Chapter 8
EIGHT
Linger – The Cranberries
The way Gabi Wilder consumed him should have tripped whatever alarms Dallas had left.
She turned a tender kiss into a violent one. Sucking on his lip, his tongue, whispering every dirty thing she’d been fantasizing about for the past week into the curve of his neck, then polishing that off with a teasing bite that had his cock hardening to a pain-pleasure degree behind denim.
Astonishingly, she’d been thinking about this as much as he had.
Fucking. Him.
In the shower. On the bench of the gazebo she’d seen out back. In her space in the mill before she moved in, the smell of raw wood clinging to their skin. In her truck. On his desk in the Dispatch office, shoving papers to the floor to get to each other.
And she liked his glasses. Enough to request they stay on.
This handy tidbit she murmured right before taking them off anyway and sweeping him back into the kiss of a lifetime.
He considered stopping her long enough to make sure she knew what she was starting.
But whenever he tried, she switched things up in some absurdly sexy way.
Spinning them and backing him into the island, drawing her leg high on his hip—an easy move in a dress—her nails scoring his scalp just enough to hurt.
She talked a lot, too, when he mostly kept things in his head.
I love kissing you.
The other night was incredible.
Touch me here.
Dallas.
It hit him hard, hearing his name whispered in that sexy Southern drawl.
Then came flashes of the choral room interspersed with memories of their flaming ’80s kiss, adolescent infatuation and reality colliding until his brain buzzed.
With all that going on, could he help it if, within two minutes, he’d drawn her skirt to her hip and run his finger along the cleft of her damp silk panties?
If her nipple went rigid beneath his thumb, harder still when he pinched it gently between his fingers, her groan sliding from her lips into his mouth?
He had his finger hooked in her thong, pulling it aside, when she broke the kiss.
Gabi grabbed his hand and dragged him across the kitchen toward a couch he avoided because lumpy didn’t begin to describe it.
He limped after her as best he could, knowing his ankle was going to give him shit tomorrow, but he was along for this ride no matter where it took him.
No conversation. He hoped she knew men in this deep were goners. Lost to lust. Mindless.
In point of fact, his vision had tunneled until he could only see her.
He was trying to work out how he could do this—go down on her, or maybe more—with a bum foot. “Sparkle, I might need the bed or something higher.”
She glanced over her shoulder with the naughtiest smile he’d ever seen, her eyes golden glints in the shadows. Stopping, she gave him a push, easy but with meaning, that had him falling back on the couch.
Then she knelt between his legs, setting off charges in his brain. “Lie back,” she whispered, reaching for his button fly. “Let me.”
Let me.
“Gabi,” he ground out, circling her slim wrist with his fingers. “I won’t last long if you do this.”
She laughed, trailing her knuckle over the crown of his straining-to-be-free cock. “Isn’t that the point?”
Releasing her arm, he hummed a reply that was absolutely no argument.
With Lover Man playing in the background, Dallas slumped back as she unfastened his jeans, fit his cock through the gap in his boxers, and began to stroke.
Really slowly, her attention centered on him in a way he didn’t think it ever had been before.
The scent of her, something floral and devastating, circled him like a hawk.
“Bakers have great hands,” she claimed mid-caress, a guarantee that almost made him come then and there.
It was glorious torture, the way she provoked him, leading up to her lips closing around him, which he guessed she was planning to do.
Tracing the lines of the tattoo on his hipbone, nipping it with her teeth, then licking a line along the crease of his thigh to, hell, soothe him?
Getting close but not giving him everything.
And the moves weren’t practiced, he realized. They came from pure attraction.
She rocked back on her heels, hand wrapped around his shaft, licking her lips as she stared. He hoped his size, something he’d been told was substantial, wasn’t scaring her.
“Tell it slant,” she murmured, reading the line of text he’d had tattooed on his skin during a chaotic night in Berlin five years ago.
“Emily Dickinson,” he returned, struggling through his dimming consciousness, when all he wanted was to capture the image: Gabi’s hair curling around her face, the ash-blond strands disheveled from the heat of the kiss, the straps of her dress hanging down her arms, her neckline gaping enough to reveal the tops of her gorgeous breasts.
Her thumb swept out to gather the drop of moisture from his crown, and the groan he let slide free was not something he could have contained if his life depended on silence.
Nor was the lift of his hips. He was powerless.
“I’m going to taste you,” she promised, and his head dropped back in consent.
Please, he might have even uttered.
He wanted to watch. But it was better he simply felt, because he was close already.
The fearless stroke of her tongue along his length, experimental advances, her touch not graceful but tenacious.
Her hair draped over him, the silken ends dusting his thighs.
Sucking hard one moment, softer the next.
Deeply, until the tip touched the back of her throat.
And the pauses, the fucking pauses.
She brought him to the brink twice, the tingle at the base of his spine signaling a pending orgasm, before he gasped, “Wilder. You’re killing me.”
“Also the point,” she whispered, the vibration of her words sending tremors to his toes, out through his fingertips.
He looked then, and her eyes met his as she slid down his shaft, her tongue doing this incredible dance along the underside of his cock.
Abruptly, the kitchen phone rang, because apparently the universe had no respect for a man on the edge.
“Don’t hold back.” Her grip tightened on the base of his cock. “Sam’s grandparents have your number. I’ll need to check if they called.”
He moaned noisily, his hips rising. “I was never…holding back. You were holding me back.”
Amused by his answer, she tucked her hair behind her ear, maybe to give him a better view, lashes dropping as she settled into an addictive rhythm.
Near the end, he gently fisted his fingers in her hair, unable to stop himself.
He didn’t guide, but he held on. She didn’t need him to direct a thing.
He gave her plenty of notice before he fell apart, the sounds of the storm outside lost to their panting breaths, his ragged groans.
There was no dignity in coming that hard, shuddering, lost. The most explosive hand-slash-blowjob of his life.
But who needed dignity?
After his vision cleared, he blinked to find her still kneeling there, a half-smile on her face. God, she was beautiful.
“Fun,” she said, wiping delicately at her mouth with the back of her hand.
He shook his head, lips parting, then closing. “I—”
There were no words.
Gabi laughed and climbed up his body, kissing his tats, his nipple, his collarbone, his neck, licking away a smear of chocolate. He reacted to each and every offer, blood bubbling in his veins. “So, Dallas True, are we going to be a thing while you’re here?”
“Do you want that?” he whispered, hands down, best of his life still scrambling his brain. Best. Of. His. Life.
“Yeah.” She smiled, her eyes glowing. “Yeah.”
He hooked an arm around her neck and brought her close, his lips closing on hers. His body felt celestial, his mind reborn. “I really only invited you for dinner, I swear.”
She snuggled against him, fitting perfectly into a nook he hadn’t known about. “Tell it slant,” she said, trailing her nail over the tat on his hip.
He shivered, his exhale sharp, his hunger simmering.
“My early reporting used to hit the truth so hard. Brutal. No finesse. An editor once told me to think of this quote every time I started a story. Dickinson wanted to remind writers to soften the telling—‘dazzle gradually,’ I think is how she put it. That kind of thing. Although he didn’t mean for me to ink it into my skin as a reminder.
That was my twenty-three-year-old solution. ”
“I have to go,” she murmured into the curve between his neck and his shoulder, her breath skating across his skin. “Don’t forget, you said you’re a writer, and you’d tell me.”
His arm tightened around her as he pressed a kiss to her brow. “Not going to let me forget that, are you?”
She shook her head. “Unlikely.”
“Is there a spot for me to drop notes? Private.” Because the things he wanted to write couldn’t be read by anyone else.
She smothered a laugh against his chest. “There’s a wicker box under my porch swing. I keep gardening tools in there. No one uses it.”
“A secret box under your porch swing. That’s a locker combination away from the good old days.”
Gabi tipped her face up, amused and soft and close. His heartbeat pulsed, calling to her. “You complaining about writing notes to a girl?”
“No.” Dallas brushed his thumb over a smudge of chocolate on her cheek, images of her on her knees before him spinning through his mind. “I like knowing where to find you.”
“Then come find me.”
He wanted to. And it felt so natural. That was the terrifying part.
Dallas tried not to make a joke, because carelessness had ruined things in the past. “I want to be your friend, Gabi Wilder, in addition to the rest.”
She blinked once, lips parting.
He huffed out a laugh, embarrassed. “Don’t look so surprised. I’m not sure I’ve ever truly had one, so I’ll probably be terrible at it.”
“Leave the notes, Hotshot.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After she left, with a promise to call him when she got home, Dallas stood in his warm kitchen, her taste in his mouth, her fragrance everywhere, thinking about a wicker box under a porch swing.
Thinking about hidden desires.
Thinking about falling and not even trying to catch himself.