CHAPTER FIVE
Charlie
I was not nervous.
I repeated this to myself on the drive up the mountain. I sat in the passenger seat with my hands in my lap and watched the dark trees go past in the headlights and told myself I was a grown woman who had made a deliberate, informed decision and was completely fine with it.
Colt drove the way he did everything — controlled, unhurried, completely certain.
He didn’t fill the silence. He never filled silence.
The mountain road unspooled ahead of us and I watched the trees and thought about the days leading up to this.
The second bet we’d made, my determination not to give in too easily.
The kiss against the wall. And the way he’d touched me on top of the bar counter…
I was not nervous.
I was absolutely nervous.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
I looked at him sideways. In the dark of the cab, he was all jaw and shadow and that particular contained quality that made him look like something the mountain had made rather than a person who’d chosen to live on it.
“I’m thinking about the bet,” I said, which was true. “About what comes next.”
He reached over and took my hand. Just picked it up off my lap and entwined his fingers with mine.
I stopped thinking quite so loudly after that.
The turn off to his cabin finally appeared.
We went up a long driveway surrounded by large pines that kept out the rest of the world.
Of course, I’d been imagining where he lived — I’d been imagining everything about this man for weeks.
The reality was quieter and more permanent than I’d pictured.
This looked like the kind of place built by someone who intended to stay.
He killed the engine and turned to me. The look in his eyes was very steady. “After tonight it’s different.”
This was the man who’d sat into that back booth every Friday for six weeks barely touching his beer, who’d shown up Saturday with his toolbox, who’d had his hand down my jeans on Sunday and walked away afterward like he had all the time in the world, who’d thrown me over his shoulder without a single apology.
“I’ve been sure for a while,” I said. “I was just making you work for it.”
He gave a small huff that made me smile.
He was out of the truck and at the passenger side before I’d reached for the handle.
I’d barely registered the door opening before his hands were at my waist and he was carrying me to the door.
Not over his shoulder this time, but like a bride being carried over the threshold.
I put my arms around his neck because it seemed like the thing to do.
“I’m not going to run away,” I said, my fingers tunneling through his hair.
“I know.”
Inside he didn’t bother to turn on the lights.
He walked me through the dark living room and all I got were impressions — stone fireplace, shelves, windows showing nothing but trees and moonlight. And then we were in the bedroom. He laid me back on the bed and stood over me and just looked at me.
That was somehow the most intimate thing that had happened yet. Just him looking.
We didn’t say anything, but that was us. I breathed a sigh of relief as he came down over me. I didn’t want him to change his mind about collecting on the bet.
He held his weight above me and kissed me slowly. Not like in the storage room — that had been urgency and interrupted want. This was deliberate. Painstakingly deliberate. I pressed up into him and he pulled back, not letting our bodies touch.
“Tonight,” he growled. “Tonight, you do what I tell you.”
I held his gaze in the dark as my breathing quickened. Those words did all kinds of things to me, starting with making me wet. Wetter. I arched an eyebrow. “And if I don’t?”
“Then we find out what happens.” His mouth found my jaw, my throat. “But I think you’re going to like what I tell you.”
The shiver that went through me was involuntary and he felt it and I felt him feel it. Understand it.
He kissed me again and this time there was nothing slow about it.
His mouth found mine, his tongue thrusting deep and hard.
He licked the roof of my mouth, snaked it along my teeth.
He held himself up with one arm, the other going behind my back so he could pull on my hair.
He held me in place for the kiss. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and kissed him back with everything I had plus all the imagination I’d been storing up for six long weeks.
When he finally lifted his head we were both destroyed.
It was time for me to pay my debt.
When he reached for the hem of my shirt, I tried to help and he caught both my hands. “I said I’d take care of you.”
“So do it faster,” I challenged. His answer was to kneel between my legs and reach for the top of my t-shirt. I gave a gasp when he ripped it open, leaving my body exposed, my breasts heaving.
“Fast enough for you?” he grinned down at me, and I thought that was even more shocking than his display of strength.
“I hope you’re not going to be fast at everything tonight.”
“Hellion,” he murmured as he removed the remnants of my shirt and unfastened my bra, throwing both aside. For just a second, an old reflex surfaced and I started to cross my arms.
He caught my wrists once again, holding them above my head.
“No.” Quiet. Absolute. “You don’t hide from me. Understood?”
“Understood,” I said, and heard the effort in my own voice.
“Again.”
“Understood.” Clearer this time.
The look on his face did something to every insecure thought I’d ever had about my body. Not the performing appreciation I thought most men probably did. Just — seeing me. Like I was exactly what he’d been expecting, and the expectation had been correct.
He cupped my breasts in his hands with the particular focus of a man who had been thinking about this for some time and intended to be thorough about it. His thumbs moved across my nipples, and I bit my lip against the sound that wanted to come out.
“Stop,” he said as if he knew what I was trying to do. “I want all of you, Charlie. These fucking curves. That damn sassy mouth. Let me hear how I make you feel.”
I made the sound.
“Good girl.” He lowered his head and took one nipple into his mouth. Those words and the sensation of his mouth made me make even more sounds.
He took his time. Learning what made me arch, what made me say his name, what made my hips roll upwards. He still held himself above me, not letting me feel him. He left nothing half-done and it was making me crazy.
I needed something.
I needed him. “Colt, you’re not being fair.”
“Who said anything about being fair, Charlie.”
He worked open my jeans and I thought, finally. Finally, he was going to touch me like he had on the bar.
I was wrong.
Oh, so deliciously wrong.
With a strong yank of his big hands, my jeans were gone, along with my underwear. Those tossed aside in the darkness too.
Then his hands were on my thighs, spreading my legs.
“What—what are you doing?” I tried to close my legs but that only earned me a sharp smack on the inside of my thighs. He pulled them apart again and I let him.
“Perfect,” he murmured and I believed him. Something about the way he said it — not a compliment, just a fact he was noting — made it land differently than any compliment I’d ever received.
I lay before him, completely bare. My breasts aching, my body weeping. All coherent thoughts fled as he settled himself between my thighs, my legs thrown over his shoulders.
He pressed his lips to the inside of my knee.
I shivered but didn’t say anything.
He kissed his way up my inner thigh, slow and deliberate, stopping just short of where I wanted him. The sound I made was low and needy. He didn’t acknowledge it except to do it again on the other leg, stopping in the same place, making me wait.
“Ask me,” he said against my thigh, the tip of his tongue licking me.
“Colt.” My hand gripped the sheets.
“Ask me, Charlie.”
“Please,” I said. “Please.”
I had theories about this. I’d read enough to have very thorough theories. Every single one of them was completely catastrophically insufficient.
My head arched back as his thumbs parted me, his warm breath fanning over my moist center. “So, wet, baby. So wet for me.”
I cried out as he placed his mouth on me. I cried out again as his tongue thrust inside me. I’d never ever felt anything like that before in my life.
The man could kiss, but this… this was totally off the charts.
He held my hips down with one big hand spread across my stomach. My stomach was my Achilles heel but right now, the weight of his hand felt like ownership, not judgment.
He thrust two fingers inside me and I screamed. Not a low moan of want, an actual scream. My hands went to his head, my nails scraping against his scalp.
I would have sworn he laughed against me, but Colt didn’t laugh.
“Easy, baby. Let it happen.”
Let what happen, I wanted to ask, but I was too lost in the sensations he was creating.
His fingers, thick inside me, his mouth having found that spot on my body.
And his tongue. It flicked across the bud, hard and fast, when his mouth wasn’t sucking it deep inside his mouth.
He devoured the juices that were seemingly pouring from my body.
I stopped being embarrassed about any of the sounds I was making.
This was Colt making love to me and heaven help me if he ever decided to stop.
He was learning me. I could feel it — the way he paid attention to every response, adjusted, filed it away. The particular focus he brought to every task he’d ever done in my bar, applied here, applied to this, to me, and it was the most overwhelming attention I’d ever received in my life.
“Stay still,” he said against me when my hips tried to move.
“I can’t—”
“You can.” His hand pressed down hard. “And you will.”
When he slid another finger inside me, I grabbed the headboard and held on.
He worked them slowly, unhurried, the same patience he’d been practicing for weeks applied here at the worst possible moment, and I said his name in a way I’d never said anyone’s name before and probably couldn’t have replicated if asked.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him, lying there between my thighs, which was not a position I’d ever been in, and the expression on his face was something I was going to be thinking about for a very long time.
“Come for me,” he said. His fingers thrust in hard, deeper, the fingertips curling just right…
And I did.
I came apart like something that had been wound too tight for too long. He worked me through every second of it, every wave, until I was limp with satisfaction and reaching for him.
He kissed his way back up my body.
“Colt,” I managed.
“Yeah.”
“Now.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Now.”
He stripped off the rest of his clothes, and I looked at him in the dark and thought—he’ll never fit. He was large by any standards, the head of his cock purple and red, pre-cum dripping from the tip.
“Are you sure?” I asked. A touch of the nervousness I’d felt in the truck returning. I was entering into a place I was not familiar with.
He came down over me, his weight on his forearms, and looked at my face for a long moment. “Am I sure I want you? I’ve wanted you since that first Friday night when I walked through the door and saw you behind the bar, Charlie. Am I sure this will work?”
His hand slid between us, two big fingers pressing back inside me. I was still wet and swollen from before and I gasped. He leaned down and pressed a slow kiss to my cheek. “Yeah, I’m sure. You were made for me, baby.”
He slammed his mouth against mine and kissed me until everything else in my mind fled. I lifted my legs and wrapped them around his waist. My wet core touched him and we both groaned.
“Then take me, Colt. Please take me.”
He settled between my thighs, one hand going between us to guide himself inside me. I felt him there, the large head pressing at my entrance. Thank god he had stretched me. Then he pushed inside me. Not slow, not fast, just perfect. He wasn’t all the way in when he stopped.
Went completely still. Above me, inside me, his weight on his forearms, looking down at me.
“You’re a virgin,” he said.
Not a question.
I looked up at him, my hands on his shoulders. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Hell no.” He gave what I could only describe as a self-satisfied smirk and drove in deep.
I gasped. There was pain. He was a big man, and I had never had anyone inside me before. But that stopped quickly. He stilled again, buried inside me, breathing hard, watching my face.
“You should have told me.” His tone said I would have been in big trouble if he wasn’t already inside me.
“I didn’t want slow.” I shifted underneath him, testing the feel of him inside me, and felt him everywhere. “I wanted you. All of you. Now stop treating me like I’ll break.”
Something moved through his expression. The controlled patience he’d been carrying for weeks gone. He was inside me, hard and warm and I watched him come undone.
He started to move.
Slow at first, because he was Colt and he was paying attention to my face no matter what I had said. “Better?”
“Yeah.” To verify the point, I lifted my hips, meeting his next thrust, which had him fully seated again, our bodies touching as he disappeared inside me.
“Damn woman.” Then he was gripping my hip, all pretense of patience and slow gone. He took me hard, just like I wanted, slamming his hips against mine, burying himself deep, staying there just a second, twisting his hips, letting me know exactly who was there, fucking me.
“Do you like that, Charlie? Do you like the feel of my cock inside you? Taking you? Making you mine?”
All I could do was moan and let him have me. It was wonderful. Hard and deep, exactly like my body had been craving. He filled something inside me that had nothing to do with the act of making love.
This was possession, pure and simple.
I came apart the second time with considerably less dignity and considerably more volume than the first, and he followed me over with his face in my hair and my name the only word he had left.
We lay tangled together afterward, both breathing hard.
He slowly moved away, as if reluctant to undo our bodies. I was pressed against his chest listening to his heartbeat slow back to something like normal.
“Colt,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I thought about all the things I could say. About what this was and what it wasn’t and what came next. About the fact that I was in a lumberjack’s cabin on a mountain in Montana and wasn’t even a little bit sorry about it.
“Thank you for making my first time… well, thank you for making my first time that. I didn’t expect you.”
He laughed. A real one, low and unguarded. He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Thank you for giving yourself to me, Charlie.”