Carnal Compromise (12 page)

His tongue forged into her tight hole and blood roared back into his cock. He was damn well going to fuck the little hellcat in that hole just as soon as he got it stretched out enough. But for now he settled for fucking her with his tongue, making her love the dirtiness of it as much as she thought she ha—

Whoa.
The weight between his feet shifted and suddenly his thighs were being pushed apart by heavy hands.

“Keep going, Brent. She’s fine now.”

He obeyed, although his movements slowed and he felt incredibly vulnerable, what with the family jewels on display down there and all.

AJ leaned forward, away from his mouth, and he felt her lips brushing his pubic hair in what felt like an apology. Then another mouth joined it on the other side and Brent swallowed, forgetting all about what he was supposed to be doing. Warm breath drifted over his cock from both directions and he jerked. He didn’t dare think about anything, didn’t dare hope for anything—he just lay there with his eyes closed and waited, barely breathing.

The first touch on the side of his cock was so light he barely felt it. The next was firmer, and more followed all over, sensuous little licks that were too frequent and scattered to come from a single tongue.

He broke into a sweat, his heart pounding.
Joe
. That was all he could think—
Joe
.

AJ shifted and then her small mouth settled over him. He relaxed somewhat, the natural response of a man finally getting cock into a woman’s mouth, and she slid down farther. As he’d imagined, her teeth scraped along the skin of his shaft, making him shudder. That was stimulating and exciting now, but if she started bobbing or he got carried away, she might draw blood.

He slid his hands down her back to her shoulders, ready to pull her off him if things got too dicey.

Then he tensed when Joe’s heavy hands settled on his hips, the fingers fanning out low over his abdomen and the thumbs stretching down to massage the creases where his thighs met his balls.
Don’t think, don’t wish, don’t hope…

“I didn’t get laid last night, Brent.”

Before Brent could process Joe’s rough confession, wet heat swiped over his scrotum and he gasped for breath.
Joe.
While AJ sucked his cock, Joe was painting his balls with a broad, hot tongue, leaving trails of cooling moisture on every square inch of his sac. When Joe spread his thighs wider with his forearms and reached lower with his tongue, Brent shuddered violently. Few women in his life had been daring enough to go there even with their fingers, but Joe’s tongue didn’t hesitate as it blazed a fiery trail from the base of his cock all the way down to his asshole. Joe devoured him like a starving man, sucking Brent’s balls into his mouth one by one and tonguing them, then moved down again to explore his perineum and ass. For a second, Brent felt a touch of AJ’s shyness, but Joe didn’t give him time to indulge it, shoving his legs back even farther so that he could push inside.

With his legs in the air, Brent just lay there, helpless, undignified and disoriented, and took Joe’s exploration of his ass and AJ’s enthusiastic ministrations to his cock as if they were his due as either sex slave or king of the world. Or both. Inside he was floating, curiously hollow and light. For the last couple of days, hurt had weighed him down with a force that was almost physical…and now it was gone.

Joe hadn’t slept with another guy last night. He’d gone out cruising, there was no way he hadn’t. Maybe he’d passed up an offer, or maybe he’d struck out, but either way the end result was the same—

Shit, I’m in love with a man.

AJ got a little too enthusiastic, and he squeezed out, “AJ, teeth.”

She jerked to a halt and then Brent felt Joe mouth a demonstration on his balls.
Good old Joe.
AJ quickly followed suit by covering her teeth with her wet lips before bobbing on him again, and within minutes, Brent was tense and poised to blow. He groaned when AJ pulled off him, but then Joe moved, and sudden fierce suction from a hot, unyielding mouth had him bowing off the bed, yelling at the top of his lungs as he came. He felt Joe’s every hard swallow on the head of his cock and nearly wept at the relief.

When AJ slid off to the side and laid her head on his heaving chest, Joe stood up, still fully dressed and sporting a hell of a bulge in his jeans.

“Apology accepted?” he asked. “Are we even now?”

“You have to ask?” Brent said roughly.

“Good. Then I’ll see you guys tomorrow.” He walked out and closed the door behind him.

Brent heaved a tired sigh and pulled AJ closer, feeling as though they’d just stepped back from the brink of Armageddon. Now that Joe had evened up the blowjob score—like they were ten-year-olds exchanging Indian burns on the playground—he probably thought their relationship would settle back into the game of cat and mouse they’d been playing for years. Maybe it would. Maybe it should. Brent didn’t want to go back to the way he’d felt the last couple of days, and he sure as hell didn’t want to lose Joe. But he also hated the idea of going back to the sidelines and watching Joe fuck everyone but him.

What are you afraid of, Joe?
AJ’s challenge earlier in the evening suddenly took on new significance. Exactly what
was
Joe afraid of, and how did AJ manage to pin him down so neatly?

If Brent didn’t know better, he’d almost say Joe was afraid of
him
.

His heart beat faster. Shit, that was exactly what it felt like—as if he had turned into the aggressor and Joe was on the defensive.

As if he were the hunter and Joe was the prey.

What are you afraid of, Joe Remke?

Brent had a feeling that if he wanted to find out, he was going to have to start pushing. Hard. But he had to be prepared for that fact that when he did, Joe would either push back or he would flee, and either one could put both of them in a world of hurt.

“What are we going to do with that idiot?” AJ asked.

“When you figure it out, tell me,” Brent said, stroking her silky hair, “because I have no idea.”

Chapter Nine

The next morning, Brent woke to the sound of rain slashing against the windows. According to last night’s weather, which he’d watched while eating a bowl of homemade ice cream with Aunt Val and Uncle Stu, the big, slow-moving low pressure system was supposed to linger for a couple of days. That meant it would probably be at least three or four days before it was dry enough to get back in the field.

He was ready to climb the walls just thinking about it. If the season were over and they were back at his place outside of Goodland, he’d happily spend the duration in bed with Joe and AJ. Now that the status quo had been somewhat restored, they could probably find all kinds of kinky ways to fill their time.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t get away with that during the season. The crews always used weather downtime to perform routine maintenance on all the equipment, and everybody would notice if the three of them spent a few days rocking the RV. That wouldn’t be good for any of them.

But a trip west might. Taking a few days off with Hake and Mandy always relieved the tension between him and Joe for a good month at least.

Joe appeared in the doorway, naked in the dim gray light. His hair was rumpled and his eyes heavy with sleep, but his body was plainly ready for action as he slipped under the covers on the other side of AJ. She shivered but didn’t wake up when he snuggled up against her backside.

“You up for a piece of Mandy’s pie?” Brent asked in a low voice.

Joe looked surprised. “Always. What brought this on?”

“Well, since Hake’s getting rained out, too, it seems like a shame to waste three or four days hanging around here greasing zerks, changing oil and adjusting chains when we could be…” he raised a brow, “…greasing and adjusting other things.”

“I like your thinking.” Joe glanced down at AJ. “I assume we’ll take her?”

“Hell yes. I’m sure she’d like to meet Mandy, and since she’s stuck working with men all the time, giving her a girls’ weekend would be the perfect excuse. The guys are already used to us taking a time-out in Garver, so it only makes sense to get it out of the way now.”

“Nothin’ that says we can’t stop again on our way back, though.”

Brent grinned. “I like your thinking.”

“When do you want to leave?”

“No time like the present.” Brent kissed AJ awake. She protested a little and tried to snuggle back into her pillow until he said, “Ariel Jane, how would you like to take a little road trip this weekend?”

Her eyes popped open. “Really? Are you serious? I thought it was my turn to change the air filters and blow out the radiators.”

“Dietz can handle the dirty low-man jobs this time. Maybe that’ll make him think twice about clearing clogs without turning off the rotor.”

She noticed Joe behind her and gave him a quick smile. “Where are we going?”

“Oh, I thought maybe we’d head up the interstate and get you some boots in Sioux Falls, then head west to Garver to visit my cousin Hake and his wife. We were planning on stopping there on the way back, but with the weather holding us up, I thought it might be nice to get away today. Maybe stay a couple of nights if the rain keeps up.”

Joe nuzzled the side of her breast, apparently intent on starting the day with something more exciting than breakfast, but AJ was having none of it. She swatted him away and scurried out from under the sheet. “I need to take a shower!”

She was almost to the door, naked as the prettiest jaybird he’d ever seen, when she stopped in her tracks and turned around. “Wait. What are you going to tell your cousin about me?”

Brent grinned. “Why do I have to tell them anything? There’s no law that says you have to tell everything you know.”

She chewed her lip for a second and then said, “Okay. I guess that’s true.”

He and Joe looked at each other and grinned.

“What?” she demanded. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothin’,” Joe said. “You’re just cute.”

She scowled at them and then disappeared through the door.

“So apparently you’re not going to tell her everything you know, either,” Joe said, bunching AJ’s pillow up under his head. “You gonna call first?”

“Nah. They can all be surprised.”

“Interesting. You’re thinking of expanding AJ’s horizons even more?”

“Why not? I know Mandy’s still got a million fantasies, and I imagine Hake must have a few too. Come to think of it, what about you? You’ve got to have a fantasy or two.”

Joe’s look darkened. “I don’t have fantasies,” he snapped. Then he took a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m still a little tired. Told you I need my beauty sleep,” he added with a weak grin.

“I’ll drive so you can sleep if you want.”

“Nah, I’ve never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle.”

“Not a bad thing for a man who has to spend fourteen hours a day behind the wheel of a tractor.”

“You got that right.” Joe sighed and closed his eyes. “Wake me up when everyone’s done with the shower.”

Brent sighed, too. Yeah, it was definitely time for a trip to Garver.

An hour later they were on the interstate, with AJ between them again, handing out breakfast sandwiches from the McDonalds drive-through. She would probably have been more comfortable in the backseat but they’d had to pile their bags there with their jackets to keep them dry.

Contemporary country music filled the silence while they ate, and it wasn’t long before Brent relaxed and started to enjoy the drive. Turning down the radio a little, he asked, “So did you always go by AJ or was that something you picked up along the way?”

“I went by both for quite awhile,” AJ said, scooting her feet from the hump in the floor to either side of it. “Dad called me AJ because he wanted another boy. Mama called me Ariel because she wanted a pretty little china doll she could dress up and show off.”

“Let me guess—neither of them got what they wanted.”

“Give the man a prize.”

Well, that explained a lot about Ariel Jane Pender. “And how did they handle that?” he asked.

AJ thought about it for a minute. “Dad handled it better than Mama because he already had his boy and I was her only daughter. She tried not to let it show, but I could tell she was disappointed that I was more interested in tinkering with tractors and caring for animals than sewing and baking and doing all the other crafty little things she liked. About the only interest we really had in common was horses, and Dad thought they were a huge waste of time and money so we never had any.”

“That’s too bad,” Joe said. “Every girl should have a horse.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” AJ said with a small smile. “But you know, I think once she saw what a help I was to Dad, Mama mostly got over her disappointment. After my brother Kevin enlisted and I took over the day-to-day care of the cattle, she let me off the hook for household chores with barely a whimper.”

Brent grinned. “Stoic farm wife.”

“She was that,” AJ said in a somber tone. “Which is probably why the cancer got such a foothold before they found it. I didn’t even know she was having problems until she went in for a hysterectomy my junior year, and by then it was way too late.”

“What a waste,” Joe said darkly.

AJ nodded. “It really was. I was kind of mad at her for a few years after she died,” she added with a sigh. “When prom rolled around, I finally had a boyfriend I wanted to impress, and she would have loved helping me get all dolled up. She deprived us both of that experience by refusing to go in for annual exams.”

He laid his hand on her knee. “I’m sorry.”

“I am too. I still miss her.”

“So what about your brother?” he asked. “Is he older or younger?”

“Kevin is three years older than me and he went into the service right after graduation. It was a real shocker for Dad. He’d always thought his only son would follow in his footsteps, but Kev wanted to see the world, so he became an army mechanic. Dad finally started accepting more help from me in my senior year, but I don’t think he ever gave up on Kev coming home and taking his rightful place.”

The melancholy look on her face made Brent want to dig the old man up and kick his ass.