The Sweetest Tattoo

Cameron Dane

(c) 2008

ISBN 978-1-59578-477-3

The Sweetest Tattoo

Cameron Dane

Published 2008

ISBN 978-1-59578-477-3

Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509

Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © 2008, Cameron Dane. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Liquid Silver Books

http://LSbooks.com

Email:

raven@LSbooks.com

Editor

Chrissie Henderson

Cover Artist

April Martinez

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

Chapter One

Monday

Her twin was a dead man.

Kelsie Cole glared daggers at the silver Lexus pulling up the dirt road to the cabin.

John McBride, her brother’s best friend, and one of the very few people who had the ability to get under Kelsie’s skin, owned said luxury vehicle. He had always irritated her; twenty years of knowing him had not changed her desire to smack the man more times than not since practically the moment they’d met so long ago.

Damn it, what in the hell was her soon to be deceased brother doing sending this man up to the cabin during her week of vacation?

John slid out of his car, his white shirt crisp and buttoned, tie and dress pants equally neat, even in ninety-five degree August heat. His dark hair lay neatly combed and trimmed to just the right corporate length, and his face didn’t look any less attractive for the fact that he sported a five o’clock shadow.

The clock had just struck noon.

Growling under her breath, Kelsie ignored the kneejerk reaction that made her want to run inside and change out of her cutoffs and T-shirt into something that would cover her extra layer of fluff from the judgment of a man whose body didn’t dare defy him and gain an ounce of weight that wasn’t pure, steely muscle.

“You can get right back in your car and drive home, McBride,” she called down to where he stood at the bottom of the steps. “The cabin is mine for the week. I don’t care what my idiot brother must have said about it being free.”

John McBride moved up the steps with deliberate intent. Kelsie didn’t even realize she had backed up until she bumped into the storm door. Cursing that damn flight instinct that always kicked in around this man lately, she forced her body ramrod straight.

John didn’t stop moving until he stood a foot in front of her, towering over her own considerable six-foot frame. He dropped his black duffel bag at his side. “I’ve told you a thousand times I don’t respond to the name McBride. If you want me to answer to you this week, you need to start remembering that my name is John.”

“Call yourself the king of the whole damn world for all I care. You’re still not staying in this cabin with me this week.”

John swept her with his icy blue stare, eliciting a shiver. She crossed her arms against her chest and rubbed her fingers over her favorite tat, a blue and green elaborate swirling design on her upper arm that only she knew incorporated hers, her brother’s, and their grandmother’s initials in the circular scroll work. It was one of a dozen tattoos on her body, and only one of the reasons this man had a tendency to study her as if she were a science project. Her shocking pink hair and ears full of piercings came in a close second and third. Her look flew in the face of everything John and her brother represented, where having a neat and clean image meant the difference between gaining new clients in their venture capitalist firm or not. Kelsie always thought John McBride took the controlled, straight and narrow lifestyle just a little too close to his heart.

She sometimes wondered if he had replaced his soul with a scorecard so he could check off where he stood among the ranks of his fellow stuffed shirts.

“I didn’t drive five hours up the North Carolina mountainside to turn around and go home, Kelsie.” God, she hated the way he stressed her name, made it sound so easy to say when she wouldn’t do the same for him. “You can take up the crossed dates with your brother, but I only take one goddamned week of vacation a year, so I have no intentions of leaving.” He scrutinized her from top to bottom. “You look settled in. I don’t think you’re about to pack up and drive home either.”

They both lived and worked in Raleigh, although her brother had once told her John said he and she might as well be on different planets.

Kelsie looked John over just as thoroughly as he’d done to her, deliberately taking her time on the wide expanse of chest hidden under that damn wrinkle-free, starched shirt. She finally reached his face, and wished she hadn’t done it. He sported a lazy smile that actually twinkled and rang true in his eyes. Damn typical man. He’d enjoyed her leering.

“You want to invite me in?” John leaned down and grabbed his bag. “Or do I wait until you’re off swimming in the lake and slip in with my own key?”

“All right, fine.” Kelsie pushed her way inside and led him to the unoccupied room.

“But just so you know, I’m only doing it because I know you could sue me for everything I own if I make you wait outside and you end up with Lyme disease—or something equally horrific—as a result of my refusal to let you indoors.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed so hard.” John paused at the threshold of the door to his room. He met her gaze and that infuriating slow smile of his showed itself again. “I happen to know your business is worth a tidy little sum.”

He closed the door in her face, leaving her standing on the outside with her jaw touching the floor.

Son of a bitch. How in the hell did John McBride know about the net worth of The Sweetest Tattoo?

* * * *

John strode down the trampled path of grass to the private deck that jutted out into the lake, and immediately spotted the top of Kelsie’s familiar pink hair over the back of one of the Adirondack chairs. He tossed his towel over the back of the empty one next to her and took a seat.

Kelsie barely spared him a glance, but it lasted long enough for him to see the fire in her hazel eyes.

He arched a brow. “What?”

“It’s a big cabin and an even bigger lake and mountain.” Kelsie’s attention went right back to what she had on her lap. “You’re not required to sit next to me just because we’re here together. It’s kind of like that guy who walks into an almost empty movie theater and sits down next to the only other person in the place.” She shot him another quick look. “It’s a hinky combination of creepy, irritating, and confusing.”

John forced down the desire to grab Kelsie and make her exchange an actual dialog with him, rather than these scathing retorts he got much too often from her lately. He didn’t want to fight, damn it, he just wanted her to talk to him like a real person. He had seen her do it with other people, so he knew she could.

Stretching his legs out, John settled his hands against his bare stomach. “What are you working on?” With his partially blocked view, he could only see a sketchpad with pencil markings. He couldn’t make out what she sketched without getting a whole lot closer. Right now, he valued his balls too much to try scooting in.

“Just doodling,” Kelsie answered. Her pencil moved with steady strokes over her paper. “Sketching the lake and the cabin on the other side.”

“Really?” John leaned over the arm of his chair and stole a quick look after all.

“Huh.” He didn’t know shit about art, but the sketch looked damned realistic, as well as pretty, to his untrained eye. “I didn’t realize you did more traditional stuff like this. I always assumed you limited your work to designs you could incorporate into a tattoo.”

He happened to know that everything inked into her curvaceous body was Original Kelsie Cole. “Are you looking to try something new?”

“Nope.” She didn’t look up. “This is just for fun. I love what I do, McBride, even if it doesn’t seem very mature and adult to you.”

“Hey.” John jumped out of his chair in a shot and clutched Kelsie’s chin in his hand.

Tilting her head back, he forced her to meet his gaze. Christ, he hardly ever got to touch her, but when he did, she stirred him to hard life in about two damn seconds. Right now, he didn’t much care if she saw his stiff cock tenting the crotch of his swim trunks. She would find out about it in one way or another sometime in the next seven days. Living in isolation, in one cabin, didn’t leave much room for secrets or hiding.

Kelsie jerked against his hold. “Let go of me.” She glared up at him.

John loosened his grip, but not nearly enough to let her slip free. “I’m getting damn sick of you putting words in my mouth for me.” His voice dropped to lethally soft, one he used on clients to which he offered one last chance not to screw up before he yanked his money out of their business. “I don’t understand what you do, Kelsie, I admit that, but I have never judged it as less than what I do. The next time you get defensive about something innocent I say, or call me McBride when I have already asked you to call me John, I’m gonna stick my tongue down your throat just to shut you up. You decide if you want that the next time you think of something bitchy to throw at me just because you know it’ll piss me off.”

John let Kelsie go and dove into the water. If he stayed one second longer watching her eyes burn a hole through him, he just might take her right there in the Adirondack chair, witnesses from across the lake and all.

Chapter Two

Tuesday

Kelsie put her book down on the little wood table next to her chair and stopped pretending she had anything on her mind other than John’s comment from yesterday afternoon. What in the heck had he meant by using a kiss as a threat to shut her up? Did he think he could intimidate her sexually in order to get her to comply? She hadn’t exactly had a ton of boyfriends—which he probably knew through conversations with her brother—but she was no shrinking virgin either. She had a collection of sex toys that she’d become extremely intimate with over the last few years. Hell, thinking she would be by herself this week, she’d brought a couple of them up here to help her relax.

She ought to leave her big, vibrating dildo out on the couch, just to freak him out.

Kelsie chuckled, and even smiled for the first time since John McBride had shown up and thrown her vacation into a tailspin. Yeah, that would mess with his male ego a little bit, and maybe even give him a complex when he saw the size of the vibrator. After all, he’d been trying to intimidate her when he said he’d shove his tongue down her throat the next time she taunted him. He didn’t really want to kiss her. He barely saw her as female, let alone as a woman worthy of his attention.

A little stab of pain nicked Kelsie in the chest at that. She rubbed her fingers over her heart until she couldn’t feel the sting anymore. The dull hurt wasn’t about John in particular anyway, but rather about men in general who couldn’t look deeper and see her heart beneath the perceived image of a tough, tattooed woman. At least, that’s what she told herself, as she always did when John looked at her so openly with his carnival show curiosity, as if she wasn’t a human being with feelings and insecurities underneath the body art.

“Hungry?” John’s whisky-rich voice drifted to her from the door.

Kelsie shivered, but blamed it on the cool air breezing across the night sky.

John stepped out onto the porch, sporting jeans and a white T-shirt, and, God, bare feet. There was something too fresh-from-the-shower intimate about those damn feet, and Kelsie quickly looked away.

“Come on, Kels.” John teased with a lightness in his voice, something she’d never heard in him before. “I swear I didn’t poison the food. It’s perfectly edible, and I made enough for two.” He moved to her side and picked up the lantern and her romance novel.

“Hey!” She made a grab for her stuff, but he two-stepped out of range.

“Come inside. Please.” He held open the door for her. When she didn’t move, he added, “With your pale skin I’m worried you’re going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes.

Help a guy out. I don’t want to have to explain to your brother that you contracted encephalitis because you wouldn’t share a kitchen and living room with me for a couple of hours each night.”

Kelsie moved to the door, but paused in front of John. She found him in the shadows, the pale blue of his eyes shining almost silver in the half-light. “Just so you know, I put on Skin-So-Soft before I came outside.”

She moved inside.

Behind her, as the storm door banged shut, Kelsie swore she heard him softly say, “I know.”

* * * *

Kelsie pushed away from the kitchen table, and if she didn’t have John sitting right across from her, she would have unsnapped her shorts. “All right,” she put a hand on her stomach, “I admit it; that was delicious.” John had made gourmet hamburgers, seasoned potato slices, and macaroni and cheese. “You are officially the chef for the rest of the week.”

“No problem.” John’s eyes shined bright over a glass of beer. “It’s nice to have more than one person to cook for, for a change.”

“You picked the right woman for that.” Kelsie hadn’t seen a single-digit size clothing label in her wardrobe since twelve years of age. “I love to eat.” She pulled John’s empty plate across the table and stacked it on hers. Getting up and moving to the sink, she added, “There’s very little, meal-wise that I won’t try at least once.”

John grabbed the glasses and stood too. “Lady, you have no idea what a turn-on that is for just about every man on the planet.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I said meal-wise, McBride, so back that fantasy train up, buddy.”

John’s eyes flashed sudden fire, and too late, Kelsie realized what she said.

She threw her hands up. “Wait.”

“No damn way.” John moved in fast. He set the glasses down with force, and they slid across the counter at Kelsie’s back, clinking into the backsplash. Gripping the countertop on either side of her, John leaned in until their faces were only inches apart. “I did give you fair warning.” As he breathed out, the air warmed between them, tingling over Kelsie’s lips and skin. She darted her tongue out to eradicate the disturbing sensation.

John’s focus shifted briefly to her lips. When he came back to her, the fire burning within turned her knees to Jell-O. “Christ, you have no idea how enticing a woman you are.”

“No, I’m not.” Kelsie’s protest died on her lips. John leaned in and claimed her mouth, stealing another sharply worded retort. His hard lips moved over hers, grazing, searching, learning her so thoroughly she couldn’t remember her last thought. She just knew nobody had ever kissed her like this. John didn’t jam his tongue down her throat as he’d sworn he would. Instead, he coaxed her into wanting his kiss, teasing her with hinting flicks from the tip of his tongue.

Kelsie tentatively slid her tongue through the seam of John’s lips, reaching for his heat. John groaned against her and clutched her hips, dragging her against him as he finally deepened the kiss. He slanted his lips over hers and sucked on her tongue, pulling it deep inside the moist cavern of his mouth. He sparked a hidden, dry kindling she didn’t even know existed inside her, and set her aflame.

Kelsie threw her arms around John’s neck and pulled him closer. In return, John slid his arm around her waist and hoisted her up onto the counter. He pushed against her knees and forced his way between her spread legs. She automatically squeezed him with her thighs and rocked her hips against the bulge riding her pussy through their clothes.

“Damn it, Kels, you drive me insane.” John reached for the edge of her T-shirt and started drawing it up. “You always smell like ginger, and strawberries, and sunshine.”

He tossed her shirt aside, made quick work of her bra, and took his fill of her with his eyes. Her breasts hung heavy and full with big rosy nipples. The pale globes of flesh were one of the few places on her body that didn’t showcase a single tattoo. She knew her size fit her body, but Kelsie still had to curl her hands into fists against the countertop so she didn’t cover herself up. She knew she didn’t come close to the perfection John had become accustomed to in his women. She determinedly refused to feel ashamed. Slowly, as John stared, her dusky areolas puckered to hard, nubby points of sensitivity.

John lifted his gaze to hers. His eyes, no longer pale, burned with blue fire. “I thought for sure you’d have at least a rose inked in the valley of the smooth, perfect skin of your breasts.”

“Nothing so plain as…”

Before she could finish, John dipped his head down and drew a circle around her twisting nipple with the tip of his tongue, and then blew against her wet skin. She gasped as the tormenting coolness rushed a telling gush of wetness between her legs.

“Honey,” John whistled, low and soft, “you make me hungry for a different kind of dessert.” He opened his mouth over her breast and suckled half of her tit inside, swirling his tongue all around the pearled tip. Kelsie bucked against his hardness and almost came on the spot.

She squirmed against the counter, trying desperately to work herself off against his straining erection. He nipped a small bite against her aching breast, wringing a stinging jolt of surprising pleasure out of her.

He kissed his way up her chest, creating a trail of lingering licks along her throat and under her chin until he landed back on her mouth. He tugged her jaw open and forced his way inside, taking her with a deep, consuming kiss, as he’d threatened to do while out on the dock. Kelsie dug her fingers into his T-shirt over his stomach, needing an anchor as she slid her tongue into his mouth and ate at him just as voraciously as he did to her. He jerked against her, and the involuntary action forced an answering tremor out of her. God, she didn’t understand what in the hell was happening with this man, but she would implode from unfulfilled need if he pulled away right now.

John broke the kiss, but didn’t move far away. She could still feel his lips grazing hers. “You want help with that itch you need scratched?” His hands went to the waistband of her cutoffs. The snap popped loudly in the sudden silence, and the drag of her zipper rang through the open cabin just as jarringly. He lowered it until it could go no more.

Kelsie covered John’s hands, stilling them before he could tug her shorts down her legs.

He stopped, but kept his hands against her lower belly. Bringing his focus up to her, he said, “What is it?” and leaned in to steal a quick kiss. “You are wound up so damn tight, honey. I know you need to come.” His hand slid down the seam of her crotch with gentle pressure, splitting her swollen lips open under her clothes. “For just once in our goddamn lives don’t fight me.” He pushed up into her sex through two layers of fabric and rubbed the soft cotton of her panties over the entrance to her cunt. Sharp lines of pleasure pulled hard inside Kelsie, fluttering whispery, intoxicating sensations into her stomach. He did it again, and she whimpered against his mouth.

John put his lips against her ear. “Let me do this for you.” His smooth, rich voice snaked into her body and wrapped itself around her instinct to protest, smothering her caution. “No recriminations, no judgments, no second-guesses tomorrow, from either one of us. Just let me take care of you right here, right now, because you need it, and because lord knows I want to do it.”

Kelsie closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and nodded. God, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d let a man close enough to even get the chance to express an interest in her, let alone far enough for sex. She was not a one-night stand kind of woman. Right now, in this kitchen, she couldn’t make herself believe she had agreed to a quick one-time fuck with John either. She had known this man for twenty-one years, even if they had spent half of it bickering about anything and everything, even stuff as asinine as the legitimacy of referee calls when they watched football together. If she were completely honest, aside from her brother and grandmother, nobody knew her better than John McBride did.

Kelsie shivered, and wondered if she’d just made a terrible, terrible mistake.

John tangled his hands in her hair and tugged her head back until it stung her scalp.

“You don’t get to hide from this.” His voice reeked with awareness and complete authority.

She opened her eyes and locked on his gaze.

He smiled, and it made him look downright feral. “You don’t get to think about someone else,” he added. “You’re gonna know it’s me touching you when you come.”

She couldn’t stand for him to see how much she wanted this, when she couldn’t understand it herself. She flashed an equally wicked grin back at him, covering the sudden vulnerability infecting her soul. “Trust me, McBride, I don’t think forgetting it’s you will be a problem.”

John’s eyes darkened to ocean water. “Christ, you know how to stir me up.” He let go of her hair and hooked his fingers in the waistband of her panties and cutoffs. “You always did.”

Kelsie’s heart raced. “I know.” She lifted her hips, and he tugged the last stitches of clothing down her legs into a puddle on the hardwood floor.

John looked down, and she swore he lost his legs for a moment. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, his voice thick and rough. “That is incredible.”

John traced his fingers over the red and gold twin dragon tattoos that circled her waist like a permanent low-riding belt. The trail of his touch left goose bumps in its wake, bringing a strange, new three-dimensional life to her tats. The tails of her dragons intertwined in a love knot on the small of her back, and their bodies stretched around hers, with each of their heads touching just above her mound. Her completely shaved mound. Just above her sex, she had the image of a pair of cherries inked into her flesh, forever out of the reach of the dragons’ forked tongues.

John brought his gaze back up to hers. “You didn’t want me to see this.”

She shook her head. “You judge.”

He put a finger against her lips. “You assume.”

She pulled his hand away. “I don’t understand.”

“You’ll figure it out.” His hand slipped between her legs. “Eventually.” He seared his lips to hers, and plunged two fingers deep inside her pussy.

John had long, lean, elegant fingers, and they took her channel with such carnal discipline Kelsie choked on the pleasure of it. She tilted her hips forward and rode his embedded fingers with complete abandon, taking as much from him as he would give. He gave a lot, but Kelsie’s tight vagina pulsed and screamed for more.

“Open for me, honey.” John fed the words into her mouth, made her taste his desire.

“Put your feet on the counter and let me see everything.”

His fingers felt so damn good inside her that Kelsie practically cried. No thought of disobeying John entered her thoughts at all. She bent her legs and planted her heels on the edge of the counter, splitting herself wide-open for his perusal. Her clit, already giant and swollen with blood, jutted out with need from beneath its protective hood.

John looked, but only for a moment. “Damn it, that’s a pretty sight. Lips almost as sweet as these.” He slanted his mouth over hers and claimed another deep kiss, almost as if he couldn’t get enough. He forced a third finger through her snug entrance and started to thrust.

Kelsie came unglued. She had never been with a man who didn’t want to get right to the fucking, and she didn’t know how to process that John made this act all about her.

Moreover, the fact that it was this particular man so completely focused on her pleasure churned discomfiting, disturbing feelings inside Kelsie, right alongside the fisting need to come. Confused, Kelsie didn’t know what to do.

She tore her mouth from his and tried to draw back from his hand, but had nowhere to go. John worked his fingers in her pussy with relentless deep strokes, and tilted his fingers up at just the right angle to torment her g-spot. She wanted to stop—needed to—

before she made herself into a fool by losing it in front of this man. She ordered her body to jump off the counter and run, but her muscles wouldn’t obey. Instead, she looked down and watched her hips undulate back and forth over his buried fingers, helping him wring every damn exposing action out of her own body for his viewing pleasure.

“Come for me, darlin’.” John’s voice scratched raspy, sounding near to the breaking point himself. He moved his thumb up and covered her clit. “Come all over my hand.”

He rolled her aching bead of flesh under the pad of his thumb and pushed her right over the edge.

Kelsie screamed hoarsely like an injured animal, watching him, unable to break away as she exploded into a thousand little pieces. He hit her sweet spot inside, and she flooded over his hand, giving him everything he wanted with no way to pull it back. She couldn’t bear the intimacy in his eyes, so she looked down. Almost with horror, she watched herself enthusiastically pumping her cunt over the invasion of his fingers again and again. Her pussy clutched him deep inside, holding him in to feel every tremor as she came violently on his expert touch.

Finally, wrung out completely, she lowered her legs, her muscles quivering in the aftermath of such tension.

“That was amazing.” John withdrew his fingers, coated with her juices. One by one, he stuck them in his mouth, murmuring with satisfaction as he licked away her essence from his hand. His eyes shone with new knowledge, and complete satisfaction. “Damn, you’re sweet. I’ve never had a woman respond to me with such abandon.”

Oh, Kelsie could not have this. She would never live it down.

“Your turn.” She pushed him back and dropped to her knees in front of him.

Immediately, she saw his erection pushing hard against his jeans. Working the button free, Kelsie slid the zipper down. “Time for me to take care of you.” She took his jeans and underwear down just enough to let his enormous, thickly veined cock slip free from the prison of his clothes. His penis sprang heavy in front of her face, and the earthy scent of precum took over the normal smells of the cabin’s kitchen.

John put a hand on top of her head and grabbed a fist of her hair. “That wasn’t why I… Ahh, damn it, yeah…” She closed her mouth over the mushroom head and shut him up.

Kelsie took more of his velvety, hard shaft past her lips, sucking the salty flesh with gentle pressure, hopefully tormenting him as he’d done to her. She pulled back and swirled her tongue around the cap of his thick penis, wetting him with her saliva and passing her tongue over his wide, pearling slit. She took him almost to the hilt, filling her mouth with his size until she no longer had a sliver of space within her for anything else.

John’s burning hot cock pulsed and throbbed with life against her cheeks, tongue, and even the roof of her mouth, taking her over in a way she’d not ever allowed to happen before. She took him to her throat, and then relaxed and forced the rest of him inside.

A strangled cry escaped John’s lips. He pulled himself out and pushed back in, hissing as she stayed open and let him fuck her mouth with deep, full strokes. “Jesus Christ, that’s the hottest damn thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” She had her head tilted up, and she could see him watching his erect, red penis slide through her lips. His face twisted in what looked like equal parts agony and pleasure, and deep between her legs, Kelsie responded, swelling and lubricating again.

Arousal renewed Kelsie’s efforts. She suddenly needed John to come for her own pleasure, just as much as she did for his. She reached between his legs and cupped his balls with one hand, and with the other wrapped her fingers around the slicked-up base of his prick. Twisting and manipulating his hot flesh in time with the bobbing of her head over the rest of his length, Kelsie brought John to a frenzy with the best of both worlds.

His hands pulled at her hair as he panted heavily above her, half doubled over as he clearly struggled to accept what she did to him. She had experienced much the same, so Kelsie didn’t back off one bit. She sucked on his straining cock as if it held the secret elixir to immortality, and between his legs, she flicked her fingers over that tantalizingly sensitive patch of flesh between his scrotum and anus, applying just enough pressure to drive him mad.

“Ohhh, Christ, don’t stop…” He squeezed his eyes shut tight and pulled his lips back over his teeth, showing him as a man fiercely catapulted into the deepest throes of pleasure. “Let go, let go, I need to come.” He tried to pull away, but Kelsie grabbed his hips and kept her lips wrapped firmly around his dick.

She circled her tongue around the ultra-sensitive head, and in front of her, every muscle in John’s body seized tight as a drum. He threw back his head with a wailing shout, his entire body convulsed, and within seconds hot streams of ejaculate coated Kelsie’s tongue, filling her mouth to the brim. She swallowed the bitter liquid, which he quickly replaced with more. She dug her fingers into his hips and kept him with her, and never let up on her hands plying him on the outside, or the suction that milked him dry on the inside.

Eventually, he slumped back against the table. “No more, please. My cock can’t take another touch.”

Kelsie leaned back on her heels, and his length slid free. She dropped her hands from his body and backed away until her shoulder blades hit the counter. The smooth, finished wood rubbed against her bare skin, reminding her of her complete and utter nakedness.

Now that they were no longer in the throes of primitive sexual heat, Kelsie didn’t know where to look or how to behave.

Good God, she had just given John McBride a blowjob and practically forced him to come in her mouth. Where in the hell had her sense of pride and self-preservation gone?

Heat stole over her entire body, burning her from the inside out. She reached for her T-shirt and struggled into it, fumbling with hands that didn’t want to work properly.

John cleared his throat, the sound like an avalanche bearing down on them in the oppressive silence of the cabin. Kelsie snapped her head up and found his piercing stare waiting for her.

He raised a dark brow, and a familiar half-smile quirked his lips. “Kelsie girl, I’d say this vacation just got a whole lot more interesting.”

Kelsie scrambled to her feet, her shorts and panties forgotten. His infuriating calm and cool cut through her like the sharpest blade of a knife.

She ignored the slicing pain and straightened her body to the haughtiest full breadth of her height. “No,” she assured him, “it didn’t.”

She dashed for her room before she humiliated herself and succumbed to John McBride’s charm again.

* * * *

John reached up and switched on the lamp, giving up all pretense of sleep. The woman he wanted more than anything in the entire goddamned world lay separated from him by one measly wall—and one fucking giant mistake on his part.

Damn it, he had handled what happened in the kitchen badly. He’d wanted lightness between them, with no pressure on Kelsie. Instead, his words had sounded flip and made her think he intended to use her for a summer fling. Christ, though, in fairness to him, he hadn’t been working with a clear head. In his greatest fantasies of getting something started with Kelsie he had never envisioned her down on her knees sucking him off until he came. In her mouth. Maybe she didn’t get it, but women didn’t really do that very much these days. Not that he would know, precisely speaking. He hadn’t been with a woman in nearly two years. Yet another reason why feeling her lips wrapped around his cock had temporarily made him stupid.

John groaned, adjusting his erection as he rolled onto his side. Closing his eyes, he tried to breathe normally and find some semblance of comfort. Pictures of hungry dragons filled his mind, licking at smooth, bare skin that John ached to taste himself.

Kelsie’s lips and tits had tasted so damn sweet, just as he’d known they would. Having confirmed that, John wanted to discover the rest of her body’s secrets, and demand explanations for each of her tattoos one by one. No, he wanted her to want to tell him about them, confident that he didn’t judge her for being different. He wanted her to understand how exciting he found her body and that he stared because he admired, not because he thought her a freak.

Much as in the way she called him McBride so that she didn’t have to take him seriously, Kelsie rebuffed the compliments he tried to give her by telling herself he made insensitive jokes at her expense. In retaliation, just so he could get something going between them, he took the counterpoint view to virtually every comment she made and secretly reveled in the fact that it meant they spent time together arguing without her usual defenses up. She might not like to admit it, but she got a charge out of fighting with him just as much as he did doing mock battle with her. Her cheeks blossomed with extra color, she breathed deeply, and her lips tinged red, as if bitten. When they’d argued in the past, he always thought she looked like a woman at the height of sexual arousal, and tonight, he had confirmed that thought.

Kelsie Cole came alive with him, as he knew she didn’t do with other men. John had six days to make her see the truth of what she felt before she burrowed back into the safety of her life, putting him at arm’s length once again.

Opportunity came to those who took chances, and where Kelsie was concerned, John no longer had any interest in playing it safe.

* * * *

One room over, Kelsie rubbed her fingers through her slit and over her clit, all the while wishing that something other than her own hand took care of the throbbing between her thighs. She had run to bed from the kitchen out of cowardice, and she knew it. She hated that about herself, but she could not have borne staying there and letting John see her need for him, her complete, newfound attraction to him shining in her eyes.

She didn’t want to want John, at all. He was so precise and perfect in every way, from his respectable job, to already owning his own cookie-cutter decorated home, to liking sports just enough, but not so much that it turned him in to an annoying jerk when his favorite teams lost a game. Meanwhile, Kelsie liked living in jeans and T-shirts, and loved hanging out in her store with her fellow tattoo artists, eating pizza while in between customers, sharing ideas for new designs, and finding ways to make patrons less frightened to enter The Sweetest Tattoo and ask for what they wanted.

She and John could not be more different, and if she fell for him, she would experience heartbreak in spades. She would not change to fit into his world, and as she existed right now, she would not be welcomed with anything other than stares and whispers in his.

Not that he had asked her to join his world. He was too smart and practical for that.

No, he understood that a vacation romance was just the right length of time to let a sudden attraction like this run its course. Like he said, “No recrimination, no regrets, no consequences.”

John understood the parameters of what they could be to each other, so why in the hell did she cower under her covers touching herself as if she had something of which to be ashamed? She’d masturbated before and never felt embarrassed, so why did she all of a sudden worry that John might hear her and laugh?

And what the hell did it matter to her if he did?

Kelsie grabbed her velvety hideaway pillow and pulled out her favorite vibrator.

Kicking back the covers, she spread her legs and nudged the silicone head against her moist lips, pushing with ever-increasing pressure, teasing herself with the thought of it filling her. Gradually, her channel relaxed and the phallus slipped inside. Her sex automatically contracted around the fake cock, sucking it a little deeper inside. Kelsie got the head positioned right up where she wanted it and activated the powerful little toy.

The low frequency buzzed along Kelsie’s inner walls, and she bucked her hips off the bed to take more of the toy’s length. She started sliding the vibrating dildo in and out of her cunt with shallow thrusts, moaning as her sex closed tightly around the false penis, greedy for more.

Kelsie pushed her little white tee up over her breasts and covered one mound of flesh with her free hand, tweaking the nipple to a hard, painful point. Tugging on the tip, she shoved the vibrator into her body at the same time, shooting wild lines of frayed nerves to her core from all directions at once. She ground her naked body into the bed linens, sliding even more tactile sensation over her bare ass as it swished against the sheets.

Kelsie dug her heels into the bed and knifed her pussy up to gobble the six inches of fat, silicone dick. When she could take no more, she then dropped back to the bed, taking all of it away until her opening grabbed for the head again. Every nerve ending in her sex screamed for release, the explosion so close Kelsie could practically taste it.

She thrashed about on the bed, reaching desperately for the final touch that would send her flying out of her mind.

Then, her door squeaked open, and a shadow filled the frame. John stood half in darkness and half in light for the space of a heartbeat, naked as the day he’d entered this world. In the next breath, he crossed the room, crawled on the bed between her legs, and gently removed the toy from her sex.

He laid himself on top of her, all solid weight and heat. With one hand, he stroked her hair. “I may not vibrate as well as that ten speed toy,” he reached between them and fit his cock against her pussy, “but I for damn sure feel a whole hell of a lot more real and alive.” He brought his hand up from below, cupping her head. He held her eyes to his, watching her so closely, without wavering, that it terrified her to think he might be able to see into her soul. Wisdom said she should push him away, but God, his natural warmth blanketed her, melting into her very being, and Kelsie couldn’t throw him out of her bed.

What did it matter if they had sex one time? Or, for that matter, for an entire week, if the mood struck them. They were both adults, fully capable of taking what they wanted right now, and at the end of the week walking away. It had been so long since she’d had sex, and for everything they couldn’t agree on, Kelsie knew John would never hurt her physically. She could trust him, and without even having to ask, she already knew he felt the same.

“Tell me, Kels.” John’s muscular arms trembled with restraint. “I won’t do it without your okay.”

Kelsie lifted up and kissed him, agreeing to everything he wanted without words. He groaned against her lips and followed her down to the pillow. With gritted teeth, he dropped his forehead to hers, pushed forward with his hips, and sank all the way inside her wet heat.

“Oh God…” Kelsie’s channel fluttered around John’s cock, pulling him deeper inside.

John’s mouth fell open, almost as if in pain. Slowly, he began to move. “Christ, you’re so fucking tight.” His eyes burned bright blue, almost glowing in the semi-darkness of the room.

Only the moonlight shining in through the open window allowed them to see each other, casting both of their bodies in a pale, ethereal light. It helped set the otherworldly tone to their coupling, lending bravery to Kelsie where otherwise it might not have existed.

She drew her legs up and wrapped them around his waist, locking him to her with all of her physical strength. “Harder.” She pushed up against him, circling herself on his impaling erection. “You don’t have to be gentle.” Tangling her hands in his, she fought against his strength until he pinned her to the pillow. “Just like that, please, I can take it.

I’m a big girl.”

“Don’t let go.” John pounded Kelsie into the soft mattress, each thrust driving the headboard into the wall with a rhythmic thud. “Lift up against me every time I come down.” He let go of her hands and gripped her hips, showing her exactly what he wanted, as demanding in the bedroom as she heard he was in the boardroom. She gave him his wish happily, loving the feel of almost completely losing the connection between them only to have him shove his thick cock into her again, taking her so deeply his pubic hair tickled the smooth skin of her sex.

Kelsie’s breasts bounced heavily between them, their weight swinging all around, too fleshy to remain stationary in a mating this out of control. She ached for him to touch her all over, nowhere more acutely than her breasts. She covered her nipples herself, tweaking the distended points, moaning and squirming as new shots of pleasure zinged through her blood to her core.

John leaned down, nipping and licking at her hand. He delved his tongue between her fingers, tasting little hints of her breasts. “Christ, honey, I love that you’re not afraid to play with yourself in front of me.” He drew up on his hands and created a space between their bodies. “Touch that aching little bud for me and let me watch you come.”

God, something about hearing and seeing this starched, pulled-together man embrace his carnal side turned Kelsie on and pushed her to places she would likely never ordinarily go. She wanted to excite him, she needed to see a crack in his armor of cool.

Kelsie slid her hand down her belly and over her cherries, pausing for just the barest second at the top of her slit. She watched John while he watched her, rapt, where their bodies joined. She pushed her hand down a little bit more, through her crease, and trapped her poking clit between the tight V of her fingers. Rubbing up and down, she writhed and split her nether lips open even further, exposing more of herself to John’s view.

John pumped in and out of her with piston-fast strokes, spurring her on to flicking her nubbin with equally fast swipes, sending her to new places of intimacy that she would certainly second-guess come tomorrow. Everything coiled tighter and tighter within Kelsie, drawing mewling little cries out of her that she had never heard herself make before. Her spine tingled with heightened sensitivity, and her breasts felt so full it bordered on painful.

“Please … please…” She stopped playing with herself and lifted right off the bed into his arms. They tumbled to the side, and she locked her leg over his thigh, keeping them connected. The new position put her clit on a ride against John’s roving prick, and within seconds, everything inside her pulled too tight to hold the line. Kelsie snapped, unable hold the inevitable off any longer, and started to come.

She bit John’s shoulder and dug her fingers into his back, holding on tight as the first wave of pleasure rocked through her core. Needful and open, Kelsie rubbed herself all over the front of John’s body as if she were a cat begging to be stroked, smashing her breasts against his hard chest and her soft belly against his washboard tight abs in a search for complete contact. John moaned and jerked within her, and suddenly, the full force of Kelsie’s orgasm hit her with the power of an electric shock. Kelsie came hard, throwing her cunt into deep spasms that held John’s penis inside her to the hilt, squeezing him so tight inside she swore a stamp of his shape would remain against her walls long after tonight.

John pushed her onto her back and shoved up inside her milking tunnel deep one last time, splitting and taking her until she had no more room in her channel for him to fill.

Unwilling to let him go, she locked her legs around his waist, needful of the connection.

Grunting, he took her hands and pinned her to the bed, his breathing erratic and hot against her face as he looked down upon her with feral intensity, possession and ownership naked in his stare. Her body responded instinctively, wringing an answering final contraction out of her sex.

“Oh shit, Kels, I’m close, I’m close.” He squeezed her fingers in a death lock. “Tell me it’s okay to stay.”

She knew what he asked, and she’d been taking the pill for many years. Her sex pulsing in anticipation, she whispered, “Stay,” and held him inside.

“Ooohh, Christ…” Suddenly, a shudder wracked through John, and his mouth fell open as if he couldn’t breathe. Seconds later he spilled himself within her, taking her channel with pulsating little strokes as hot spits of cum emptied out of his body and overtook hers.

*

This time, John didn’t move off Kelsie. Trying to regain his breath, he lowered himself on top of her, openly trapping her to him. He tucked his face into her neck and loosened his grip on her hands, but didn’t let go. “I’m sure I should say something here.”

He knew what he wanted to say, but also knew it would freak her out to hear it. “But I have to admit I don’t always find the best words where you’re concerned. I don’t want to say the wrong thing and run you off.”

“You have the rest of the week, McBride.” Kelsie stroked his hair and naked back absently, affectionately, even if she didn’t realize the message her touch conveyed. It was damn near the best moment in all of John’s life. “We both know it can’t go on longer than that.”

He had five days to convince her that they were the only two people right for the other. He started things off by getting comfortable inside her, and let her get used to the feel of him living there, hard or soft. His cock didn’t want any other home than her. His heart didn’t either.

John squeezed Kelsie’s hands and planted a soft kiss behind her ear. She shivered, and he smiled.

“I’ll take what I can get,” he finally murmured, and settled in for some much needed sleep.

Chapter Three

Wednesday

Kelsie rolled over, groaning as she glanced at the clock—and the man zonked out next to her in bed. Oh, God, I slept with John McBride. Worse, in the weakness of afterglow, she’d told him they could keep doing it until their vacation ended. Why, why, why did she do that?

Chastising herself, Kelsie wondered what in the hell had possessed her to put herself in such a vulnerable position. She knew better, damn it. She couldn’t possibly maintain any dignity with John after last night. And if they kept going at it as they had for an entire week… Forget it, she would never be able to look him in the eye again when they went home.

Through his friendship with Grey, John knew too much about her already. He knew about her parents and why she and Grey spent half of their childhood living with their grandmother. Now, he’d seen her naked, been inside her body, and had watched her shudder and react to one of the deepest orgasms she had ever experienced in her life. He had to be arrogantly pleased to know it happened because of him.

Kelsie snuck a quick peek at John sprawled out beside her in bed. The rumpled white sheet rode low on his hips and the linen tented between his legs, his cock half-hard with a morning erection. She glanced up the length of his body, but she didn’t breathe any easier staring at the wide expanse of his chest and the breadth of his shoulders, all of it covered in hard, tan flesh. Her body responded to the heat he generated, even in sleep, and she leaned in for a taste.

Kelsie got her mouth within an inch of John’s flat stomach, so damn close her lips tingled in anticipation of the warm, salty taste of hard, male body. She made contact with his skin, and his abdomen contracted at the touch. Kelsie pulled back and peered up the length of John’s body, praying that she didn’t see a knowing pair of blue eyes staring down at her. God, she didn’t want him to know how deeply her physical attraction to him went. She couldn’t. For her to go home and see awareness of her need in his eyes every time they crossed paths… Kelsie couldn’t stand the thought of him seeing any more weakness in her than he already had.

Time to regain some distance. John McBride could never know just how sexy she thought he was. She could never give him that kind of power over her. Nobody would ever control her happiness and peace of mind—Kelsie made that promise to herself many years ago.

Crawling ever so slowly away from John, Kelsie didn’t breathe until her bare feet hit the chilly hardwood floor. She tiptoed to the chest of drawers and grabbed underwear, shorts, and a T-shirt, taking extra special care to ease the drawer closed and not create so much as a tap of wood against wood. She moved to the door and opened it without making a creak. Kelsie took one step over the threshold, and a rumble stopped her dead in her tracks.

“You’re just like your brother,” John said, his voice cutting through the silence Kelsie had worked so hard to maintain. “You really are two peas from the same pod.”

Kelsie stiffened and her back locked ramrod straight. Damn man. Thought he knew everything. “No, we’re not.” She turned, and wanted to scream at the picture he made in her bed, with his left arm folded under his head and his right hand slipped under the covers, very, very near his cock. Closing her eyes for a moment, she took a slow breath and forced down the quickening in her pussy at the thought of watching this man masturbate and come. “Grey and I are nothing alike. No one who didn’t already know us would ever think we’re twins, let alone brother and sister. We don’t do anything in the same way at all.”

“Except for how you both protect yourselves, and don’t ever do anything truly impulsive.”

Kelsie chuckled and shook her head. Inside, though, her chest seized and sent her heart to racing too fast, making her lightheaded. “I think you’re mistaking me and Grey for you and Grey, McBride.” She clutched her change of clothes to her breasts, burying her fingers within the fabric so that he wouldn’t see her white-knuckled grip. “I’m not the one all buttoned up from top to bottom, working seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, and who only takes one week of vacation a year.”

“Fair enough,” John conceded. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong about you, though. Just because you wear jeans to your job, and work those same fourteen hours in the afternoon through the night rather than the day doesn’t mean you’re not just as afraid to take a chance on something new as your brother is. And I seem to recall you pointing that out to him not that long ago.”

God, she hated John McBride’s photographic memory. He never forgot a damn thing she said or did, ever. “Grey does need to release his desire for control and complete order in his life.” Kelsie forced the death grip off her bundle of clothing and affected a nonchalant lean against the doorframe. “You can for damn sure bet no one ever accused me of being a neat freak the way they have him.”

Kelsie didn’t know how John did it, but he somehow managed to throw himself down and look disgusted, when he was already lying down. “All right, fine. Keep up the space between us. Go take your shower. I won’t bother you.” The blue in his eyes shadowed to cobalt. He looked toward the window, staring at the pretty day beginning outside. The break in eye contact stabbed Kelsie in the chest, hard, although she didn’t understand why. After a moment, John cleared his throat, and went on. “By the time you come out of the shower we’ll be back to the casual fuck buddies you gave us permission to become last night. I won’t cross your line again and give you any indications that prove I’ve known you for twenty years. When you’re done with your shower, I’ll take mine. If you make coffee while I’m in, I’ll make breakfast when I get out. Deal?”

Kelsie stood there staring at John, fighting an itching urge to run to him and burrow into his heat. He still had his head averted, and that little cut stabbed Kelsie in the heart too. The hypocrisy of it was not lost on her. He gave her what she wanted and she still wasn’t happy.

She could be such a bitch.

Swallowing the thickness in her throat, Kelsie took the step needed to get out of the room. “Deal,” she said softly, and then speed-walked the dozen steps to the bathroom.

Once inside, Kelsie shut the door, leaned back against it, and took deep breath after deep breath to calm the racing in her heart. “Don’t let him become important to you, Kelsie,” she muttered to herself, hating with a passion that she needed a pep-talk like this at all. She was not supposed to want a guy like John McBride. They could not be more different, and he already damn well knew that just as well as she did. Sex was one thing; to become involved or care deeper than this fun they’d agreed to have was something else entirely.

Something potentially devastating to her soul.

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Kelsie tossed her clean clothes over an extra towel rack and pulled open the shower curtain. Turning on the water, she let the icy spray turn to warm and then hot against the tips of her fingers, steaming the small bathroom, before climbing in.

Stepping under the rainfall of water, Kelsie tilted her head back and let the stuff sluice over her face and wet her hair, and tried not to think about that time in her life when every rare shower she took was bitterly cold and left her with the shakes before finishing. She had a good life now, thanks to her grandmother, and she had no reasons to complain. So many kids had lives a million times rougher than she or Grey had suffered.

And if they each had a quirk or two left over from that time … well, they had learned to live with it and build productive lives around their respective hang-ups.

The shower curtain opened, and John stepped inside. Immediately, he wrapped his arm around her waist and hoisted her up against his body. “Put your legs around me.” She did it without conscious thought. “Damn it, you feel good against me.” His voice touched against her like a second caress. He turned them in the small space and shoved Kelsie into the wall, out of the direct spray of the water. His mouth came down on hers, crushing her lips in a kiss. At the exact same moment, he pushed through her entrance and penetrated her, lodging his cock all the way inside her sex.

Kelsie shook at first contact, and John did too.

“Wait, wait.” She clutched his shoulders, gasping as he rammed her into the wall and speared her deeply, stretching her open for his taking. “You said…” His chest and stomach plastered itself to her breasts and belly, rubbing and abrading her nipples and sensitized skin. Kelsie could hardly think, let alone speak. “You said you wouldn’t bother me.”

His pale eyes lit up with fire and lust. “I lied. Can’t stay away.” His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her ass, holding her in a way she knew would leave bruises. “Gonna be fast and hard this time.” He buried his face in her neck and licked a line up her throat.

“Better next time.” His voice grated rough, barely audible. “Slower next time.” He fucked her without quarter. “I promise.”

John sawed his cock in and out of her tender channel, and Kelsie fluttered helplessly inside, unable to control her responses to this man. “Like fast,” she admitted, the words slipping free before she could audit them and stuff the confession back down inside.

“Like you.” He shuddered against her, and she squeezed his hips with her thighs, holding him to her sex. “Don’t want to.” She found his mouth and kissed him with desperation, unable to hold back. “Can’t help that either.”

His mouth fell open against hers. “Ahhh, Christ, Kels.” Trapping her against the wall, John stilled completely. Seconds later he jerked and released, filling her squeezing pussy with his seed.

John didn’t even have to touch her. The second his cum flooded her, Kelsie went off like a series of little time bombs and started to spasm around his buried cock. She grabbed hold of him tightly with her cunt and didn’t let go, milking his length with consecutive rippling contractions, bucking softly against him with her core as she came.

It seemed like John held her pinned to the shower wall forever, but eventually he did let go of her ass, and she gingerly slid down his body. His penis slipped free, sending one last shiver through her. Her legs trembled, but she managed to stay upright. Just barely.

Kelsie didn’t want to look at John, but he laid his forehead against hers and she couldn’t hide. “Let’s not even burden ourselves by taking this thing between us one day at a time,” he said, his voice rich and calm, way too much for Kelsie to mimic. “Let’s just take it one morning at a time, one afternoon at a time, and one evening at a time. Okay?”

John’s gaze burned blurry and bright in front of her, and its steadiness flip-flopped Kelsie’s heart. Oh God, how this John McBride seized panic in her heart, so much more than the combative one. Challenged her not to be the first to run too.

“Okay.” She expelled an unsteady breath, but forced herself to look at him and didn’t cower. “Deal.”

“One of my favorite words.” He pressed a soft kiss against her lips, and she felt them turn up in a smile. “Morning, Kels.”

Damn it, he tripped her heart to skittering again with those two little words.

“Morning,” she said back.

She put her hands against his chest and shoved him back under the water that had already turned cold, laughing hysterically when he shrieked like a girl.

Until he pulled her under too.

Then kissed her again, and she didn’t care.

* * * *

“Ahh, ha-ha, there.” Kelsie jammed the button on her controller with her thumb, holding it down to keep her gargoyle on the screen flying through the sky. She used the arrow buttons to dip her creature out of the way of the fireballs hurling from the castle and scooped up a glowing fairy, immediately gaining herself five hundred extra points.

She threw her opponent a triumphant smile. “It won’t be long before I catch up to you now, McBride.” Down to her panties and bra, she sat at the edge of the couch next to John, her pulse racing with energized life. She knew she was close to getting John’s shirt off very soon.

She took her eyes off the game for a split second, imagining that very picture. Too late, his dragon swooped in and clamped down on her gargoyle, shaking it like a ragdoll and gobbling it up in two bloody bites. The TV flashed “game over” as John’s dragon took the last life from her gargoyle.

Again.

Tossing his controller on the coffee table, John leaned back into the plush couch. He threw her a smile that went all the way through her and curled her bare toes. “Fitting, don’t you think?” He reached over and rubbed her tattooed waist. “You, getting eaten by a dragon?”

“I think you fell into a hot streak of luck,” she grumbled. She looked at him, and his stare was so focused it mesmerized her. “So, which do you want?” She covered his hand and drew it over her breast. “The bra?” Squeezing his hand over her flesh, she moaned as her nipple immediately pebbled, warming with the stroke of his heated touch. She dragged his hand down and forced it between her closed legs, letting him cup her mound.

Moisture already drenched her sex, and his pupils flared as she dampened his fingers through her underwear. “Or the panties?”

His pale eyes darkened to sapphire, giving away his lust. “Both.” He rubbed her through her panties, and her sex pulsed. “I want both.”

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “Those aren’t the rules. One article of clothing for one loss of game life. That was the deal. You only get one.”

He smiled with lazy confidence. “I’ll get the other one in a few minutes anyway.

You’re simply prolonging the inevitable.”

She shook her head, leaning it back against the couch in a mirror of his. “You always were a cocky bastard.” She spread her legs though, blossoming under his teasing touch.

“And I certainly haven’t given you any reason in the last twenty-four hours to make you believe it unfounded.”

“The two don’t have anything to do with each other,” he corrected. Twin slashes of red marred his sharp cheekbones. He took his hand from between her legs and used it to adjust the bulge forming in his jeans. “The odds were stacked in my favor. We financed the company that invented this game. I pretty much know all of its secrets to winning.”

“You cheater!” Kelsie jumped up on the couch, gloriously uncaring that she must look like some crazed Amazon woman. “You dirty, rotten cheater!”

“Not a cheater.” John looked up at her with cool calm, pushing every last one of her buttons. “I had the advantage of additional knowledge and didn’t offer full disclosure. I will admit to nothing more than that.”

“Oh?” The man could not go unpunished. “OH!” Kelsie threw herself down on him, knocking him to the side as she went for his weak spots. “You won’t admit anything to me, huh?” She dove for his waist and ribs and started tickling him mercilessly. “You won’t cry ‘uncle’ by the end of my wrath, McBride, is that what you’re saying?”

John yelped and dodged her menacing fingers. “You won’t break me, woman,” he vowed. He tackled her right back, tussling with all of his strength. He got her under the arms and behind the knees. Kelsie shrieked with laughter, and they rolled and tumbled to the floor.

They both hit their shoulders hard, and he immediately sobered. “Are you all right?”

Kelsie lay back on the floor, her chest heaving with exertion. “I’ll live.” She poked him in the ribs one more time. God, she had never felt so alive in her life. “But you owe me a board game of my choice to give me a chance to redeem myself.”

“Deal.” John levered himself over her and brushed a few fuchsia strands of hair away from her heated cheeks. His eyes twinkled as he looked at her, catching her in the heart.

“I love to rile you up,” he admitted, his voice rough. “Christ, Kelsie, you are radiant when you laugh.”

Her cheeks grew even hotter. “Thank you.”

“Finally.” He dropped a kiss on her lips. “She takes a compliment without fighting me.” His hands drifted down her body and hooked on the waistband of her panties. “I’ve decided what I want.” He pushed the pale blue cotton down her legs. “You’ve been driving me crazy all night.” He kissed his way down her chest and over her soft belly, nuzzling his nose into her skin as he went. “I need your panties gone so I can get a taste of what your sweet body does for me.” He spread her thighs and swiped a long lick with the flat of his tongue right up her bare slit.

Kelsie’s hips shot off the floor, and her legs automatically widened for John to take more. He put his hands under her ass and held her up to his face, sucking on her nether lips as if she possessed the only nectar he needed in order to survive. His tongue slipped through her crease, foraying inside her with deep, sinful probes, driving every nerve ending in her pussy to rich, full life. She held his head and pushed his face into her cunt shamefully, greedily circling her crotch against him for more.

John looked up at her from between her legs, his eyes hazy with desire. His tongue slid out of her channel, and Kelsie thought she would die. He pushed her legs high and wide, splitting her sex open from end to end in a way no man had ever done with her before. “How is it that you taste like the Orient?” He flicked the tip of his tongue over her exposed clit, shooting tremors and shivers through every corner of her body. “All exotic, unfamiliar spices that make me feel high. I don’t think I’ll ever get enough.” He opened his mouth over her aching bead of flesh and sucked her clit into his mouth.

Kelsie lost her mind. She drove her hips into John’s face repeatedly, keening desperately as he rolled the pearl of excited nerves between his lips and teased the tip with his tongue. He pushed her to a place of needing to come every time they came together, working her body to the point where if she didn’t orgasm she actually believed she would explode right out of her skin.

“Please, please.” She threw her hands up and grabbed the edge of the coffee table, clamping down hard enough to make her fingers ache, needing to take away some of the tight, coiling pleasure pulling between her clit and her belly. “Ohhh, God…” A deep throbbing in her channel cried for John. “Give me more. I need to feel you inside.”

John let go of her thigh with one hand and shoved two long, nimble fingers up inside her cunt in one sure thrust. Kelsie screamed as exquisite sensation shot her from a cannon into an ocean of unimaginable pleasure, practically drowning in her release. She ground her shoulder blades into the rug beneath her, searching for traction as every muscle in her body contracted and released time and again, wringing pure, blinding joy from each nerve ending inside her, starting and ending in the ultra sensitive core of her sex, at the expert touch of John’s mouth and hands.

When sanity returned, John crawled up the length of her torso, satisfaction at a job well done shining in his luminous, far too insightful gaze. “I’m ready for that board game challenge whenever you are. I still have to win that bra off you. I’m anxious to see if I can make you come just by touching and tasting your luscious breasts.”

Grinning wickedly, John leaned down and nudged at her lips, giving her a taste of herself lingering in his mouth. Possessiveness welled in Kelsie’s breast, powerful in its knifing intensity. She knew without having to look too deeply that she didn’t want any other woman’s taste or scent on this man. One overwhelming phrase of insanity reared itself in her head: he is mine. Kelsie shivered. God, how had she gotten to this place so quickly? More important than that, how did she stop the freefall that wanted to hurl her right into his arms, well past these few days in a seemingly enchanted cabin?

Looking up at John’s handsome face and surprisingly open, smiling eyes, Kelsie had no earthly idea how not to fall for the one man with whom she could never let herself imagine a future.

Chapter Four

Thursday

A lazy little smile hitched up the edge of John’s lips, and Kelsie squirmed. The man had a focus that made a person feel stripped bare. “What?” No one around them gave a rat’s ass that they ate together, but the hairs on the back of Kelsie’s neck tickled and stood on end anyway. They were out in public together, and everything about the meal screamed first date. “Stop staring. You’re making me feel weird.”

John chuckled, and his eyes twinkled a bit too cheekily for Kelsie’s comfort. “Who else am I supposed to look at, Kels?” He glanced around the half dozen other occupied tables in the down-home diner. “I’m here with you, not anyone else. Besides,” he took a sip of his tea and Kelsie just knew he had a big old grin hiding behind the amber colored glass, “I like looking at you.”

Her stomach somersaulted, and her bite of fried catfish sandwich lodged in her throat. She downed two big gulps of soda to move the blockage along.

“How can I make you nervous at this point in our lives?” John asked. “I ate dinner with you and Grey and your grandma more than I did at my own house. You’ve got to be used to me by now.”

Yeah, but not like this. “I didn’t say nervous.” She pushed her back up straight against the leather booth at her back. “I said weird. There’s a difference.” God, if they talked about her for one more minute she would turn fire-engine red from top to bottom.

Not a good look for her.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” A need to discover this man pushed Kelsie beyond the need to hide herself. “It’s personal,” she quickly added. “Don’t feel like you can’t say no if you don’t want to share. I won’t get mad.”

“All these unnecessary qualifiers.” John wiped his mouth with a napkin and curled it up in a ball. Leaning back, he settled his attention on her with a focus that pricked a sliver of fear through her. “Kelsie, you can ask me whatever you want.”

“How bad was it at home for you?” Her body settled and became very still of its own volition. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from him, even though her heart raced terribly and felt like it wanted to punch right through her breast. “You joke about how often you lived at our apartment, but the truth is that you really kind of did. Obviously, my grandmother saw something that made her say yes every time Grey asked if you could spend the night. She didn’t allow that for any of my friends, or even Grey’s other ones.

What did she see in you?”

“A lonely kid raising himself in a big house that fooled everyone but her and Grey.”

A dark shadow deepened and shuttered John’s gaze. Kelsie could only imagine that he went back to a home he hardly ever claimed once he met Grey. “I can’t complain. So many kids in this world have it far worse than indifference and neglect.” A wash of cold coated Kelsie’s exposed skin as memories of her own past pushed at her, but she determinedly stamped them down. She only wanted to know about John right now.

“There was always money sitting around somewhere from Dad emptying his pockets, or I could always go into my mom’s purse if I needed some money to go to the store for food.

I never went hungry; just, more often than not, I cooked my own meals whenever I wanted something to eat.” The shadows cleared, and he actually smiled. “Would have been nice to have The Food Network back then, you know?”

A nervous chuckle escaped her. “Right.” Kelsie forced herself to stop staring and looked down at her plate. Picking up a leftover french fry, she ran the thick edge through what was left of her ketchup and drew a swirling design across the glossy white ceramic.

“Grey told me about the drinking. He wasn’t betraying you or anything. I think I was probably being bitchy about you or something and he wanted to share the one thing that would shut me up.”

“I know,” John murmured, snapping her focus back up to him. “He told me what he told you, probably right after he did it. It didn’t make you feel sorry for me or lay off with the battles though.” A hint of red suffused his cheeks, turning them ruddy. “You don’t know how much I appreciate that you never pitied me after you knew.”

“You always knew how to push my buttons,” Kelsie admitted. Her attention dropped to his sensuous mouth, and new pictures did battle to replace old. Brushes of those firm lips against hers, or lingering with a lick and a suck against her breast fought against ages-old, ingrained images of that mouth of his tilted up in a smirk or a full-on laugh at her expense. “You still do. That didn’t change just because I learned that your parents spent most of their time at home drunk.”

“All of their time, actually.” His hand flexed tightly around a butter knife, and those lips that had become of so much interest to her of late thinned down into a hard line.

“Which was only one of the reasons why bickering with you was still infinitely more pleasurable than going home.”

“Do you have any contact with them anymore?” Kelsie held on to this moment with John, where he seemed willing to open up with her about his past. He rarely let anyone see beyond the conservative suits he wore like armor—at least, that’s how Kelsie thought of them. She felt the same about Grey. “This is terrible of me,” she wanted to slip right under the table out of his sight, “but I don’t even know if your parents are alive. I should know that about you.”

“It’s all right. I don’t ever talk about them, so why would you know.” His tone stayed even, and if not for the strangle hold he had on the handle of his knife Kelsie would have totally bought into the detachment in his voice. “Yes, they’re both still alive.

I have minimal contact with them, as they have yet to stop drinking.” A hint of gravel roughened his words, finally betraying him. “I should be doing more than sending them money so they don’t lose the house, but I can’t. If I were to get sucked into the middle of their constant mind games and battles… No, I’ll take whatever punishment I have to in the afterlife, but as long as alcohol runs their lives I can’t be in it with them.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about going to hell.” Never had conversation flowed so freely with John. It lulled Kelsie, made her share more than she knew she should—and pushed her into very dangerous territory. Everything about John’s demeanor and stance rang so damn stoic right now—reaching into her without even trying—that nothing in Kelsie knew how to apply the brakes. “I know you helped Grey buy that house for my grandmother.” Two years out of college, two years into their business, Grey moved their grandmother out of the tiny two-bedroom apartment they’d lived in for so many years and into a lovely four-bedroom home. Room enough for Grandma, Kelsie, Grey… and John. “I battled Grey when he took me to see the place because I knew he couldn’t afford it yet. I wanted him to look for something smaller where I could help foot the bill too. He told me not to worry, that he wasn’t getting it on his own. I knew what that meant without him saying anything more.”

“Still…”

A shadow slid across the table. “Hey there, Kelsie.” The deep, male voice had Kelsie and John glancing up in unison.

A dark-haired, slate-eyed wall of muscle wrapped in jeans and a black T-shirt greeted Kelsie’s vision, and brought out an immediate smile.

“Sirus, it’s so nice to see you again.” She pushed over in the booth and made some room. “Take a seat and tell me how you’re doing.”

“Well…” Sirus’s focus shifted to John.

“It’s okay.” Kelsie read the tough guy as easily as one of her favorite romance novels. “John’s okay. You don’t have to worry.”

“All right. Just for a minute.” Sirus slid his muscular frame in the booth next to Kelsie. “I called in an order for food. It should be ready in a few minutes.” He glanced at John again.

“Oh, sorry.” Kelsie rolled her eyes. “Sirus Wilder, meet John McBride. John, Sirus lives in the cabin across the lake.”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like,” Sirus said. He smiled, and all of the hardness went right out of his intimidating face. “Driving a truck doesn’t allow me to be at home as much as I’d like.” The man reached his hand across the table. “Good to meet you, John.

Any friend of Kelsie’s is plenty good enough for me.”

John pumped fists with the truck driver. “Likewise. Nice to meet you, Sirus.”

“So,” Kelsie rubbed Sirus’s left pec through his T-shirt, “how’s the tat? Did you lotion it up and take good care of it like I told you?”

“Yeah. Take a look.” Sirus lifted his shirt all the way up to his neckline and revealed a tattoo of a rearing, rust-colored mustang on his chest. Kelsie let her fingers glide over it for a moment, loving the design more and more. Twin orbs of red blossomed on Sirus’s cheeks as he let his shirt fall back into place. A small smile lifted his lips. He took another quick look at John again, before saying softly, “He really liked it. I can’t wait to see him again next week. We’re gonna try to get a whole month together in September. A couple weeks for me down there with him, and then he says he’ll get away and come up here.”

“I’m happy for you.” Kelsie rubbed the big man’s shoulder, and couldn’t stop herself from giving him a quick one-armed hug. “Be careful though, okay? You’re putting a lot on the line for him.”

“He’s worth it.”

“I believe you.”

“Sirus!” a female voice bellowed through the restaurant, killing every conversation in the place. “Food’s ready, darlin’!”

“Let me get going.” Sirus stood, but leaned down and pecked a kiss to the top of Kelsie’s head. “It was good to see you again, sweetheart. Next time I’m in Raleigh I’ll stop in and say hi.” He shifted to face John. “Again, it was nice to meet you, John.”

“You too, Sirus.” John stuck out his hand this time. Sirus’s eyes widened, and he paused before reaching out and shaking John’s hand. “Maybe you can join us for dinner one night,” John added. “I’m there at the cabin too.”

Sirus chuckled, and all the tension left his massive shoulders. “You don’t have to stake a claim with me, buddy. Our oars don’t dip in the same pond.” His attention drifted quickly to Kelsie, and his gaze softened. “Treat her right though, or I’ll be coming to find you and do some serious damage.” He gave a little two-fingered salute as he backed away. “Later.”

“Well, hell.” John turned back to Kelsie, and he had another one of those little smiles on his face that flip-flopped her stomach. “What’d you do to incite such a protective streak in Sirus? I mean, that tattoo was beautiful, but I don’t imagine that everyone you ink gets all Alpha over you like that.”

“Nothing.” Kelsie shrugged. “Just treated him like a human being when I saw something last summer that very few people know about him.” Lightning fast images of an equally big, handsome man covering a naked Sirus from behind and grinding him into the earth in the rawest fuck session she’d ever accidentally witnessed sent secret moisture between her thighs. “Let’s get out of here right now.” God, it was so very wrong, but Kelsie’s sex clenched tight, pulling at her newly revived sexual needs. Fortunately for her she had a few more days with a man who could satisfy every last one of them. “Because you’re about to get very, very lucky.”

The fork dropped from John’s hand, clattered on the Formica tabletop, and fell to the floor, drawing the eyes of all the other patrons in the diner. He grabbed up the utensil with one hand and took a stack of neatly folded bills out of his pocket with the other.

Palming a twenty and a five out of the mix, he slipped them under the edge of his glass and got to his feet.

Holding out his hand, John cleared his throat. “Let’s go.” He had his fingers extended open in invitation, clearly issuing her a challenge in his blue, blue stare.

“I’m the one who put the offer on the table, McBride.” Kelsie slid her hand into his and let him tug her up, daring him to claim triumph with a sharp-edged glare. He immediately linked their fingers together, and the contrast of his tan skin against her pale coloring, and the way the webbing between their fingers meshed so intimately, had her locking her knees so that she didn’t wobble. Another quick look warned him not to comment on that either. “Wipe your damn mouth.” She narrowed her gaze on his twinkling one. “You’ve got a little bit of yellow feather sticking out of the edge there. I expect you to start purring any minute.”

John snagged her around the waist and started back-walking her toward the exit.

“Take me home, darlin’, and let the stroking begin.” She opened her mouth, and he sealed his lips to hers in a lingering, searching kiss.

He stole her very breath away as he managed to kiss her and walk her to the car at the same time. That damn word, home, sank in deeper and tangled itself around her heart.

Three more days with John suddenly didn’t seem like nearly enough.

This was very, very bad.

* * * *

Slowly, torturously slowly, John gritted his teeth as Kelsie pushed the butt plug into his ass. On his elbows and knees, perspiration coating his neck and back, his entrance screamed at the stretching that opened him up in a way he had never experienced before.

His rectum rippled around the small, three-inch toy that for his virgin ass felt like a twelve-inch cock filling his hole. At least, what he imagined that might feel like. Jesus, he wondered if a woman felt like this the first time she took a man. The toy suddenly twisted clockwise within his clenching channel, drawing a low hiss out of him. A shiver shot right up his spine, raising every follicle of hair on his body.

“You okay?” Kelsie’s whisper-light touch trailed up that same path of sensitized nerve endings on his back, and her soft voice acted as a lick across his bare flesh. “We can stop if it’s too much.”

“Want it.” John barely had the ability to think sentences out, let alone say them as she turned the plug in his ass, rubbing over his walls … and other things. “Want you this way. Only fair. Just… Ohhh…” She popped the toy out and forced it back inside him, confusing his anus all over again. “Secure it, but don’t turn it on yet. Too much.”

Specially designed leather straps that slipped through slits in the wide base of the plug allowed the device to be secured around his thighs. Kelsie cinched the fastenings firm enough so he could feel them and they would hold the toy in place, but not so much that they cut off his circulation. Felt weird as hell, as if he had rubber bands around his haunches and a tree trunk up his ass. But damn, when Kelsie had whispered to him about trying a little bit of anal play on the way home from the diner he couldn’t stop the picture of his cock sinking into her lush ass from taking over his every waking thought for the rest of the afternoon, and then well into the evening.

She had gone into her zipper pillow for special lube, and, along with the dildo that made him jealous those few nights back, out came a red butt plug too. She had looked up at him, her eyes big and round in her pale face. “I never have.” She sucked in the edge of her lower lip, and John’s chest swelled and hurt. “But I was curious, so I bought it,” her fingers grazed over the toy, “and some special lube, just in case.”

“Put the toy in me.” The words left John’s mouth before he even thought them in his head. They snapped her focus right up to him, wide-eyed for an altogether different reason now. “This way we learn what it feels like together.” He had rolled over on his elbows and knees then, his muscles quivering as he presented her with his ass.

Now, bizarrely full and strapped in, John shifted to his back, grunting when the base of the plug hit the mattress and jostled in his scorching alive channel.

A little trill of laughter escaped Kelsie and broke the thick, heated silence in the room. It sounded unnaturally high to John’s ears. “I guess it’s my turn now, huh?” Kelsie shifted to turn.

John wrapped his hand her thigh and stopped her. Damn it, her skin seemed to come alive under his palm, but he forced his fingers to peel back and let her go. “Not if you don’t want it, Kels.” He found her gaze in the shadows. “If you’ve changed your mind, we can stop. I won’t be mad at you.”

She smiled, and it kicked up the edge of her lip in a way that tugged a grin out of John too. “Don’t go all ‘gentleman’ on me now, McBride.” She dropped her attention to between his legs. “Not when you’ve got a toy in your ass and a hard-on to go along with it.”

John lunged and tackled Kelsie, tumbling her to her back. He loomed over her on bent knees. The fuchsia of her hair caught the moonlight streaming in through the window, reflecting and casting strands of it to darker and lighter iridescent shades.

“Don’t act like you didn’t love putting it in me.” He growled and spread her legs, tugging them up onto his thighs. The dragons undulated and reached for her cherries, and he swore they got a centimeter closer in their quest for that tantalizing piece of fruit every time they did. His cock twitched in understanding, and he moaned as his rectum squeezed down on the plug, teasing him with its newness too. “And don’t act like you don’t know I get hard every time I get close to you. Doesn’t have anything to do with the toy.”

“Might have something to do with it.” Kelsie reached across the bed and grabbed a wireless remote. Just this one time.” She pushed a button, and John’s entire body bowed taut.

“Shit.” His cock reared up toward his stomach as his entire middle hummed with life through that one damn little appendage jammed inside him, sending wave after wave of new delight from his tingling prostate through his balls and penis, and up into his spine and belly. He clamped his teeth and breathed through the pleasure, but his cock went so damn rigid he knew he wouldn’t last. “Can’t get you ready. Next time,” he promised, and yanked her pussy up to his cock, plunging inside.

Kelsie cried out as he drove his length deep into her sex, both of them moaning as her channel engulfed him in wet, clutching heat. He wrapped his hands around her thighs and rammed her down on his erection at the same time he pumped up into her, mashing their bodies together in a messy display of desire that had no grace or style to it at all, only fisting need. Kelsie keened and arched her hips down at a sharper angle, and John found a way to slip even deeper inside. Reaching back, Kelsie braced herself against the headboard to take his rough thrusts, her grunts and the flush taking over her body throwing John toward climax on nearly her reaction alone.

“Oh God, I can feel the vibrations shaking through you,” Kelsie moaned. She ground herself into him, hard, and then shot upright and pulled back, forcing herself out of his hold and off his cock. Before he could protest the withdrawal she knocked him onto his back and shoved his legs up against his chest, the shift pulling his ass around the toy, making him feel wider open than he surely actually was. “I want to see it make you come even more than I want to feel it for myself.”

Kelsie got the straps off his legs in seconds. “What… Ahh, yessss…” Leaving the leather dangling from the flange, Kelsie ground the toy against John’s backdoor and then pulled it out, leaving his channel clenching and grabbing for it, only to then push the gradually thickening tip back in, filling him anew. “Ohh, shit, Kels.” John groaned as every nerve ending in his body tingled with what she did to him. The combination of the gentle vibration and repeated penetration and retreat of the toy in his ass teased and attacked him on every level. He hooked his arms around his knees and spread himself open wider, and could not look away from her magical hand working the toy within him.

“It feels like you’re fucking me.”

“On my end too.” She pushed in and added a twisting motion, and John bucked and cried out as the tip hit right over his kill spot. They glanced up at each other for a second and shared a look heated enough to send the temperature in the room up at least ten degrees. Dropping back down to his invaded rectum as one, Kelsie made her shafting of him more erratic and rough, sending John’s inner walls into a frenzy and his thigh muscles to shaking. Her voice laced with wonder, Kelsie murmured, “God, I don’t know why this thing looks so damn hot in your ass, but it does.” She shifted forward and came down on top of him, lining her mound right up with her hand working that damn plug in his hole. “I could come just thinking about it.” She started to thrust her hips against his core, and it was as if she truly did have a cock and screwed him into oblivion.

“Oh…” With the plug all the way in, every jam against the base nudged the tip against his prostate and sprouted a crazy pulling sensation around his stretched ring.

“Holy shit, woman.” John let go of his legs and locked them around her hips and thighs.

Using every bit of muscle strength in him, he crushed and released her weight against the base of the toy with his thighs. “Fuck me.” He snaked his hand around her neck and yanked her face down to his, fusing their mouths together. Looking right into the blur of her eyes, he pumped his cock and ass up against her powerful weight, as if he were the woman and she the man. “So good, baby.”

“For me too.” Lifting up, with one hand braced on the bed, Kelsie reached between their torsos with the other and squeezed his cock. “Come for me.” Her voice sounded as thick and drugged out as his did when he got inside her sweet little pussy. “Come on my stomach and tits.”

“I… Ahh, fuck, fuck.” She worked his cock like she’d been playing with it forever, pressing that hot button spot right under the crown and smearing across his slit, to finally dragging an insanely firm grip down his length and right back up, making it hurt so damn good. All control out of John’s hands, his balls drew up tight, and he started to tremble.

“Coming … coming.” His rectal walls clamped down around the plug buried in his ass seconds before it happened, sending him into a deep, fiercely intense orgasm that shot pure pleasure to every corner of his body. He reached down and covered her hand with his as he came, spraying hot jets of milky cum onto her lily-white breasts, coating her nipples and the heavy underside, where his ejaculate dropped off and drizzled down to her belly. As it did, Kelsie’s mouth dropped open and she shuddered above him, against him, coming too, and it was one of the hottest damn things John had ever witnessed in his life.

The words were right there on his tongue, so ready for him to speak them. I love you.

I have forever. She crawled off him, and the familiar shutters slipped right back down over her gaze, one that had been so open only moments ago.

“I think I’ll take a shower,” she said, huskiness in her voice. Grabbing an oversized T-shirt, she darted from the room, cutting him off at the knees. Again. He knew if he chased her down he would not only drive her right out of this cabin, he would send her running straight home to Raleigh behind the wall she’d erected there to keep him out.

Fighting against every aggressive, killer business instinct in him, John backed off and left Kelsie alone. He stayed in bed, feeling like an idiot in the aftermath, wincing as he pulled the butt plug out of his own damn ass.

Time to follow her lead for a while.

Fuck.

* * * *

Looking out the smudged back window of the car, tears streamed down Kelsie’s face as her mother and father got smaller and smaller in the distance. A shaft of sunlight cut across the path, blinding her, and when she stopped seeing spots, they were gone.

Rage bubbled up through a wrenching sob, and it centered completely on one human being. “I hate you!” She turned and lunged for her brother, uncaring that the seatbelt holding her strapped down ripped a pain through her middle when she hit resistance. “It’s your fault.” She threw punches at his arm and shoulder instead, and knocked him one in the ear too. “You called her,” she kicked him in the leg and then hit him again when he didn’t so much as flinch, “when you knew she would take us away.”

“Kelsie Marie Cole.” Her name sliced through the air with precision, stilling her immediately. Driving the car that took her farther and farther away from her parents, Kelsie’s grandmother didn’t take her eyes off the road for one second. “Get your hands off Grey right now. I won’t tolerate hitting among any of us. Get that straight in your head right now.”

Kelsie just barely resisted the urge to kick the back of her grandmother’s seat with every ounce of strength she possessed in her nine-year-old body. “Yes, ma’am.” She threw her brother a look that should have withered him down to nothing.

Identical hazel eyes looked back at her, flat in a way that made Kelsie’s stomach hurt, even though she hated him right now. “Hate me all you want,” Grey said. “I had to do it.” Wetness brimmed his eyes, erasing the calm the stillness in his body conveyed. He looked away and started to blink. She knew how much he hated tears. “It’s not supposed to be like that, Kelsie.” His voice cracked, and Kelsie wanted to shrink into a little ball for making her brother cry. “It’s not.”

“But Mom and Dad. We live there—”

“This will be better,” he interrupted. “I don’t care if I never come back here. You shouldn’t either.”

“But Mom and Dad.”

“No. They did this.” Grey shook his head vehemently. “No more of them. No.”

Kelsie didn’t think the same as her twin. She shifted her head, staring down the long dirt road to the only home she’d ever known, to her mom and dad and her cat Binks. Her shoulders trembling hard enough to shake her entire body, she buried her face in the crook of her elbow, sobbing as her grandmother drove them away from everything she and Grey had ever known…

“No!” Kelsie jerked and shot upright, her heart pounding so hard it yanked her right out of sleep. Blinking the heaviness from her eyes, she touched the mattress beneath her, as well as her arms and legs, confirming with another sense that she wasn’t a little girl back in that car so long ago. God, why did I dream about that? She hadn’t thought about the day her new life began in years. And she’d long ago stopped blaming Grey for his part in the move.

Kelsie put a hand to her breast and tried to still the racing within. Swallowing past the thickness constricting her throat, she glanced down at John and found pale blue eyes waiting for her.

“Want to talk about it?”

Her spine stiffened under her Hurricanes T-shirt. “Talk about what?”

John’s chest rose and fell with his sigh. “You have tears in your eyes, Kelsie, and I don’t have to touch you to know that your pulse is racing. You have a layer of sweat coating your entire body and it’s plastering your hair to your temples.”

“Gross.” She flopped back on her pillow with a dramatic flounce, her blood still rushing too fast through her veins. “You’re not supposed to tell a woman that she sweats.” Reaching across the foot of space between them, she tickled his side. “Even if I do tend to do it often and inelegantly.”

“Christ, you deflect more than anyone I know.” He snagged her fingers off his ribs and plastered them to his stomach, trapping her there under his hand. “If you don’t want to tell me what’s bothering you, fine, just say so. You should know by now I would never push, but don’t try to play with me and think I’m not intelligent enough to pick up on why. If you want to fuck to take your mind off whatever gave you the nightmare, just come out and say it, and I’ll happily accommodate.”

She opened her mouth, all prepared to tell him off for his arrogance. What nerve, thinking his dick was enough to tear her head away from unhappy memories. Then, he spread her fingers against the furnace of heat emanating through his flat stomach and weaved his own in between hers. The pad of his thumb rubbed the webbing between hers and her pointer finger, and he murmured, “I don’t know why you’re so scared to open up to me, Kels. I probably already know what haunts your dreams. The only thing you risk by not telling me is your own peace of mind. I think we’re having fun up here right now, and I don’t want to see that go away because of old hurts that you don’t want to share. I like when you smile, and I love it when you laugh. But more than that, I feel like your champion when you give me these little nuggets of information that I know you don’t gift on anyone else. I kind of hoped you felt the same when I did that with you.”

Her eyelids fluttered closed on a fresh wave of pain … and shame. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” she blurted out. “It’s just that I feel so stupid for even dreaming about it again. I don’t know why I did.”

He didn’t attempt to get any closer or pull her into his arms; he just kept up that intoxicating stroke of his thumb over her skin, ever more slowly sinking her into everything John. “What were you dreaming about?”

“The day my parents handed me and Grey over to my grandmother.” Fear squeezed down on Kelsie, even though everything in her knew that Grey had already shared these stories with this man. “About how much I hated Grey for ratting Mom and Dad out, even though now I can see it was the right thing to do. I had such bad allergies back then, and living in that squalor with no running water, no electricity, and parents who didn’t believe in going to the doctor was so unsafe, for both of us. Man, looking back on it I’m surprised no teacher ever reported my parents and had us turned over to child protective services. I didn’t care about any of that the day my grandmother came, though, or about how much I hated living in that disgusting house most of the time. I just didn’t want to leave my mom and dad. Even if they were completely unable to support us and care for us, they were still the only family I knew, aside from Grey. The house and the yard full of all that crap was the only home I’d ever lived and played in, and it terrified me when my grandmother removed us from it.”

“I’m sorry your parents just gave you over to your grandmother, even if it wasn’t healthy for you to be with them. No kid wants to know Mom and Dad had no problem handing custody of his or her children over to someone else. Even if it’s to family.”

“They couldn’t even take care of themselves.” As an adult, Kelsie could see that her parents were two more kids. They just didn’t care if they didn’t have any of the necessities in life—like water and electricity—as long as they were together. “We were a surprise when we came along, me and Grey. They obviously didn’t have any clue the kind of responsibility required to take care of two children.”

“It still hurts.” John tucked her hand against his chest. “Grey told me how he tracked down your grandmother, and that she had no idea you guys were living like that.”

“We always took the trip to see her,” Kelsie shared. “And that wasn’t very often. She had a strained relationship with my mom, although she would never say why. I’m guessing it had to do with my dad and how he rarely held a job. As much as I hated having nothing, my grandmother might as well have been a complete stranger to me on the day she came for us, and to Grey too.” Kelsie twisted her hand under John’s and clasped their fingers together, clutching him hard. “He never showed his fear though, and the only time he ever got emotional about it was when I was a total snot and told him I hated him for what he did. He cracked a little bit then.” John lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the back, and her voice broke some this time. “God, I hate myself for doing that to him.”

“You were nine.”

“So was he.”

“He is a different breed.” John chuckled, the sound rumbling through him and into her hand where they joined. “Trust me, he’s so damn stubborn he refused to let me help pay for that house for your grandmother any more than he wanted you to help him. I had to threaten to refuse to sign off on a business deal that had the potential to become our biggest client in order to get him to relent. He still bitches that he should pay me back that money. I remind him that I own half the business and could refuse to sign a single new deal, and that shuts him up pretty quick.”

“I know you and I butt heads a lot,” Kelsie said softly, “but I really am glad he has you as his friend.” She rolled over and burrowed under his arm, suddenly needing his heat. Immediately, he wrapped her up around the waist and plastered her to his side. “It scares me for him that you might be his only one.”

“Thank you for saying that you think he’s better off having me than not.” Shifting her, he hauled her on top of him, draping her over his hard body, and drawing an involuntary shiver out of her. He dug his hands into her hair and tugged her lips down to his. His pale blue eyes held her trapped. He scraped skin against skin, and added, “And thank you for telling me about your dream. Doesn’t matter that I already know the facts. I know Grey’s view and memories from that time in your lives. I’d like to think you can trust me with how you saw everything in your mind.”

She laid her forehead to rest against his and nodded. “I appreciate your faith in telling me a little bit about your parents and how you grew up too.”

“Good.” He smiled against her lips. “Then we’re getting somewhere.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He reached down and pushed her underwear into the crease of her leg, unearthing her damp pussy for his touch. Her body swelled on automatic and grabbed for his fingers as they grazed along her slit. “It’ll keep.” Something immeasurably thicker nudged against her pouty lips, and with one small adjustment his cock slipped inside.

“Mmm, God, I love that.” He settled her thighs on either side of his hips until she rested on the thickness of his fully impaled cock. “Don’t need to come. Just want inside.” He brushed his lips across her mouth, cheek, and temple, and let her head come to rest against his shoulder. “Try to get some sleep. Morning comes early.”

“We’re on vacation, McBride,” she grumbled, feeling a bit handled. Good God, he had his cock nestled inside her, after all. “One of the perks is that we can sleep as late as we want.”

He swore under his breath, the one word curse rustling her hair. “Still gotta work on that one, honey.”

She tried to lift her head, but he pressed it back down against his shoulder. “The sleeping in?”

“Huh-uh,” he murmured, his voice drifting. “Other.”

Other? OH. The “McBride” thing.

Kelsie shivered.

She would give him a lot, already had done more than she’d ever thought to do.

She didn’t dare give him his name.

Chapter Five

Friday

Kelsie quietly climbed up the ladder to the dock, biting her lip to keep from laughing as she stared at John, his head turned down over a sheaf of papers. She tiptoed across the treated wood, leaving a stream of water in her wake. With the shadows behind her, it gave Kelsie the perfect element of surprise. She got to within one foot of John undetected, and then leaned forward and shook her body and hair like a big, hundred and fifty pound wet dog.

“Damn it! Shit!” John yelped as the shower of water came down over him in his own personal Kelsie-created rainstorm. He shook out the papers and glared up at her. “Work, Kelsie.” He held up the file. “This is work.”

“You’re on vacation, McBride.” Kelsie wrung out her hair and twisted it in a knot at her nape. “So unless you want me to get out my needles and start inking a design on your sweet ass,” and God, she could not get out of her head what a nice, hungry ass he possessed, “you need to put your work away and start engaging in some fun.”

John shot to his feet and grabbed Kelsie, wrestling her into his arms. Tilting her head back, he looked down on her with a mock scowl. “You are going to call me John by the end of this week, darlin’.” He leaned down and smacked a hungry, but all too brief kiss on her upturned lips. “I promise you that. Now,” he pulled away and grabbed up his paperwork, “let me go hang these on the clothing line to dry, and then maybe I’ll let you have my body again, which you so clearly want or else you wouldn’t have tried to get my attention in the manner of a twelve-year-old, like you did just now.”

“What!” Kelsie snapped her jaw shut and raced up the small slope to the side of the cabin, quickly catching up to John. She tugged the back of his shirt and slowed him down. “How about how much you clearly want my body, as everything I say you turn into an innuendo for sex.”

John looked her up and down openly, his slow perusal of her body heating her in a way that left no room for wondering about his thoughts. “Oh, I don’t have any problems admitting how much I want your hot little body.” He palmed her ass. “In fact, it would be nice to see a little bit more of it when we go swimming.” He eyed her shorts and tank top.

“You’d be amazing in a bikini.”

“Oh yeah.” She snorted. “I forgot how size sixteen women grace every magazine, catalog, and print ad for swim suits every summer. How remiss of me. I’ll run out and get one right now.”

“Don’t pretend you’re not smart enough to see through that bullshit, Kelsie.” John spared her an impatient glance as he separated his damp sheets of paper and hung them on the line with clothespins. “You might have an extra layer on you, but you know damn well it makes you curvy and sexy as hell. Men like women with shape, and they like a body they can hold onto in bed without worrying he’ll hurt her if he gets a little overexcited. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not exactly a small man myself.”

“You’re tall, I’ll give you that,” Kelsie conceded. “But don’t act like you don’t know you have a body that makes most women drool over its near perfection. You’re one of the better looking men in this world, don’t act like you aren’t completely aware of that fact.”

“So what if I am?” John hooked the front of her shorts with his fingers and tugged her to him. “Looks don’t keep a person interested for more than a short while. More women have dumped me than I’ve dumped, so what good did being blessed with decent looks do me in the grand scheme of things?”

She cocked her head to the side. “Have you really been dumped a lot?” That scenario had truly never occurred to her.

“Yes, I have. Don’t look so surprised.” John pulled her close and linked his hands at the small of her back. “I love my work, and I’ve had my personal reasons for not being able to commit to anything long-term with a woman.” He tripped her leg out from under her and gently tumbled them both to the soft, rich grass, rolling her on top of him in one way-too-smooth move. John tunneled his hands through her wet hair, undoing the loose knot before drawing her lips down to his. “We’re not that different, Kelsie. I know you get caught up in your work just as much as I do. We just package the product in very different ways.”

“It’s more than that—” He silenced the rest of her thought with a kiss, and God help her, Kelsie let him. Underneath John McBride’s neat, buttoned-up exterior beat the heart of a sensual, voraciously carnal man.

One to whom Kelsie feared she had grown too quickly attached.

She almost wished she had the willpower to pull away from him right now, but he worked his hands into the back of her shorts and kneaded her buttocks, groaning as if he enjoyed caressing her just as much as she preened with delight every time he touched her.

He delved his long middle finger down her crack, rubbing over her asshole with tickling pleasure before moving on to the moisture already forming between her legs.

“Damn it, you ready yourself for me so fast it makes me fucking crazy.” John collected her cream on two fingers and pushed the tips into her wet cunt.

“I can’t help it.” Kelsie pushed John’s shirt open and pressed her face to his chest, inhaling his clean, outdoorsy scent. “My body knows what’s coming next.” Warmth radiated through her from John, as it always did when they came together. Even on a sweltering day like today, Kelsie craved the heat his body created.

Nuzzling his smooth, hot skin, Kelsie opened her mouth over his copper-colored nipple and suckled on the little flat disc, eliciting a rumbling growl out of him. “I want you right now.” She straddled his hips and bore down on his bulging erection, trying to get to his arousal between two layers of clothing. Every time he took her, he made her want him more. Surrounded by the magic of this cabin, she couldn’t slow down or pull back. “All of you.” She pushed his shirt off his shoulders and pulled hers off over her head, tossing it aside. “Right now.” She reached for the snap on his shorts. “Please.”

John covered the full globes of her breasts and squeezed, shooting lines of tension straight down to her sex. “Honey, you can have me whenever you want.” Together, they quickly helped each other out of their clothes, mindless of the fact that they were outdoors in the middle of the day. Naked, with the full glow of the sun bearing down on them, John wrapped his hand around his cock and pointed it straight north. “Take what you need, Kelsie.” Desire clouded his eyes, darkening the irises to the colors of blue topaz. He so clearly wanted her, but he didn’t jam his hips up, or drag her down onto his prick. “Ride me as hard or soft as you want.”

She bit her lip and nodded. Back ramrod straight, hands braced on her spread thighs, Kelsie very deliberately, oh-so slowly, lowered herself over John’s straining erection. His tip pierced her lips, opening her pussy ever so slightly, eliciting a little shiver from both of them. Anticipation made breathing a tangible thing between them. Kelsie pushed down on John, impaling herself one thick inch at a time, stretching her pulsing channel around eight inches of rock-hard heat that throbbed with a pounding life of its own. She took him all the way to the base, and then circled her hips against his penetration, somehow adjusting and getting just a little bit more of him inside.

“Ohhh, Christ.” John grabbed fistfuls of grass on either side of him, pulling clumps of the stuff straight out of the earth. He gritted his teeth, and expelled a gasp of held breath. “You’ll drive me insane with need of you by the end of the week, I swear to God you will.” His muscles strained beneath her, all around her, but he didn’t move. “Fuck me, woman, before you kill me with wanting you.”

Kelsie’s chest twisted tight at John’s words. He had shared phrases just like that one so freely in the past few days, tying her up in knots every time she heard them. She stared into his eyes, unable to look away from the intensity sparking his entire face to excited life. They both fairly vibrated with bottled need, as if they hadn’t already had each other on the table in the middle of lunch only a few hours ago. Yet once again, she found it impossible to walk away from him and try to preserve any sense that for her this was about “sex and a vacation fling” at all.

“I know how you feel,” Kelsie admitted, her voice thick with vulnerability. She planted her hands on John’s chest and started to rock her hips, creating a delicious friction between the length of his buried cock and the shivering walls of her sex. “You make me feel crazy sometimes too.” For all the blinding sunlight and wide-open outdoors, this moment between them felt more intimate than any other thus far. Kelsie ached with the need to connect with John in ways that went deeper than merely the physical. “I… I…” Flashes of their normal lives assaulted Kelsie, choking her.

John let go of the grass and rubbed his big hands up and down her thighs. “You what, honey?” He reached up and brushed his thumbs across her heated cheeks.

She shook her head. “No, huh-uh … nothing.” Sudden fear of discovery turned Kelsie’s movements from smooth and teasing to jerky and frantic. No longer trying to torment John, she bounced on his cock in faster and faster springing action, reaching for the purely sexual contact in which they’d agreed to submerge themselves for this brief snippet of time. Didn’t matter that she’d given him small pieces of her soul already, she knew that next week and beyond wasn’t their agreement, and that she couldn’t have him outside the sanctuary of this cabin and mountain. Back in Raleigh and their real lives—

very different lives—made them as a long-term couple impossible.

In a flash, John levered himself up until they were breast-to-chest, and face-to-face.

He adjusted her legs around his waist, locking her ankles at his back. Pushing the first flyaway strands of drying hair off her face, he touched her so tenderly it nearly brought tears to her eyes. “Whatever it is, honey, let it go.” He sipped from her lips, drawing a nudge and a kiss out of her. Their bodies rocked in unison, creating a harmony of motion that would have made anyone spying on them believe they’d been together for a very long time. “Stay with me.” Roughness scratched John’s voice, and the pressure from his hold on her hips dented her flesh. His lips grazed against hers as he spoke. “Stay with me.

Always.”

Kelsie’s jaw dropped to her chest. Always. What in the hell did he mean by that?

Flings didn’t turn into forever. And theirs could not. John’s eyes flashed, clashing with hers, seeming to argue her very foundation with a raw, open connection that felt like he put a brand of ownership on her heart. Before she could scream that this could never be, he fused his mouth to hers, catching her tongue and tangling with her in a dueling, heated kiss, stealing her very breath away along with her coherent thoughts.

Sliding his hands up her belly, John covered her breasts and tormented her with teasing flicks from his thumb and forefinger over each nipple, quickly stirring her back to full, aroused life. He darted his tongue into her mouth for one more tantalizing lick, tasting her everywhere. Hot breath tingled over Kelsie’s swollen, sensitized lips, shooting tremors of joy through her frayed nerve endings and down to her sex.

He drew his legs up behind her, creating a wall at her back. Without needing words, Kelsie supported her back on his thighs and started to glide up and down along his embedded erection. John leaned back and braced his arms against the ground, his eyelids falling to half-mast as he watched where they joined, moaning every time she forced her cunt down on his cock.

They stayed like that for a tantalizingly long length of time, rolling their hips in circles against each other, keeping themselves right on the edge, forcing how long they could make this coupling last without tumbling over into the abyss. Barely touching at all other than in the most intimate of places, it was as if each tried to prolong the moment, knowing that when it ended, the other pieces of their lives that they could not ignore would resurface and put a small distance between them once again.

The tingling in Kelsie’s stomach corkscrewed in a tight line between her belly and sex, demanding more than this shallow thrust and angle could give her. She wanted to claw right out of her skin, and started pushing hard against the barrier at her back.

“Spread your legs, spread your legs.” Panic laced her voice, but she couldn’t hold it back.

“Let me lie back.”

John immediately widened his thighs, and Kelsie lowered herself to the grass, arching her spine and thrusting her swaying breasts to the sky. She planted her hands against John’s shins, using him as an immovable object as she twisted and pushed her pussy in erratic little circles against his penis, searching for that one elusive rub of flesh against flesh that would rocket her right out of her body and into the clouds. Kelsie couldn’t break away or slow down her frantic movements, couldn’t withhold the need pouring out of every moan, every stare, and every touch, whether accidental or intentional, between their bodies.

John groaned, pushing upright into a sitting position against her manic thrashing.

“Christ almighty,” he muttered, his voice thick with lust, “you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He put his hands low on her belly, covering the faces of her dragons with his open palms. Sliding his thumbs down her smooth mound and over her cherries, he opened her up, exposing her dark red clit to the afternoon air and his intense, hungry gaze. “I could take care of you for the rest of my life and never get tired of being with you.”

“Please…” Kelsie didn’t exactly know what she begged for, she just knew she’d expire on the spot if John didn’t take care of her right now. “Touch me. Make me come.”

“Anything you want, baby.” John slid both of his hands between her legs and rubbed all around her swollen, stretched labia that nestled his dick. “Anything you want.”

Holding her open, he pushed his long, middle finger into her pussy right alongside his fully embedded cock, penetrating her deep and wide in an entirely new way.

Kelsie’s face contorted with torturous delight. “Ohhh… Goddamnit that’s so good.”

Her cunt contracted all around the new thickness, grabbing at John inside, asking for more without words. She wrapped her arms around one of his bent legs and bit his knee, fighting the deep, strange pleasure, even as she pumped her hips over his invasion for more.

John gave her everything she could stand to feel. He covered her clit with two fingers, and rode her engorged pearl right to paradise.

Pleasure strung Kelsie’s entire body tauter than a drum. She gritted her teeth hard enough to make her jaw ache as John moved his buried finger independently of his cock, making it feel like she had two different people in her pussy fucking her at the same time.

Add into the mix his fingers whipping over her clit with exactly the speed and pressure she used on herself when she wanted to come fast, and he threw Kelsie into complete meltdown.

She turned her upper body toward John’s leg, holding on with every ounce of strength in her as he worked her over like a pro, tearing an orgasm out of her unlike anything she ever believed possible. Powerful shaking slammed through Kelsie all at once, and her channel squeezed around his finger and cock with incredible force, again, and again, and again, bucking her hips with each pulse as it occurred. She keened as she came, almost without a voice, the fierce pleasure and emotion coming from so deep inside her core. John kept up his relentless flickering over her clit and grazing over her sweet spot, and when she thought she had no energy left and nothing more to give, he wrung another sharp orgasm out of her, so fast and focused, deep in her sex, it stung tears to Kelsie’s eyes.

She met his gaze, saw the tormented emotion storming his eyes, and it ripped her heart out right through her throat. She pushed up and wrapped her arms around his wide shoulders, burrowing her face into the safety of his neck. She never wanted to let him go.

“John, John…”

“Ohhh, Christ, you did it.” John shuddered, and his entire body jolted as if a bolt of lightning had hit him. Instantly, he pulled his hands from between her legs and grabbed her ass, holding her flush to him as he came in a rush inside her pussy, flooding her with the heat of his seed. Kelsie held on tight through John’s release, loving the feel of him spilling inside her, heating her core and marking her with his essence. She’d never let a man inside her without protection before John, and as much as she might tell herself otherwise, she knew she hadn’t let it happen this time simply due to some spur of the moment decision to have a fling. She trembled, frightened of the reasons she wanted sex with John McBride to be different in every way from what she’d had with other men.

Heartbreak lay with those destructive thoughts, and as pierced and tattooed as Kelsie was, she had never been a masochist.

John glided his hands up and down her bare back, sending new shivers along her spine. He kissed her temple, hairline, and then let his mouth linger on her forehead. “You said my name,” he murmured, his voice laced with wonder, and not a trace of arrogance in sight.

She nodded against him. “Yes, I did.” She buried her face into the crook of his shoulder before he saw the redness burning up her cheeks that had nothing to do with sunburn.

His mouth against her hair, his voice rough, he said, “Christ, it sounded right on your lips.”

She blinked hard against his neck, unable to give him words back. Like, how easily his name slipped out, and how warm it felt inside when she finally said it. They could give each other bits and pieces of their history up here in this cabin all they wanted, but real life didn’t embrace a pairing like Kelsie Cole and John McBride. Thousand dollar business suits, multi-million dollar clients and stiff dinner parties did not go with pink hair, tattoos, and baggy cargo pants. Not for more than a very short time, at least.

Like a week in a secluded cabin.

Kelsie knew she was right, but her chest still ached a few minutes later when he unfolded from the ground and carried her inside.

* * * *

Kelsie came out of the bathroom and moved tentatively toward the bedroom door, each step careful and measured. She made it to the dresser without wincing once, and then a low whistle from the doorway snapped her neck up and forced out a little cry.

John stood with his shoulder against the jamb, looking so naturally tan that she had to stifle a scream. “I saw you tiptoeing and thought you were avoiding me,” he said. “I didn’t think you were doing it because you were in pain. Damn it, Kels, I’m sorry, I didn’t think. I shouldn’t have stripped you naked like I did. I never once thought about how you would burn.”

“It’s all right.” She would have smiled to reassure him, but right now her skin simmered with heat and pulled a little tight. “At least it’s only pink.” She lifted a shoulder, and then clenched her teeth and wished she hadn’t. “Red would have clashed with my hair.”

“All right, you know what? Take that shirt off.” Everything in his formerly casual stance flipped like a switch, and John became the man Kelsie witnessed when she went to visit her brother at his suite of offices. “I’ve already seen you naked, so there’s no reason to torture yourself by having clothing touch your skin. Get in bed and lie down. I’ll be right back.”

She would have chased him down to fight about his autocratic tone, just because she liked bickering with him, but right now nothing in her would allow her to do anything but agree with his dictate. Working the loose tee over her head with minimum hissing, Kelsie fell into bed face first, sighing as the sheets welcomed her with a temporarily cool embrace. Her eyelids slid closed, the heat of the day exhausting her. The fresh scent of plant life and the heady, rich, clean smell that was all John McBride suddenly teased her nostrils and pulled her away from sleep.

Prying one eye open, she just caught John slice across the pointed tip of an aloe stalk, releasing the crisp smell of its juices into the air. He sat on the bed carefully, barely shifting the mattress beneath her. Lifting his hand, he brushed his wrist across her hair, the piece of aloe between his thumb and forefinger. “Just close your eyes and try not to think about it too much.” He rubbed the open face of the plant across her shoulder, and Kelsie started as the cool substance coated her burning skin, immediately bringing the temperature down and causing a little shiver. “That’s it, baby. Just let it do its work, and you’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”

His voice lulled her so completely, Kelsie couldn’t help but comply. She closed her eyes and let the gel of the soothing aloe plant sink inside and do its work. At the same time, every little and big moment she had ever spent in John McBride’s company played like a TV serial in her mind, right under the comforting touch of his strong, gentle hands tending to her burn. He finished without a word, even turning her over to do her breasts and belly. Not a damn thing in his touch was sexual, only the careful ministrations of someone who wanted to help another heal. After he finished, he rolled her back over onto her stomach and pressed a soft kiss against the back of her thigh.

Flicking off the bedside lamp, she expected to hear him tread out of the room to go watch some TV. He did leave, but a few minutes later the soft padding of his bare feet returned, and a small torch lamp by a chair and ottoman next to the window bathed that corner of the room in soft light. She waited until all rustling settled and then snuck a peek from the one eye she didn’t have buried in her soft pillow. In the chair, with one leg drawn up and the other stretched out, sat John, engrossed in a book.

Right there in her bed, alternating between burning up and chills, Kelsie fell in love with the bane of her youth, tween, teen, and adult years, her twin brother’s best friend, John McBride.

No, no, please, no, no. She knew she could never make him happy in the real world.

Kelsie had never been more miserable in her life.

Chapter Six

Saturday

Coward. Coward. Coward. That was what Kelsie was. A full-on cow-ard.

Curled up on her side in bed, Kelsie drank in the sight of John fast asleep in the overstuffed chair, his long legs stretched out so far over the ottoman his feet and calves dangled off the other side. He had slid down into the plush cushions sometime during the night, but the poor guy had his shoulders rolled forward and his head tilted at an awkward angle that would leave him with a crick in his neck. She should wake him up and invite him to bed, but she couldn’t make her mouth open to say the words, and she couldn’t move across the five feet of space to nudge his shoulder and guide him to the bed.

Coward.

She ached to run her fingers over his mussed hair and stubbly jaw, to wake him up just so she could look into those incredible blue eyes that after twenty years of fighting had somehow stolen her heart—something she swore she would never weaken and give to anyone. Least of all to this man.

How could she let herself fall for a guy whose world would reject her? How could she tell this man how she felt, knowing that even if he did want her for more than this week, she could only hurt the life he’d worked so incredibly hard to build? She could never do that. He loved that world and the business he and Grey had created; he thrived on securing a big check for a new venture just as much as Grey did. They both lit up when they’d talked about it over the years, bragging to her grandma back in the days before she passed, knowing how proud it made her to see them succeed.

It swelled pride in Kelsie too, that was part of the problem. John led a life of expensive society dinners and schmoozing the old southern rich in order to build capital for his and Grey’s firm. He needed a woman who could aid him in that world, and Kelsie was just not that person. She wouldn’t even know how to dress for it, let alone how to behave in it and make that prickish small-talk that seemed so necessary to success at corporate dinner parties. Besides, all the pretty dresses in the world couldn’t cover her pink hair, multiple tattoos, and many piercings. Sure, makeup, dye, and the removal of metal hoops could conceal who she really was, but even if she were willing to do that, she couldn't ever censor her snarky, smart mouth. Virtually every conversation she’d ever had with John should have proven that to him long ago.

Tears stung at her eyes. Kelsie breathed slow and easy, struggling with everything in her to stuff them back down. It would do her no good to cry. She’d learned that lesson long ago too.

Her vision clearing, she found John in the shadows again. Together less than one week and she couldn’t imagine going home to an apartment that didn’t have him in it with her. She couldn’t even conceive that she would open her eyes in two days and not see him sleeping next to her, and to know that his body heat wouldn’t warm her to the point of overheating when he hauled her against his chest and tucked her in tight. Her pulse quickened and her skin tingled to life just thinking about how John held her while they slept. Just as quickly, her chest constricted, and Kelsie chastised the foolishness of these new wants with John, despising the wetness that broke through her determination and leaked a damp spot onto her pillow.

She couldn’t let herself have John. To get him for a little while and lose him in a year or two when he realized they wouldn’t work as a couple would rival the pain she’d suffered when her parents gave her and Gray away. She swore she would never go through that again.

Still, she couldn’t look away from John’s face and the sharp handsomeness that never left him, even in sleep. “I love you,” she whispered, choking on the words she’d never spoken to a man before, her heart breaking. “I wish I were brave enough to tell you while you could hear me.”

John stirred, rolling to his side. Kelsie turned over fast, hissing as her sunburn scraped across the sheets. Didn’t matter. She didn’t dare let him catch her like this.

With love for him shining in her eyes.

Coward.

John deserved better.

* * * *

John wiped down the kitchen counter as Kelsie dried the last plate and put it away.

They worked in silence, but nothing about it felt companionable to him. A half dozen feet separated them, but for all of today, it might as well have been a hundred miles.

He studied Kelsie again out of his peripheral vision, noting the tension in her sun-pink shoulders. “Kels.” As he broke the silence, she jumped at least a foot off the ground before spinning to face him.

She glanced his way, pausing for a second when their gazes met, but then turned and started folding the damp dishtowel into a tiny square. “Yeah? What is it?”

“Are you okay?” he asked, keeping his voice soft. He couldn’t explain it, but he thought if he raised his voice to her—as they’d done to each other all of their lives—she might shatter right before his very eyes. His tough-as-nails Kelsie. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense. “You’ve been quiet all day, and you hardly ate any dinner. What’s up?”

“Nothing.” She snapped the recently folded dishtowel back open and draped it over the oven handle to dry. “Just tired.” As she moved across the kitchen—away from him—

she fiddled with her hair, twisting the thick pink stuff into a loose braid. “I’d forgotten how much having a sunburn can wipe you out, that’s all.”

“Right.” Frustrated that she wouldn’t look at him, John dug his fingers into the lip of the counter at his back to prevent himself from taking three big steps across the room to grab her with a demand that she look at him. “Do you want to go ahead and get into bed?” She stopped mid-stride at his words, her entire body stringing with visible tightness where she stood. “I can rub some more aloe on you, if you’d like.”

“No, but thank you.” He swore to God she inched ever farther away from him—a millimeter at a time—with every word she spoke. “I think I’m going to take a cool bath and then try and rest. I didn’t get much sleep last night.” Her attention finally snapped up to him, and her eyes were so big and round it made the hazel look almost pure green.

“Because of the sunburn, I mean. I wasn’t comfortable. You understand.”

Not really. “Take care of yourself however you need.” He crushed the edge of the damn counter so hard he bruised the tips of his fingers. She held the line of her back incredibly stiff, yet everything about her screamed “fragile” right now. If he even hinted that he saw it, she would snap his head off like a praying mantis does her mate when she’s finished having her way with him. “I’m here if you need me.”

Her jaw clenched, and he swore she cursed under her breath. A second later, she flew across the kitchen and hurled herself against him, making his breath catch with the power of her hold. He automatically grabbed her around the waist and clutched her flush to his front.

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be,” she whispered. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his neck, squeezing him with incredible power. Her voice muffled, she added, “Why can’t you just go back to being the jerk I always knew you were?”

“Honey,” Christ, he was so bad at stuff like this, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here if you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing.” She pulled back, and her fingers drifted over his jaw, making him ache for her. She didn’t seem entirely steady, but he didn’t know what to do. “You don’t have to say anything, because there’s nothing wrong.”

“I think there is.”

Her gaze swirling with green and gold, Kelsie leaned in and crushed her lips to his, stealing his very breath away, along with his thoughts. The tips of her fingers dug into his jaw hard enough to scratch, drawing a moan out of him, along with a jutting of his cock.

John squeezed her around the waist and dragged her right up against him as he opened his mouth, allowing her to deepen the kiss. She bit at him and grabbed his tongue, sucking it inside her mouth in a way that had him groaning. He shifted her until he had her back riding against the counter, his weight sandwiching her on the front side.

He went for the hem of her shirt, desperate to feel her body against his. As soon as he did, she tore her mouth away from his and moved out of the wedge of his hold. Her breasts heaved with every breath she took, her lips were tinged a deep red, and her eyes brimmed with moisture, cutting him open inside.

“Kelsie.” He tried again. “Talk to me.”

“There isn’t anything to discuss, okay?” She moved to run her fingers through her hair, but caught herself at the halfway point and dropped her hands, her fingers flexing straight and wide at her side instead. “Except that you’re great and I’m a bitch, and I’m sorry if anything I’ve said to you over the years has hit too deeply and truly hurt your feelings. You have to know I never meant to hurt you.”

“Kelsie.”

“No.” She cut him off with a raised hand. “I didn’t say that to get anything out of you. I just wanted you to know what I’ve been thinking this week.” Back-stepping out of touching distance, she turned from him, and he felt as if she walked away from more than the kitchen. “I’m going to go take that bath now. I’d like to be alone, all right? Thank you, John. For everything.”

“Kelsie.”

“No, please.” With that, she disappeared from his sight without another word.

John slammed his fist against the counter, welcoming the pain of his knuckles crushing into granite. Everything in him said he should go after her. Two steps into his chase, the unsteady tone of her voice and the words “I’d like to be alone” echoed in his head, stopping him in his tracks.

Alone in the kitchen, John cursed a litany of foul words that didn’t make him feel a damn bit better.

But he respected Kelsie’s wishes, and stayed away.

Chapter Seven

Sunday

John sipped his coffee and watched the sun rise over the lake, the light twinkling against the water like gems against the slow moving ripples that moved across the surface on a cool morning breeze. John could not sleep, and he knew why. He was losing her. He didn’t understand what had gone wrong, and he didn’t know how to make it stop.

Maybe he’d grossly overestimated her interest in him, but his gut told him that wasn’t the case. More likely, he’d pushed her too quickly and made her shy away like a skittish animal, too fearful to trust something that had come into being practically overnight. He never should have said that thing about “always” when he made love to her outside, but damn it, every second he spent in her company he found it harder and harder to keep the depth of his feelings for her locked up tight inside.

He had to try though. Right after he’d made that slip-up was when she’d started withdrawing from the closeness they’d shared the first few days here at the cabin. He didn’t believe for one goddamned second her silence had anything to do with her sunburn. By yesterday morning, most of the pink had already gone away. He had checked her over himself. This withdrawal was from something else. The woman he spent the day with yesterday wasn’t Kelsie, not his Kelsie anyway, and John didn’t like it one bit.

He had planned to use this week to get under her skin, and then talk her into taking their new relationship back home with them with the hope that over time she would see they were a perfect fit. Now he worried that if he didn’t push her she would very probably withdraw to the point where he wouldn’t even be able to draw her out with sex.

On the other hand, if he spilled his guts, she could just as easily take flight and never let him see her again.

John sighed and rubbed his face, scratching at the stubble covering his jaw. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know which path to take. He didn’t have a natural sense for his next move.

He knew what he wanted with absolute clarity, he just didn’t know how to go about getting it. He learned what it meant to be in a real family through Kelsie and Grey’s home with their grandmother. The peace he’d felt there had never been duplicated anywhere else in his life. Now, as an adult, he wouldn’t settle for anything less in the family he wanted to create for himself. Women constantly left him after a short period of time for one reason and one reason only: he could not give them what already belonged to Kelsie.

Now he just had to figure out a way to convince one stubborn, passionate woman that deep down she wanted the same thing.

A shadow fell over John, and he looked up to find Kelsie, her glorious pink hair mussed around her shoulders, and a fuzzy robe covering her luscious, inviting body. She chewed on the edge of her lip, and her hazel eyes seemed to take over half of her face.

Protective instincts kicked in like nobody’s business. John immediately took her hand and drew her onto his lap, pulling her back against his chest. “What’s the matter?”

Sliding his hand inside her robe, he settled his chin on her shoulder. “Talk to me, Kels. I can see that something is troubling you. Tell me what it is and I’ll do everything in my power to make it better.”

Her half-hearted chuckle hurt his ears to hear. “You can’t make it better, John.”

Every word she spoke rubbed against his heart like a goodbye. “You’re a determined man, but even you can’t fix everything. It’s my problem, and I have to deal with it. In order to do that, I’m going to leave early today. As soon as I shower and dress I’m going to head home.”

No! He needed every hour she had promised him in order to show her he was more than her brother’s best friend and a boring suit. His arm tightened reflexively around her waist, as if he could tie her to him physically and block her from leaving.

Actually, for a short time, he could. He had one final chance to make her see him as a mate.

“You are your own woman and I can’t force you to change your mind.” He untied her robe and spread it open in the front. He covered her full, soft breasts and gently kneaded her flesh. She whimpered and squeezed her thighs together, and he knew she already began to lubricate herself for his penetration. “Give me an hour to convince you to stay.”

“It won’t make a difference.” Kelsie’s voice already sounded breathless. She rubbed her ass over his prick, and John had never wanted clothing to disappear so fast in his life.

He guided her forward and drew her robe off her shoulders, letting it fall to a puddle at her waist. “If it won’t change your mind then it shouldn’t matter if you let it happen.”

Holding her around the ribcage with one arm, John guided them up a few inches from the chair, taking his sweats down his legs and dropping her robe to the porch. He ached to fold her over the porch railing and ram into her, pounding into her tight, wet pussy until they both screamed their releases. He wanted to do that, could see himself entering her from behind, pushing through her pouting, red lips until he could get no deeper. Or, one day when he gained some control around her, God willing, she’d issue another invitation for him to take her ass. Groaning, John sat back and drew Kelsie to him. He lined her smooth entrance over his painfully hard cock and eased into her snug opening. Settling her on his lap, he took her to the hilt.

She sank her short fingernails into his thighs, gasping as her channel closed in around his prick and embraced him deep inside.

Rather than moving, John ran his hands all over Kelsie’s body, glorying in every goddamned inch of her, whether it smooth and pale, or inked with a unique design. He rubbed her strong arms, pausing over her scrollwork tattoo. “I’ve been jealous of this tattoo for almost ten years.” He leaned down and kissed the intricate piece of work.

“Christ, how I wanted my initials in there with yours, Grey’s, and your grandmother’s. I always wished I was important enough to you to warrant a piece of art on your body.”

“Grey told you about that design?” She squirmed on his buried cock, and John had to grit his teeth not to knife up into her with all the power of his build behind it.

“He didn’t tell me.” John grunted and grabbed Kelsie’s hips, stilling her hot little gyrations. He would get through to her today, damn it, if it was the very last thing he did.

He knew if she went home he would not get another chance. “I notice everything about you, Kelsie.” Enclosing her in his arms, he drew her back against his chest. He kissed the crown of her head and tucked his face against hers. “Don’t tell me you never saw me looking.”

She covered one of his hands and drew it to her breast, moving him over her distended nipple. He rolled it under his palm, loving the way the tip jutted against his hand, pebbling as he flicked and tweaked.

Kelsie moaned and rubbed her smooth cheek against the roughness of his jaw. “You always stare,” she said, hurt lacing her voice. “You think I’m strange.”

“No.” He shook his head against hers, making her feel the truth. “I think you’re fascinating.”

A little choking sound caught in her throat. “You can’t. You never said anything.”

“I can, and I’m sorry I never did before this week.” He brushed her hair aside and nuzzled her neck, moving ever more slowly upward and licking behind her multi-pierced ear. With gentle care, he flicked his tongue between the spaces of the small hoops. “I don’t take my eyes off you because there’s nobody else who comes close to capturing my interest and desire the way you do.” John’s cock throbbed inside Kelsie, crying to move.

He tightened up every damn muscle in his body and fought his way through the need. “I want to know the story behind every tattoo on your body, and I want to know what in the hell I have to do to make you care about me enough to warrant one too.”

A bubble of laughter erupted from Kelsie, stabbing John in the heart. Rejection sliced through him, stealing his breath and gutting him deeper than he’d ever imagined possible. For all their jabbing at each other, he never thought this woman would laugh at his feelings. He went cold inside, and when Kelsie covered his hand with hers, it burned him like frostbite.

She slid his hand off her breast and moved it around to her side. “Look there,” she said, her voice incredibly soft. “I’ve had you marked on me ever since you scared off that guy I went out with the summer we graduated from high school.”

John growled. “He wasn’t good enough for you. He didn’t respect your intelligence the way a man should of the woman he loves.” He lifted her arm, his brows knitting together as he looked upon the two-inch black tattoo that looked like a piece of barbed wire. He rubbed the pad of his finger over the curved, dark line, curious and unbearably touched. On top of him, Kelsie shivered. Her pussy squeezed around his dick, painfully reminding him that he was still buried all the way inside her tight body.

He lifted his gaze to hers while letting her arm fall back to her side. “Why that design?” he asked, his voice rough. Her hazel eyes darkened to forest green, showing a wealth of vulnerability she’d never offered him before. In this moment, he hid nothing of himself either. “I don’t understand.”

New blooms of pink tinged Kelsie’s cheeks, but a hint of a grin graced her wide, passion-red lips too. “Because from the moment I met you, you were a constant pain in my side. I knew you were never going away, so I had it inked on and made it permanent.”

For a split second, John didn’t know how to respond. Then, he watched her beautiful smile creep bigger and bigger, and a sharp bark of laughter escaped him, filling him to full with a sense of rightness and purpose, showing him the way.

He slid his fingers into the fullness of her hair and drew her mouth to his. He looked into her eyes, so close he could see the striations of gold in her hazel irises. “I love you, Kelsie.” Her eyes widened and her body started against his. He held her to him with his other hand around her waist, and started them moving. He gave her everything, understanding if he wanted all of her, he could not afford to hide. “I swear to God I think I have from the moment we first met and fought over who got to play Star Wars action figures with your brother.”

Moisture filled her eyes. “No.”

“Yes.” He licked the wetness away, taking her fear inside his soul. “I knew for sure I wanted you when we were fifteen. I accidentally saw you naked one evening when I spent the night at your apartment. I thought you were the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. I wanted so badly to be your boyfriend, but I knew I had to be better than I was to make you like me over everyone else.”

“No, John.”

“Yes.” He kissed her, putting all of his desperate love for her into the touch. He clung to her lips, searching, tasting. She cried out and opened for him. Her fingers traced over his jaw, holding him open for her tongue. She sank inside and swiped all of his mouth, making him groan and shudder with suppressed need.

With one hand around her waist, John wrapped the other arm across her breasts and held her prisoner to him, finally knifing up into her heat as he’d craved doing from the second she’d stepped out on the porch. “I’ve wanted inside you from the moment I understood what fucking was,” he confessed, rocking his entire body against hers as they undulated as one. “I’ve dreamt of nothing but making love to you for the past two years. I stopped dating entirely because none of those women were you.”

Kelsie reached behind him and linked her hands at the small of his back, fusing them closer, tying them up even more intricately. Her head fell back against his shoulder, and she turned in to his neck. Her voice muffled against him, she whispered, “You got me with the massage.”

“What?” He clamped his jaw down, fighting with everything in him not to come.

Her mouth fell open against his neck, heating his skin with shallow little pants. She strained down on him, forcing gut-wrenching, base coupling between them that had no style, only core need. “Two nights ago you covered me in aloe and spent the rest of the night at my side reading a book.” Her voice sounded scratched and rubbed raw with emotion. “Right in that moment, I fell in love with you.”

“Ahhh… Jesus Christ, Kels.” Right in this moment, no warning whatsoever, John jerked within Kelsie as if he’d been shot with an electrical charge, and came like a preteen boy discovering his cock. In almost the exact split second, Kelsie dug her fingers into his back, scratching across his flesh with her tiny nails. Her cunt squeezed his spurting cock with insanely tight drags, demanding every drop of his seed. Great spasms wracked through John as she writhed on top of him, deep in the throes of her release. She twisted every stripped-down emotion right out of his soul, and John cried out hoarsely to every corner of the North Carolina mountainside, outshouting the waking birds squawking in the trees as he shot hot streams of cum deep inside the only woman he’d ever loved.

In the aftermath, both of them still trembling, Kelsie tried to pull away. John held strong around her waist and pressed a kiss over the tattoo of a phoenix rising to flight from between her shoulder blades. “I want to just start driving,” he admitted, smiling against her heated skin. “I want to keep going until we find the first justice of the peace that will marry us today.”

Kelsie shot off him so quickly he couldn’t reach her fast enough to keep her on his lap. She snatched her robe off the porch and quickly wrapped herself up tight. With shaking hands, she pushed her tangled mess of pink hair behind her ears and looked up, finally showing him her face.

The fear reaching out to him through her wide eyes and trembling lips socked him in the gut. He moved to stand, but she put up her hands and tried to keep him away. He stood anyway and stalked her, backing her into the porch railing.

He trapped her there with his hands on either side of her. Following her eyes, he refused to let her hide from him anymore. “You told me you love me.” He leaned down and bit at her lips, then soothed with his tongue. “You can’t seriously think I’m going to let you walk away from that. Not ever.”

*

Goddamnit, he had to. Kelsie curled her hands into fists and knocked him against the chest. He didn’t budge. “It doesn’t mean we have to get married!” Shrieking notes entered her voice, but she couldn’t tone them down. “God, why did you have to say that?”

“Why the hell not?” he demanded. “I happen to love every damn thing about you, Kelsie, and I want everyone to know it. I’m tired of pretending I don’t want you every time I see you. Christ, do you have any idea how hard it is for me to keep from pulling you into my office and stripping you naked every time you so innocently come to visit your brother at work?”

“But that’s just it.” She poked his chest. “Look at me.”

“Oh, I’m looking.” He tugged at the lapels of her robe, getting some cleavage for his trouble.

“I don’t mean that.” She snarled at him, wishing he would stop being so deliberately obtuse. “I mean look at you, and look at me. Don’t act like it doesn’t matter that you’re in such a conservative business, while I happen to have pink hair, ears pierced a half dozen times each, and a great many tattoos.”

“Yeah.” John’s gaze finally did turn serious. He looked right into her soul, and that scared the shit out of her even more than his teasing. “And you also happen to own a very successful business of your own, one that I happen to know has won small business awards, even if you won’t brag about it yourself. The people I do business with, that’s what they’re trying to do themselves. If they met you they’d spend the evening grilling you about that far more heavily than your hair or your body art.”

Kelsie glared, her eyes narrowing. “I’m talking about the people you have to schmooze with to get the money to help finance those other people you’re trying to fool me with, John. I’m talking about the ultra rich who want you to guide them to business ventures that will make them even richer. I’m talking those old money people from those old southern families. They would not have confidence in turning over money to a man who chose a wife that looked like me.”

“And what about to a guy whose business partner is a gay man? Do you think they’d be inclined to give to a guy like that?” John shot her a knowing look. “Because they do.

They do it right now, they do it all the time.”

Kelsie snorted. “Nice try, McBride. Those people don’t know about my brother.”

Grey was extremely discreet. She happened to know that very few people knew her brother was attracted to his own sex.

“A few of them do,” John shared, shocking the hell out of her. “You know I would never lie to you, but if you don’t believe me we can get Grey on the phone and have him confirm it.”

Damn it, he wouldn’t throw a challenge like that one out to her if he couldn’t back it up with proof. “All right, fine. So a few people know my brother is gay and haven’t pulled their money from your firm.” Pushing at his arm until he finally opened a path for her, she started to pace at a furious clip. “That doesn’t mean we should just jump into getting married.”

John leaned his hip against the porch railing, totally naked, completely comfortable with his nudity, as he’d been for the last week. God, no man had the right to be so beautifully sculpted, while still exuding complete masculinity.

He watched her as she walked the planks of the porch, his stare so focused and intense Kelsie felt like a business proposal that he scrutinized and decided whether or not to take a gamble. Only, he had apparently already decided to take a chance on her, and not only that, but had wanted to do so for a long time. How could that be? How in the hell had John McBride fallen in love with her?

“I don’t get you, McBride.” She shook her head, wishing she didn’t want to run to him and burrow into his chest, crying her acceptance at everything he offered her.

“Don’t move backward, Kels.” John grabbed her as she passed him, stalling her in front of where he stood. His pale gaze swirled with all different shades of blue, betraying a depth of emotion that he had not let slip into his voice. “Don’t go back to calling me McBride and put us back at square one. Tell me what is really scaring you here, and I will do everything I can to put that fear to rest.”

Tears filled Kelsie’s eyes, and she hated it. She wiped them away roughly, and forced up her chin. “I don’t want you to regret an impulsive decision, okay?” She mopped at her awful, runny nose, and noticed the tremor in her fingers. Vulnerability made them shake, so she shoved them in her pockets, away from his watchful eyes. “I don’t want you to wake up in a year or two and discover you don’t really want a woman who works almost as many hours as you do, or who in the middle of the night watches a shameful amount of sappy movies that I’m supposed to think are dumb but that I secretly love, or who will never be a perfect size six, or likely even double that ever again. I don’t want to be on your arm at some business dinner and see you secretly scanning the room and deciding who you’re going to have to defend me against.” Her voice cracked more with each confession, but she couldn’t stop. She had to make him see. “But most of all, I don’t want to love someone so much that it will break me if he leaves, when after just being with you like this for one week I already felt lost when I woke up this morning and you weren’t in bed with me. I panicked, and I rushed outside because I was sure I’d find your car gone. I hate that, I despise being that girl. ”

“Hey, hey.” He pulled her into his arms and wrapped her up tight. Leaning back against the railing, he tucked her securely between his legs. “Shh, shh.” He rubbed her back and spoke at her ear. “You think you’re the only one who’s scared? I was sitting out here because I thought for sure I had already lost you, and I was trying to figure out a strategy to stop the bleeding before you disappeared from my life completely. I’ve wanted you for half as long as I’ve been alive. I went to college and tried to be perfect in every way so that you’d notice me and think I was interesting and intelligent enough for you. Only, I went too far and alienated you, and put you further out of my reach than ever.”

He tilted her head back and cupped her cheeks, wiping her wet face with the pads of his thumbs. She had never seen the blue in his eyes so bright, and it stole her very breath away. “It’s no accident that I’m at the cabin this week, Kelsie. You consume me so completely that there isn’t even a place in my life for sex anymore if it isn’t with you. I admit that I came up here horny as hell, looking to start something with you. But I also came up here desperate for one shot at some alone time with you so that you would hopefully finally see me and find something you liked in return.” She sobbed over his words, wishing desperately that she didn’t cry so pitifully in exactly the way those women in those embarrassing movies she loved so much did. He spoke so beautifully though, that he wrenched every ounce of emotion right out of her heart, rendering her a sopping mess.

“So, to answer your worry,” his lips tilted up in that little half smile she’d come to desperately love in the last six days, “it’s not possible for me to fall out of love with you and want you gone in a few years. I’ve spent fifteen years secretly trying to get you unsuccessfully. Now that I have you, I’m going to need at least another fifty to satisfy every sex dream I’ve had about you, and then another fifty together showing you how much I admire you and adore you, just to make up for lost time.” He dropped a kiss on her upturned lips. “So, how does that sound?”

Kelsie’s heart felt full to bursting, and she wanted to shout from the highest peak on the mountain that she loved John McBride. Instead, she tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. “You came up here to seduce me?”

He didn’t even try not to leer. “Hell yes.”

“Was Grey in on this?”

That damn sexy smile of John’s got bigger. “Hell yes.”

John’s erection, already returning and jutting against her belly, spurred an answering swelling between her legs. She reached down and enclosed his shaft in her fingers, squeezing near the base with just the amount of pressure she knew he liked.

John hissed, and thrust his hips forward into her hold. He fisted her hair in his fingers and forced her to look at him. “Is that an agreement to my proposal?” He kissed her fast and fiercely. “Because anything we do from this point on is tantamount to you saying yes to forever with me. Is that what you want?”

“Let me spell it out for you.” Kelsie got down on her knees and wrote her answer into John’s spike-stiff cock with the tip of her tongue.

John didn’t have any trouble making out the letters licked against the side of his prick. “Christ, honey,” he groaned as she finished and swallowed him deep, “I love the way you say yes.”

He thanked her in kind a little later in bed after recovering his wits.

As John held her tucked tight against his chest later on that evening, Kelsie smiled in the darkness and decided that maybe her brother wasn’t a dead man after all.

Epilogue

John winced, gritting his teeth as the heat from the needle burned against his flesh.

Kelsie straddled him, but paused, lifting the instrument with the little baggie attached away from his body. She looked up at him, patience shining in her eyes. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, steeling himself to take the stinging pain as the needle came down on his skin again. “Is it almost finished?”

“Perfection takes time, McBride.” She smiled as she said it, and John didn’t fight it.

She called him that whenever she was in the mood to play with him now, so even while being tattooed, he got hard hearing that one word from her lips. She looked up for a split second and winked, acknowledging his arousal.

He squeezed his hands into fists at his sides, fighting the urge to grab her and strip her naked. Christ, he had imagined taking her right here in her tattoo shop over the years in a dozen different ways, many of them with the little curtain closed as it was right now, with other people around. “I am picturing you riding me, your lush breasts bouncing as you take me inside, trying not to purr the way you do when my cock grazes your sweet spot every time you move.”

“Careful.” Kelsie took a cloth and wiped ink from his skin. “You don’t want to startle someone who’s putting a permanent mark on your body. You’re lucky I have ice in my veins when I work.” She leaned to the side and set her needle down. “You’re also lucky I just happened to be finishing when you said that, because take a look.” She drew back to his thighs so he could sit up. “It’s done.”

*

Kelsie sat back, her breath held as John looked down at his tattoo. His design, his idea, and he wouldn’t let anyone brand it on him but Kelsie. In a circle stamp insignia over his heart, the only place he said it belonged, were the initials KM, for her, Kelsie McBride. She blinked back tears, still quite overwhelmed that this man loved her, even though he showed her every day in a thousand ways.

John looked up, his eyes suspiciously bright too. “It’s perfect. You’re always there already, no matter what. Now, you can always see it, and it can remind you on those days when you forget. For me,” he tunneled his hands through her hair, loosening her braid as he pulled her to him, “that truly does make it the sweetest tattoo you’ve ever inked.”

Kelsie melted, opening up to accept his kiss. She rubbed against his erection through their clothes, not getting nearly enough of him to satisfy her. She broke the kiss and met his heated gaze. “Let’s go home.”

Familiar fire sparked in John’s blue eyes. He reached for the buttons on her shirt, drawing her close to his lips. He whispered against her, “Let’s not.”

One deep, soul-stealing kiss that stopped her very breath later and he talked her right into it. Honestly, she loved the man so damn much, and he was such a good asker, she hardly put up a fight.

After all, what else was the owner of a parlor called The Sweetest Tattoo to do?

The End

About the Author:

I am an Air Force brat and spent most of my growing up years living overseas in Italy and England, as well as Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia while we were stateside. I now live in Florida once again with my big, wonderfully pushy family and my three-legged cat, Harry. I have been reading romance novels since I was twelve years old, and twenty years later I still adore them. Currently, I have an unexplainable obsession with hockey goaltenders, and an unabashed affection for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

I’d love to hear from you! Visit me on the Web at http://www.camerondane.com Meet LSB Authors At The House Of Sin

Lsbooks.NET

We invite you to visit Liquid Silver Books

LSbooks.com

for other exciting erotic romances.

2007: Terran Realm

Urban fantasy world: TerranRealm.com

Featured Series:

The Zodiac Series: 12 books, 24 stories and authors

Two hot stories for each sign, 12 signs

The Coven of the Wolf by Rae Morgan

Benevolent lusty witches keep evil forces at bay

Fallen: by Tiffany Aaron

Fallen angels in hot flight to redeem their wings

The Max Series by JB Skully

Meet Max, her not-absent dead husband, sexy detective Witt, his mother…

And many, many more!

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven