Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Dallas
I rritated to the point of madness, I spun again, ready to head out the door— but what happened was that, after waiting three seconds to hear birds chirping outside the barn, the rustle of the wind, and the faint grunt of bulls in the distance, I yanked the door closed.
No one was around, and while I knew I would hear guys coming a mile away— I didn’t want to take chances.
Striding back to Blair, I saw her apprehensive gaze; what did she expect me to do to her? Drag her to some godforsaken part of the ranch and become Hannibal Lecter?
If that is what she thought—she was partially correct.
“Dallas?” she asked. “What are you?—”
I grabbed both of her hands and pinned them above her head, bracing her wrists with my forearm and, with the other free hand, slid down to cup her ass. I squeezed and kneaded those perfect globes as her head knocked back on the wall .
“When are you going to stop riling me up?” I asked.
“When you decide to wake up and smell the c-coffee,” Blair replied, and we both heard the hitch in her words. “Or do you want to stay in your bubble, believing a lynch mob is just outside your do?—?”
I didn’t give her a chance to keep going because kissing her hard suddenly became way more pressing. I slanted my lips over hers and claimed her mouth, needing to shut her up and needing to excise the lust inside me. My tongue swept between her lips, tangled with her; I angled her as I wanted, sucking on her lips.
When I broke the kiss, her eyes were dazed, and her lips were swollen. I leaned in, captured her bottom lip again, and suckled on it before biting down and swallowing her gasp. I moved my lips down her neck and peeled her collar apart to fix my lips over her pulse point, suckling on the throbbing pulse— before I sunk my teeth into her skin.
“Ah!” she half-screamed.
I pulled my mouth away and licked over the bruise with the flat of my tongue, like a big cat would. Pulling away again, I said, “Keep your hands where they are. If you move them an inch, I won’t be pleased.”
“Right, because I live to please you,” her words trembled, sarcastic as anything, but her hands did not move an inch.
Grinning, I pulled off to crouch, took her boots off, dropped them to the side, and worked out the button of her pants. All I wanted to do was tug down her pants, push her up against the wall, and get my tongue inside her.
I could finger-fuck her too, find that little g-spot and rub it and stroke that clit until she screamed. She wore those lacy little panties like before; only these were nude instead of black. I tucked one finger under the gusset of her panties and pressed up.
She groaned, “Fuck.”
Pressing my nose on her mound, I asked, “How wet are you, Blair? How wet is your sweet pussy?”
Her chest heaved, and her belly contracted, “Very…very wet.”
I dragged my fingers lightly over the seat of her underwear again before I yanked them down and touched her. She was hot and silky wet. Her pussy clenched; her breath stuttered at my touch.
“Want me to stop?”
She shook her head frantically. “No. Oh, don’t stop.”
I grinned and licked at the seam of her crotch. “Maybe I should.”
“Dallas, no.” she pleaded.
“You’re begging now.” I fixed my hands under her thighs. “Maybe I should leave you hanging.”
“Don’t you fucking dare, you son of a bitch,” she groaned.
I looked up. “My, my, what a filthy mouth you have on you, Miss Southern Belle. Are you a good girl, Blair?”
“Yes.”
With that, I slid a finger that I slowly circled around her entrance, one digit slowly dipping in, nice and deep in her body, and her body jackknifed. “Really? That mouth tells me there is a bad girl in you.”
“No,” she rolled her hips. “I always follow the rules.”
Looking up at her, I smirked, “You’re in the barn with me, my finger inside you. Good girls don’t get finger-fucked up against a wall.”
“Do bad girls get your mouth on them, then?” she asked, sweat blooming on her reddening skin .
“Is that what you want?” I asked rhetorically. “You want me to lick your pussy? You want me to eat you out?”
“Yes, now get your mouth on me, cowboy,” Blair ordered.
I couldn’t miss the way her pussy gushed all over my hand. Yeah, Blair was a naughty girl. “Bad girls do get their pussies licked.”
The thin triangle of silky hair on her pussy was neatly trimmed and smelled sweet. Her scent had my blood surging this close, making my mouth water. I pried her thighs wide, lifted both legs on my shoulders, and slid my tongue everywhere—between her folds, around her clit, and inside her slick entrance.
I wanted it all; I wanted all of her, so I stabbed my tongue deep, licking and teasing, sucking and flicking; a few times, I even let my teeth graze her swollen clit. That bare hurt made her pleasure spiral out of control.
Her thigh pressed against my ear, trembling. Her stomach shuddered at her breaths, and the sounds she made— fuck! My cock was harder than an iron rod, listening to those little frantic breaths and cries and tasting her. Pre-cum spurted from the throbbing tip and stained my boxers and jeans, but I didn’t care. This was pleasure enough.
“Oh, god,” she groaned, her hands still in place.
One thing I was glad about was that years of experience and sacrifice had taught me self-control. Before Blair—and her smart mouth—I’d enjoyed dominance. With her now, I craved it. Her facade was peeled away when Blair surrendered, and I realized this was her true self.
For so long, she’d been strong as the kickass businesswoman she was, but in the dark, in the quiet times when she did not have to be her other self—this was her release .
When she melted for me, her surrender filled the cracks of my thirsty soul and made me harder than a steel pike.
“Jesus, Dallas.”
I fucking loved the sound of my name on her lips, especially with that desperate tremor to her voice and her inner walls rippling around my thick tongue. Shifting a little, I worked a finger and then another and a third into her tight channel and curled them, hitting her g-spot.
The moment I found it, she convulsed around me. “How fucking long is your tongue? Jesus.”
“I don’t think Jesus wants any part of what we’re doing, sweetheart,” I smirked.
I wanted to get her out of her mind, finding her spot and then rubbing it as I finger-fucked her hard, knowing she was about to come. I couldn’t help but grin against that perfect center of sweet flesh, knowing she was so responsive to me. My mouth closed over her clit and sucked hard and deep.
She tore at my hair. “Fuck!” Her voice rose in pitch. “Fuck, Dallas!”
She came, her hips snapping, her channel putting the squeeze on my fingers as she shouted and gasped out her release. I couldn’t cover her mouth or stifle her sounds, not that I wanted to miss one bit of it. It was all for me.
I was right. Blair was a bad, bad girl. I slowed my thrusts, and then stroked her inner walls until she sagged back, limp. Slipping my fingers from her, I licked them. “Hadn’t I told you to keep your hands where I’d placed them?”
Her chest heaved, while her fingers carded through my hair, lightly this time and not ripping the strands out by the root. “You have to excuse me,” Blair said, her words still breathy. “I wasn’t exactly prepared to have my world tilt sideways. ”
Reaching for her discarded underwear, I had her slip back into them before getting her jeans on, too. Blair plucked the bun from her hair and shook out her hair; straight locks of silver spilled into her hand, falling in tangled streamers to her waist like liquid snow.
Well, the carpet did match the drapes, for sure.
Plucking the hat back on my head, I inspected the tumbler. “Damn. It’s cold.”
Blair burst out laughing. “You’re impossible.”
Capping it, I went back to the horse I’d been in the middle of dressing before I’d gotten assaulted with a big-ass dog—that was surprisingly quiet in that stall—and then Blair had come around. She was silent for a long time, but I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck.
“How did we go from fighting to fucking?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I have no clue. Maybe we’re more messed up than we think we are.” With the hide brush in my hand, I looked over my shoulder. “What were you doing out here, anyway?”
“I thought you were already on the ranch, and I came to saddle a horse and see what was going on out there.”
Getting the saddle on, I ensured the straps were cinched right before asking, “Should I get a horse for you?”
“Please,” she replied. “Such a gentleman.”
I snorted. “Hold the compliments, please.”
A healthy spread of snow was on the ground as we got to the pasture, where the rest of the guys were minding the peacefully grazing bulls. Two of the guys, the youngest, Isaac, and another guy, Santos, who I understood had been in a horrible accident a few months ago, rode over to us. He was holding out a cell.
“Good that you’re here,” Santos said. “Bossman was trying to call you, but couldn’t get you.”
I took the cell and cocked it to my ear. “Warrick?”
“Hey,” Warrick said, and I heard wind through the back of the cell. Was he driving? “Zoe and I are in DC. To my surprise, the proceedings went quicker than I’d thought they would have. We might be back by the end of next week before Thanksgiving.”
My brows lifted high. “Oh, that’s good.”
“It is,” he replied. “How are things going with the site?”
“It’s going well,” I replied. “The snow is going to stall the development for a while, but as far as I can see, they’re following the schematic to the letter.”
“Good,” Warrick said. “Hold down the fort for me. I’ll be back home soon.”
I handed the cell back to Santos. “Thanks. Warrick will be back soon.”
“Yep. He told me too,” he slid the cell into a saddlebag and then nodded over my shoulder. “So, what's going on with her?”
Craning my head over my shoulder, I saw Blair sitting pretty on her mare, hair down under a beaten brown hat I’d found in the stable. For a moment, she looked like a proper cowgirl— if that cowgirl had posed for Vogue.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, come on,” Santos drawled. “You know what I mean. Are you hitting that or what?”
“No,” I lied.
“So, I can hit that?” Santos added.
The possessive growl that left my throat sounded like a bear over his kill. Laughing his head off, Santos added, “That is what I thought.”
I was pissed that I’d allowed my true self to slip through the cracks, even when it was the best for everyone that no one knew about me and Blair.
“Don’t worry,” Santos said, zipping his mouth shut. “I won’t say a word.”
Blair was rounding the post and heading to a spreading elm, possibly to wait out the now fluttering snow, her hair fluttering on the wind. Only, she did it at the worst possible time. A bull, a big-ass Longhorn bastard with wicked horns, while shaved down, they were still wicked, headed her way for no foreseeable reason.
Was it her hair?
Was it her unfamiliar scent?
Was it the horse?
It didn’t matter— I had to get in between them.
“Hey, bull,” I shouted, racing between them to cut him off his path to Blair. “Over here, bull.”
With a tight grip on my reins, I circled his perimeter, drawing his eyes from her to me. It was enough to distract him, but now he knew he was about to be penned, and the bull pawed a hoof, and I reached for my lasso. It’d taken about five minutes on the ranch days ago for muscle memory to kick in and for me to remember my bull-wrangling chops.
The asshole turned on his heels and charged right at full speed, making a break for Blair. He made it within six feet and ran, and with fear now, a block of sharp ice in my chest, I spun the horse, and the lasso whipped through the air, snagging a horn.
In seconds—these things happened so fast, and I couldn’t put them in chronological order, Frankie and another ranch hand, Lucas, were roping the bull too; Blair flung herself to the ground, curling up in a fetal position, or did that happen before we men had the bull roped?
My arm felt like it was about to rip out of its socket— but I could not allow her to be injured. Their ropes were around his neck, and one on his back left hoof, but damn, the ornery old bull was too stubborn to go down without a fight.
I dug my heels into Sweetie, and so did she, locking her legs and heaving to the side as I held on to the saddle’s horn and kept my seat. The bull bellowed with fury and shook his head, trying to break free.
Sweetie stood steady, keeping up with the bull but leaving enough space between us; between the three of us, we finally got that nasty beast down, and I looked over to Blair, who, smartly, had not moved an inch. That would have been disastrous, as it would have only egged the beast on.
“You got this?” I shouted over to the three.
Lucas gave me a tight nod, his arms bulging as he held the bull down, and I rode over to Blair, leaping off the horse in record time.
“Blair!” I was about to be sick. “Blair!”
When she sat up, her face was as white as death. Her face was scratched, and her wrist looked twisted the wrong way. I gently eased her up. “Are you all right?”
She looked over my shoulder, and I could only imagine her seeing the men hog-tying the bull before she looked at me. “Have you ever seen your life flash before your eyes?”
“A couple of times, yeah,” I said. “Are you hurt?”
“I—” she cradled her hand to her chest. “I think I may have sprained something. ”
“I’ll take you to the medical center,” I said, gently pulling her to her feet. “C’mon.”
Gently, I lifted her to the saddle, grabbed the saddle horn, and swung myself into the seat behind her while she hung on. She was still shaking like a leaf after a hurricane. I wrapped my arms around her and drew her close to my chest by grasping the reins.
“You’re safe now,” I whispered into her ear as she tried to relax into me, still trembling and shivering. This was the second time I’d seen Blair vulnerable, and God knows I didn’t want to see it on her face again. I’d rather see her uppity, bitch boss face instead of the pure fear I’d seen moments before.
But I had her in his arms. We were safe— for the moment, at least. We had shared something just now, an intimacy of another kind I had never felt before.
It was more than fear and frenzy. It was something else. Something that made my heart thump, something that began to bloom under my ribs and settle in my bones. I didn’t think I was going to give this up for anyone.