Chapter 3
chapter
three
Oliver
Our tongues collide, and the sensation pulls a growl from my throat.
Everything about her is perfect. The weight of her body on my lap, her taste; a mixture of whiskey and lime, the feel of her soft skin against my palms. I run my hands around to her breasts, weighing them, plucking at the metal through her nipples. She whimpers into my mouth.
But then she lowers herself all the way onto my lap, and I feel the heat of her pussy through our clothes, and every thought I had about being sensible dissolves like sugar in rain.
I stop being careful. Tongues and teeth, her fingers curl into my shirt, my hat sliding sideways on her head.
It’s intense and so damn hot I could embarrass myself just from kissing her.
There is exactly no world in which she doesn’t know what she’s doing to me.
She grinds herself down on the hard line of my erection. I might have permanent zipper marks when this is all said and done, but right now I don’t give a shit. When she releases a low, throaty sound into my mouth, I know—without a single doubt—she feels exactly what she’s doing to me.
I pull back and cup her face in both hands and look at her. Really look. The hat sits crooked over her hair, the diamond through her nostril glints faintly in the dark, and every tattoo I can see is just another thing I want to learn. “You are something else,” I tell her.
She smiles, slow and a little shy in a way that catches me completely off guard. “I was going to say the same thing to you, Cowboy.”
Again, I cup both of her breasts, swiping my thumbs across her nipples, careful and then not careful when she arches into the touch. She makes a sound that rearranges something in my chest.
Then her hands drop to my belt, and she gets to work.
We are absolutely doing this.
I haven’t done anything like this since I was seventeen and considerably more reckless. But this woman has driven every reasonable thought out of my head with nothing but her mouth and the way she looks in my hat.
“Condom?” she asks.
“Uh, yeah, but no judgment.”
Her brows raise.
I lean over and open the glove box, where I pull out a brand new, industrial-sized box of condoms.
“No judgment, but I do think there’s a story there,” she says.
“I have two brothers and two sisters who all think they’re fucking hilarious.”
By the time I’ve got the box in hand, she’s got my jeans undone and her hands are working into my boxers.
I rip open the box, and the square foil wrappers explode all over my truck.
She giggles. “I think we only need the one, unless you’ve got another dick hiding in here.” She runs her hand over my cock, and I groan in response.
“Just the one.”
“Feels more than sufficient.”
“Mischief,” I say, when her fingers wrap around me.
“Yeah?”
“You are so damn sexy. Sexiest woman I’ve ever met.
” I drag her mouth back to mine and kiss her like I mean it.
Because I do. The kiss feels enormous somehow, bigger than the truck cab, bigger than the flat dark fields stretching out around us.
Like it means something, it has no business meaning between two people who haven’t even traded real names.
I manage to get the condom on—fast, because we’re moving like a brushfire and I refuse to lose my head so completely that I do something stupid.
“God, I wish we had more room,” I mutter against her throat. “There’s so much I want to do to you.”
“Like what?” she asks, her lips moving along my jaw.
This woman is going to ruin me. “I want to lay you out flat and taste every inch of you. Want to trace every one of these tattoos with my mouth and figure out where they end.” I slide a hand into her hair and grip gently.
“Want to know what it feels like to have you fall apart against my tongue before I slide my dick all the way inside you.”
She makes a soft, wrecked sound.
She reaches under the hem of her skirt, shifts around for a moment, then pulls her underwear free and sets it on the dash like a flag of surrender. She holds up her fingers and they’re gleaming in the dark.
Without a word, she brings them to my lips.
I close my mouth around them, lick them clean.
“Like honey,” I tell her. Then I pull her down into another kiss and stop thinking in complete sentences.
She positions herself over me and sinks down slowly.
I drop my head back against the headrest and stare at the roof of my truck and think—briefly, barely—that I am not a man who gets overwhelmed. I am steady. I am measured. I am a man who has been through enough to learn not to feel things too fast.
But I was not prepared for this woman.
I was not prepared for the weight of everything she’s making me feel. I desperately want to ask her for more information. A name. A number. Another night. But that’s not what we agreed to.
I get my hands on her hips and tighten my fingers into her plush skin.
“You feel so good,” I manage. “Goddamn.”
She rises up on her knees and then shifts down again and finds her rhythm, and I am not in my head anymore. I am just here. Just this cab, just this dark road, just her.
“Cowboy,” she breathes.
I lean forward and close my mouth around one pierced nipple. She gasps and grips my shoulders.
“I need to—” She breaks off. “I’m close. I’m so close.”
I pull back to look at her. My hat is still somehow on her head, tilted wildly to one side, her hair loose around her shoulders, her lips swollen, her chest flushed under all that beautiful ink. She looks like something I saw once in a dream and spent years trying to remember.
“You are gorgeous,” I tell her.
The feeling building at the base of my spine is coming faster than I’d like—I normally have more patience, more discipline. But I’m not performing anything tonight. I’m just here.
“Cowboy.” She looks straight at me, dark eyes wide, pupils blown. “Cowboy, I’m—”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, Mischief. You going to come on my dick?”
She comes apart. Completely and utterly above me, around me, her whole body shaking, one hand knocking my hat off her head as she grabs at the roof of the cab for something to hold. She’s everywhere. She’s surrounding me.
And I just let go. What else is there to do?
I grip her hips and move her, and she moans, and I feel her begin to wind tight all over again, and I am not ready for that.
“Think you’ve got one more in you?” I ask.
She shakes her head, but her body says something else entirely.
“I think you do.” I shift my hand between us and find what I’m looking for. “Right there, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes, yes—Cowboy—”
My orgasm hits like the ground coming up to meet you. And she follows me over, clenching and shaking, and I have never in my life felt anything so exactly right. I wish, in that moment, I knew her name.
We stay like that for a long while. The windows are fogged. The rain has slowed, but still patters on the windshield.
She’s collapsed against my chest, my hat on the floorboard, her cheek against my neck. I can feel her breathing even out.
More at peace than I’ve been in a long time, I realize. And it’s not just the release. I know the difference. I’ve had plenty of one without the other.
This is something else.
“Wow,” she says finally, her breath warm against my throat.
“Very much wow.” I stare at the fogged windshield. Now what? I’ve done this before—not often, but enough—and it’s always simple. Simple because I make it simple. Get dressed. Drive away. Done.
This doesn’t feel simple. This feels like the opposite of simple.
She seems to reach the same conclusion at the same moment, because she gently lifts herself off me and starts feeling around the seat for her shirt.
She finds it, pulls it over her head, and rights herself.
Settles her underwear back into place with the kind of composure I respect and resent in equal measure.
I take care of the condom and tuck myself back into my jeans.
Then she leans over and kisses my cheek. Light and deliberate. “That was incredible,” she says quietly. “Unexpected. But incredible.”
I chuckle, and it comes out rougher than I intend. My hands are steadier than they have any right to be.
I glance over at her. She’s biting the inside of her lip, looking out at the dark fields like she’s reading something written in them.
“Why does this feel awkward?” I ask.
She laughs. The sound of it hits me somewhere behind the sternum.
I could get addicted to that sound. That’s a problem.
“Because it is a little,” she admits. “I don’t usually do this.
With someone I just met.” She holds up a hand quickly.
“I’m not saying I regret it. I don’t. I just—it’s not really how I operate. ”
I nod because I believe her completely. Everything about her—the way she talked about the town she came from, the way she said foster home like it was just a fact and not a wound, her love of nineties country music—speaks to her being real. No artifice, no enhancements.
Which makes me wonder what it says about me that she did this one.
“You want me to take you back to town?”
She bites down on her lip and then pulls out her phone, typing out a message. She waits for a response, then nods. “My friend will drive back and grab me. You can just take me back to the bar.”
“I can drive you home so she doesn’t have to come back out in the weather,” I say. It feels like the right gesture, but I know there’s more than politeness behind my offer.
“Nah, she’s going to want a thorough debriefing, so I might as well get it over with.”
“Ouch.” I touch my chest, feigning a wound.
“Don’t you worry, Cowboy, I’ll be singing your praises.
We’re quiet most of the drive back. The county road rolls out ahead of us, flat and silver-grey in the headlights. I turn back onto the highway. The lights of town gather in the distance.
I pull into the parking lot at Ace’s, and her friend is already there waiting.
She unclips her seatbelt and turns to face me. I know, without doubt, I’ll be thinking about her for a long time. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier. “This was the best night I’ve had in—maybe ever,” she says. “Even though it wasn’t supposed to be anything.”
She kisses me one last time. Soft and final, tasting like goodbye, and I hate how much I hate it.
“Good luck out there, Mischief.” My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. “Hope you find what you’re looking for.”
She gives me a small, wistful smile. Picks my hat up off the seat—I hadn’t even noticed she’d held onto it—and sets it gently back on my head. Adjusts the brim with two fingers.
“Take care of yourself, Cowboy.”
Then she’s out of the truck and walking away, a flash of ink and dark hair, and my hat’s still warm from her hands.