitude, the one that would suck me in and devour me for the rest of my life, wrenches a sob from my throat. I smash a fist to my mouth, holding my breath as Blake stirs, mumbling sleepily as he rolls onto his other side.
But after a moment, it’s clear he’s still asleep.
I wait another long minute, ears ringing and heart racing in the loaded silence, and then I quietly dress, putting everything on except my shoes, which I hold in my hands until I’ve shut the tasting room door softly behind me. It isn’t until I’m almost to my truck, however, that I realize I left my keys inside, somewhere in the darkness where they will be impossible to find without disturbing Blake.
And I can’t fathom going back into that tasting room right now, back into that place that will always be home to one of my most beautiful memories and a terrible, stinging sadness. It will forever be the place where I realized how broken I still am, how broken I will probably always be.
Because better to be broken than tumbling forever through infinite sadness.
“Isn’t it?” I ask, hot tears spilling down my cheeks, but going cold before they reach my chin. The spring night is cool, almost chilly.
The perfect night to run away from my problems.
Even though I know they’ll chase me to the ends of the earth.
They always have, but this time, I won’t drag Blake down with me.
Any more than I already have, anyway.
Without another thought, I jog off through the fields, taking the shortcut from Blake’s place to mine. It’s five minutes by road, but not much more by foot. Half the time, he’ll walk over to fix my toaster or patch up my hard drive, if the job is small enough that he doesn’t need his big toolbox.
But not anymore.
We can’t be anything to each other anymore.
Not even friends.
I’ll have to figure out an excuse to send myself away on a business trip for the rest of our fake marriage. Maybe to study that sustainable farm in Vermont I’ve read so much about, the one with the foreman who told me I could come shadow him any time and learn how to turn my shelter into a source of farm-fresh food for my community.
Kyle knows I’ve been obsessed with that place for a while now. Maybe he’ll believe that I love sustainable agriculture enough to tear myself away from my new hubby.
And if he doesn’t…
Well, then we can fight it out in front of a judge.
I might not know how to love a human mate, but I’ve made a promise of forever to innocent creatures who won’t leave.
Animals die, but they never willingly choose to abandon you. They never wake up one morning, stop loving the person who has cared for and adored them, and decide to make that person’s life miserable, instead.
Animals take your love and keep it safe.
Safe.
That’s what I want. What I need. Just to be safe again. Alone, and lonely sometimes, but good enough on my own to get by and have some fun while I’m doing it.
But when I stumble in the front door, I don’t go to my bed. I go to the couch and fall onto the pillow Blake left there, inhaling his soapy, sexy Blake scent as I cry myself back to sleep.
And in the morning, I’m awakened by a loud pounding on my door, Kyle’s voice shouting—“I’ve got proof, Hope. Time to admit your marriage is a joke and sign that animal over to me.”—and I am reminded that things can always get worse.
Always.
Seventeen
Blake
* * *
She’s gone.
I’m not surprised—a part of me even expected it.
It’s the reason I laid awake for so long last night, memorizing the feel of her in my arms, the sweet smell of her, the way her heart beat perfectly in time with mine.
Because my gut warned that she might be gone by morning.
Hope didn’t say “I love you” back.
I get it, and I don’t blame her or resent her for not saying things she isn’t ready to say, but the fact that she didn’t share her feelings with me remains significant.
I believe she feels what I feel. I know she does. The way she touched me last night, kissed me, held me like she couldn’t bear to let me go, not even for the few minutes it took to fetch the extra sleeping bag from my truck so we’d have something to cover up with while we slept, matters too.
It matters enough to send me bolting out the door without bothering to clean up the remains of our picnic or roll up the sleeping bags.
Because I have to find Hope and convince her that she doesn’t have to run from me. I’m a patient man. I’m willing to give her as much time and space as she needs to feel comfortable letting me the rest of the way into her heart. Tending a vineyard for years before my vines finally started to bear enough fruit to make something delicious has taught me that good things are worth waiting for, working for.
And Hope isn’t just good. She’s incredible.
I just wish I could make her see it.
I race out to my truck, thrown by the sight of Hope’s old beater still parked beside it. Maybe she walked back to her place.
Or sleepwalked?
Shit. If she was sleepwalking, there’s no telling where she is.
“Hope?” I call.
No answer.
I pick up the pace and circle the tasting room, looking for any sign of her and finding nothing.
And now I’m hoping she did run away.
At least then I’d know she was safe.
I dash into my truck and speed along the country roads, fear gripping my heart.
I don’t have double locks on the tasting room. And we didn’t lock it at all. If she was up sleepwalking, she could be hurt. Lost. Worse.
I tell myself Hope’s a nature girl and more than capable of getting herself home in the dark, but I’m also thinking about all the ruts in the trail between our places, holes I’m going to fill in and cover with a fresh coat of gravel as soon as I ensure she hasn’t sprained her ankle and ended up trapped alone in th
e woods overnight.
As soon as I verify she’s okay.
She has to be okay.
I roar up to her place.
Dean isn’t at his post. His station wagon is there, but it’s empty and there’s no sign of him in the pasture or beside the road.
My inner danger alert system is going overtime with warning signals when I rumble into the shelter’s gravel parking lot to see a swanky Mercedes parked by the house.
Fuck.
Kyle.
I’m in no state of mind to deal with him right now. Not when I don’t know where Hope is, or if she’s okay.
I slam out of the truck, jogging around to the back of the house, hearing raised voices before the porch comes into view. And then I see them—Kyle on the steps, yelling at a frazzled-looking Hope—thank god she’s safe—while Cara and Dean stand in the grass nearby.
Dean’s holding Chewy on a lead while the alpaca nibbles anxiously on the rim of his baseball cap. For his part, Dean is grinning like getting a hat chewing from a high-class alpaca is the best time he’s had in a while. Cara is chattering, but after my one and only run-in with her, I don’t have any clue what she might be saying, and I don’t care.
Because the St. Claire cousins are swiftly headed toward some kind of nuclear explosion.
I have to put a stop to it.
And hug my wife.
Because she’s safe.
I charge up the steps, startling Kyle enough to make him stumble. He grabs for the railing to steady himself, while I grab for Hope, pulling her into my arms and hugging her tight.
“They’re taking Chewy,” she sobs into my neck.
“He’s rightfully mine,” Kyle says.
“The hell he is,” I snap, glaring at him over Hope’s head.
“They’re taking him because you slept at the winery and I slept here,” she says, breath catching as she clings tighter to my shoulders. “I tried to explain but they won’t let me and I—”
