Chapter 23
Stick
I ruled the road.
And then I was sideswiped by Jane.
I left the bed. Left Jane dozing under the sheet. A shame to cover her luscious body, but when the sweat that we’d worked up cooled down, she’d be chilled.
I shook my head as I walked to the bathroom, unbelieving that I was thinking shit about how a girl I’d just banged might get chilled.
Except she wasn’t just any girl. And it wasn’t your regular old bang.
It was Jane. And it was…unfuckingbelievable.
The sun was nearly down and the guesthouse was dim. We hadn’t turned on any lights when I’d dragged Jane here. There hadn’t been time. I’d had her pinned against the wall too quickly.
And then she’d ground against me and all logical thought had left me. Instinct—and desperately wanting Jane naked for months—had taken hold.
And then I’d taken hold of her.
I switched on the light in the bathroom and shut the door so the glare wouldn’t rouse her.
I didn’t think she was asleep, just in more of a post-sex haze. And I was too, but I wanted to get rid of the condom and clean up a little so we could commence with round two.
I peeled the rubber off, then stopped. Something looked a little different.
It’d been a while since I’d had sex (since before that first kiss with Jane when I’d dropped off Yvette), but I knew what a used rubber looked like.
Not that I scientifically studied them or anything, but if you see what looks like blood on anything, you take a closer look.
I held the thing together at the top, then ran it under the tap so water would run off the outside of it. And the water turned pink in the basin. Yeah, blood.
She could have been having her period, though she hadn’t brought it up and I hadn’t seen anything to make me think she was.
Or she could have just started her period.
But no. I knew. Jane had been a virgin until about an hour ago.
I wrapped the condom in a couple of Kleenex (Dotty didn’t need to be dealing with the sight of that) and put it in the trash. I washed up and took a wet washcloth and dry towel back to the bedroom with me.
“Hey,” Jane said as I sat down on my side of the bed. My side. Like we had “sides” already. Like I hadn’t been sprawled right in the center of this lush bed the nights I’d stayed here.
But yeah, I’d take a side for sure if it meant sharing my bed with Jane.
She had her back to me, lying on her side, the line of her curves playing like the most erotic roller coaster ever.
“Hey,” I said. I laid the warm, wet washcloth on her bared shoulder, and draped the towel over her hip, on top of the sheet.
She reached up and pulled the washcloth in front of her. “Thanks,” she said, and the hand and the cloth disappeared under the sheet.
God, I wanted to be the one to push that warm heat against her tender flesh.
But I let her do it. Losing your virginity against a wall in a bout of emotional—okay, angry—sex might have been more than any girl could handle in one day without the guy pawing at her afterward because he just couldn’t get enough of her.
But again, this wasn’t any girl. And my guess was that Jane could handle just about anything.
“Why’d you pick out a Corvette?” she asked.
She put the used washcloth on the floor on the other side of the bed.
The towel was next to disappear under the sheet.
The movements she made drove me crazy with want, and I slipped under the sheet and pulled the duvet (or whatever Dotty had called it) up to cover my newly burgeoning woody.
It didn’t work; Jane’s eye went right to it when she rolled over onto her back and looked over at me. A brow quirked, but she didn’t remark on it. Just repeated her question, which I’d been too horned up about the thought of her under that sheet to answer. “Why’d you pick out a Corvette?”
“What do you mean?”
“You picked it out, right?”
I tried to remember what I’d said that first day, and if I was giving anything away by telling her how it had gone down.
“It’s okay. I know you would have done it. Grayson wouldn’t want to be bothered with choosing a model—beyond saying it had to be American-made. And my father… My father just wouldn’t have given a shit.”
Yep, that was pretty much exactly how it had gone down.
“You picked it out, right?”
“Yes,” I said. I reached out and laid a hand on her hip. The towel was underneath her mostly, but part of it was lying over her hip, and a bit of her stomach.
Caro had nothing but the best of everything—including in her little-used guesthouse—and the towels were big, fluffy and soft, but they felt like burlap next to Jane’s smooth skin.
I rolled onto my side to face her, keeping my hand gently on her, as if I didn’t want to scare her off.
She stayed where she was, on her back, looking up at the ceiling. I’d left the light on in the bathroom and the door about halfway open. The beam of light cut across our bodies around waist level. I raised the duvet up higher on her side, letting it rest just under her breasts.
Those babies should never—ever—be covered up at all, but I could deal with the sheet. When she’d breathe, the sheet would rise and fall on those sweet tits with just a hint of her nipples jutting against the white, crazy-high-thread-count cotton.
Nothing had ever tasted sweeter than having them in my mouth.
“Stop staring at my boobs and answer the question,” she said, though her eyes were closed.
I smiled, maybe because she couldn’t see it. “You’re a Corvette, Jane, all the way.”
She stilled for just a second before a grin crossed her face. “You mean because I’ve got great curves and am fast?”
“No, though you’ve got great curves.” I moved closer, and my hand edged up her body, off the towel completely (thank God) and over those great curves. I cupped one of her tits in my hand and flicked my thumb across the nipple, it already pebbling and hardening at my touch.
“And I’d hardly say fast. It’s been eight weeks. Twelve since Betsy’s wedding.”
She didn’t ask eight weeks since what. She knew it was that day with Yvette. The day she’d sat in front of this huge place and told me about coming there as a kid with her mother.
The day she’d pissed me off and I’d kissed her senseless.
Well, that actually could have been any day in the past eight weeks.
“You’re a Corvette because you announce your presence.
In some ways you want people to notice you.
” I thought of the funky clothes she wore, so different from what Lily and the Bribury Basics wore.
Jane never wanted to blend in, and yet… “You don’t want to announce everything about yourself.
You want to define yourself. Not let somebody else do it. ”
“And Yvette does that?”
“Yes.”
She waved a hand in dismissal. At least, I thought it was dismissal.
My mind was thinking about how great it felt when she moved with my hand cupping her.
I squeezed her and brushed my thumb against her nipple again, and she squelched a moan, I supposed not wanting me to know how much she liked it.
But she did press her thighs together, the sight of which made my dick all the harder.
“How do you figure I define myself? I’ve been nothing but a pawn my whole life. If that debacle in there today proved nothing else, it proved that.”
I pulled my mind away from how great her tits felt and tried to get it right, feeling like I had to get it right.
Not so I could keep feeling her up (and hopefully get her hands on me, too), but because I could sense something in her.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say she was vulnerable, but…
a shield was down. Not down very far, and surely not down for long.
But I knew it was my chance to take a shot.
“That’s the thing. You know you’ve been a pawn in other people’s games, but you refuse to play. You’re trying to make the rules bend to your advantage.”
“That’s just playing their game, learning what they’ve taught me by example.”
“Maybe. But maybe you’ve got everyone fooled and we’ll all be playing by your rules.”
“Ha, I’ve got no one fooled.”
My hand slid down, regretfully leaving her soft breast, and I rested it on her belly, just above her mound. “You don’t think everyone is fooled about you not being a virgin?”
Everything about her stilled. I brushed my hand gently from hipbone to hipbone, not saying a word.
“Well, of course you figured it out. You’ve probably been with tons of virgins.”
“Fewer than you’d think,” I said, which was the truth. In my neighborhood, girls didn’t stay virginal very long once they’d hit puberty.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She nodded, but didn’t look over at me. I sat up a little, resting my head on my hand, my elbow on the bed, looking down at her.
“You want to talk about it?” Words I’d probably never in my life said to a girl before. Yet they rolled off my tongue pretty easily. I wanted to hear Jane’s story.
“God, no,” she said. She moved to cover her face with a hand, but I took it in mine and returned our clasped hands back under the covers to rest on her hipbone, her palm flat on her skin, mine on hers.
“Why the big talk about wanting to bang the prof? Talking about slut-shaming you, and that you’d been with other guys?”
She shrugged, and I watched as the sheet edged a tiny bit lower. “I never actually said I’d been with anyone.”
I thought back. She was right. “No, you didn’t. But you certainly implied that you…had more experience than you obviously have.”
“It’s nobody’s business who I have or haven’t slept with.”
“You’re absolutely right, it’s not. But why the misdirection? Why not just say nothing?”
She turned her head away from me, and I thought that maybe she was putting the shield back in place. I squeezed her hand, but didn’t say anything else.
She turned her head back, but continued to look up, not at me. “You know that incident with Edgar Prescott?”
“Who?”
“That old guy at Betsy’s wedding?”
My body tensed just thinking about that old perv’s hands on Jane. “Yeah?”