Heavy Issues (9 page)

He wasn’t talking, so she took it as a rejection.

“If you want to pull out of your sex-for-fake-dates offer, I totally understand.”

He frowned. “Why would I want to do that?”

Oh God, the guy looked genuinely puzzled, like all that she had said to him was nothing.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I’m a…a…” …
nutcase that, left to her own devices, can’t stop eating even if her life depends on it?
“And my body isn’t…isn’t…” …
acceptable or what you’re used to?
No help came from him. He was just intently staring at her, waiting for her to spell it out. “Oh God, forget it. Let’s go with the others.”

“Come here, Christy,” he said in that deep voice of his. As she came closer, he pulled her to him and kissed her, thoroughly, possessively. He held her head with both hands, caressing her cheeks with his thumbs. “You had some issues, and you learned how to deal with them. I’m okay with that. I don’t see why what you told me should in any way change my mind about fucking you.”

No? Boy, the man was shortsighted. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, mist—”

He silenced her with another of his mind-blowing kisses. “Come on, let’s get my keys from Max and go for a spin,” he said, dragging her toward the others.

On the way there, he turned to her. “I have one question though.”

She swallowed hard. Here it was. “Yes?”

“Why on earth didn’t you have sex with your fiancé?”

Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that wasn’t it.

She shrugged. “We did have sex at the beginning. It just wasn’t working for me. Then we got engaged, and we were very busy…both working extra hours…”

Christy’s relationship to sex had always been weird. She’d been a late bloomer. She’d had other things on her mind, like slowly killing herself, for example. No time for little pesky things like dating or love or sex, God forbid. It’d taken her forever to get her act together, but when she finally did, she thought she was ready for intimacy. She had a brand-new life, one that was working out pretty fine. Surely she could make intimate relationships work too. Everyone else did. Besides, she was past all her shit. She had successfully rewritten herself; she was a new person, right?

Wrong. It hadn’t worked. She had a new life, true, but that old one had left a bunch of roadblocks she didn’t know how to get around, let alone eliminate.

“When he suggested we wait until after the marriage, that it’d be romantic, I agreed. It suited me just fine. I thought we’d ease into the intimacy with the marriage…that it’d get less awkward.”

He stared at her for a long second, then shook his head.

“Mental,” he said under his breath and continued dragging her along.

* * * *

After a short ride, Cole turned the engine off and set the kickstand. They were in one of his favorite spots in the whole of Alden: a secluded viewpoint atop a hill near his home with a great backdrop of the lake, now illuminated by the fireworks.

She was perched at his back, her arms wrapped around him in a tight embrace. For a couple of seconds he stood still, letting her heat sink into him. Having her close felt good. Damn good. After taking off his helmet, he covered her hands with his and gave a squeeze. “We’re here, honey. You’re missing the fireworks.”

Breaking the embrace, she got off the bike. He missed her closeness right away.

“Oh, wow. Beautiful,” she said in a whisper, taking off the helmet, her hair spilling all over her shoulders.

That long neck, that mane of brown hair falling over her like a thick cape, those bangs almost reaching her eyes. The swell of her tits straining over her shirt. Man, he could come just from looking at her.

“You cold, baby?” It was summer, but at night it got chillier, especially while riding a bike. She shook her head, but she shivered and hugged herself. “Come sit here with me so I can keep you warm.”

She looked at him doubtfully, then glanced around, probably searching for a bench. No bench, just trees and dirt. He sat back and, offering her an innocent smile, patted the leather seat in front of him.

As she came to sit, he took both helmets, placed them on the handlebars, and then surrounded her with his arms. At first she was stiff, but soon her body relaxed and burrowed into his, like a damn kitten seeking heat.

“So weirdly quiet here, don't you think? Without your giggling, bouncing, tits-on-a-stick horde of groupies around harassing you,” she said with a smile on her lips.

Yes, it was.

He so missed his days in the marines. He could put his men in line with a glare, but these women? He could glare at them until hell froze over, but it didn’t make any difference.

“If you’d played along, sweetheart, there would have been less harassing.”

She snorted and looked at him, those damn witch eyes turning his insides into mush. “Play along? What was I supposed to do, strip and jump on top of you?”

“For example,” he whispered, tightening his embrace. Now that he’d broken his don’t-get-within-one-hundred-yards-of-Christy rule, he couldn’t stop himself from reaching for her at all times.

She laughed, totally relaxed. He liked that. She’d been so stiff after their last conversation. And he’d known she’d felt uncomfortable on that picnic, so taking her away from there had been a priority. He didn’t understand much about eating disorders, but Christy had seemed very agitated, and he hadn’t wanted to add to it by asking. Besides, he’d seen in her eyes she thought he was going to mock her; at the very least she thought he wouldn’t understand her issues, which he didn’t. But he wasn’t a total moron, and he’d seen plenty of soldiers battle addiction. Some of them got discharged because of it, others got into it full-blown after the military. Some were hooked on a substance like drugs or alcohol, whereas others were simply adrenaline junkies. How had she put it? Medicating her feelings with food? Yes, medicating one’s feelings with a substance or a behavior was something he could easily relate to. It had actually taken him twelve years of blowing things up and risking his neck in the marines to work through his shit.

“Your performance today at the picnic left a lot to be desired, but I’ll let it go as it was the first. Next date I expect, one, more skin showing, and two, more passion.”

Her giggles rumbled through his chest. “Dream on. You just keep teasing me, and I’ll tell Rose you call me by her name when we have sex. Let’s see how that helps your case.”

He chuckled and, moving her long hair aside with his chin, nuzzled her neck. She smelled like warm, sweet woman. Vanilla and cherries. He wasn’t going to be able to eat cherry pie again without getting a hard-on. “I can fucking assure you, when we have sex, her name will be the last thing on earth coming out of my mouth.”

She pretended she didn’t hear him, but he felt her legs tightening and her heartbeat picking up. She wanted him. Maybe not as much as he wanted her, but he could get her there.

“Let’s get real here,” she said. “The fake-date scam won’t work. You don’t need a date; you need a bodyguard. A seven-foot, three-hundred-pound lump of pure muscle. A possessive-looking bald guy clad in black leather. Maybe that would derail them.”

“So your solution to the situation is for me to pretend to be gay? Sorry, baby, it won’t work.”

“How come? Ah, I see. You’ve hooked up with too many women in town for them to believe you’ve gone YMCA all of a sudden.”

He said nothing. Since first becoming sexually active and discovering how great sex was at burning adrenaline, he’d never had trouble getting women. Then he’d enlisted in the marines after that juvenile rescue operation that had landed his sorry ass in jail, and he’d only visited Alden while on leave. There had been plenty of meaningless, no-strings-attached sex then. Lately though, he’d tended to go outside of Alden for his exploits. It was…less complicated.

“I have nothing against gay people. I have my quirks like anybody else, but I’m one hundred percent straight.”

Christy visibly tensed. “Quirks?” she asked, suddenly out of breath. “What quirks?”

He laughed softly at the way her voice trembled. “Haven’t you figured it out already, babe?” he said in her ear. “When it comes to sex, I like to run the show. I’m a control freak.”

“Only when it comes to sex?” she repeated in a mocking tone. Then her breath caught in her throat. “Wait a sec. You mean a regular control freak or the super-deluxe, yes-master-no-master-collar-me-and-put-me-on-my-knees-master version? Because frankly I don’t—”

He barked out a laugh. “Just the regular kind, sweetheart. I love any scenario where I’m dominant, but I don’t go for slave fantasies. Or for pain. No collars, no whips, no cans, no shit like that. Although you can call me master anytime you want. I won’t mind.”

She gave him a scowl. “Sure, because you need the extra encourage—”

That last word died on her throat as he splayed his hands over her stomach and caressed her, feeling her flesh clench under his touch. Then he moved higher, over her breasts. He couldn’t feel any skin under his fingers, just hard material.

“What’s that?” By the feel of it, a roadblock the size of Alaska.

“What? Ah, vintage bra.”

He glanced over. Yep, it looked like those bras from the fifties, hard cups and a death trap of hooks almost reaching to her midriff.

Then it dawned on him. “Ah, now I get it. The long sleeves, the tight jeans, the belt, the vintage bra. All this is to keep me out, right?”

She harrumphed. “For all the good it’s doing me, I shouldn’t have bothered.”

He laughed. “Oh, sweetheart, all you have to say is no.”

“Really?”

He nodded and kissed her jaw, nibbling and licking down her neck, feeling her pulse beat madly against his lips while he cupped her breasts, and she shuddered. “But you can’t say no, can you?”

Her nipples were so tight he could feel them through the thick material. As he began playing with them, she let out a soft moan and strained against him. “No…I can’t say no.”

Thank fucking God. For a second he’d feared she was going to turn him down. Cole would have walked away from her, howling at the moon from the injustice of it, but he would have. He was relieved it wasn’t the case, because he needed to touch her, all over. Delve between her soft thighs. Feel again her pussy clenching madly around him. Like the other night, when she’d started coming right away. So damn sexy. That hot pressure was probably going to be permanently imprinted in his brain.

He hadn’t gotten any sleep. His sexed-up imagination hadn’t let him. He’d tried very hard not to think about her soft tits, her heart-stopping ass, her killer smile. The way she nibbled at her lower lip and blew her bangs away from her eyes. He’d tried not to imagine how it would feel to have her splayed open for him, her tits bouncing as he nailed her. But he’d failed miserably. The more he’d tried to stop thinking about her, the more aggressively the images popped into his mind.

Christy on all fours, so tempting, her pussy dripping wet, her folds puffy and ready for him. Christy turning to him, her hair cascading over her arm, those sexy lips of hers swollen from his kisses as he moved over and mounted her, no preliminaries, just straight in to the hilt, with his hand gripping her hair, his body jackhammering her to the bed. And now he was done imagining. Done denying himself. Done fighting the attraction. He was going to throw himself into it and pray really hard it wouldn’t backfire on him.

As he began working the button on her jeans, she stiffened, but he turned her face to him and took her mouth, stealing any protest she might have uttered. Christy’s body softened right away. She tasted so good. He wasn’t too big on kissing, never liked the intimacy and closeness of it, but, boy, could he get used to sucking at these sweet lips.

“Your skin is so smooth and soft, I love it,” he whispered to her while his fingers brushed the waistband of her panties and dipped under it.

She jerked. “Cole, stop. We need to talk,” she said, trying to wrench his hand away from her crotch.

“Okay, babe, let’s talk.” He stilled his touch. He didn’t know whether he’d be able to listen to a damn thing with the way his blood was pounding in his ears, but whatever, he’d give it a try.

She squirmed, but he kept his hold on her, his hand cupping her mound proprietarily, his middle finger sinking between her folds from all her writhing.

“Cole, this would work much smoother if you remove your hand from between my legs.”

“Why? Are you gonna be talking with your pussy?” They could talk, but he needed the contact.

She harrumphed but let it go. “My body…my body is not like yours.”

“Thank God for that.”

“I’m serious, Cole. I mean your body is…well, your body is damned perfect. Mine isn’t.”

“Bullshit.”

She ignored him. “It didn’t bother me this much when I was with other men. Their bodies were normal, but yours is breathtaking. It makes me more self-conscious than usual.”

He clenched his jaw. He so didn’t want to hear her talk about being with other men. He was going to interrupt, but she hurried on. “I was fat, Cole. Very fat. I’m not talking about panicking for being five pounds overweight, or for eating one extra carrot. No, I’m talking about seventy extra pounds. I’m talking about years and years of gaining and losing dozens of pounds, shrinking and ballooning like a…like a frigging puffer fish. I was either on my way up, bingeing my brains out, or I was on my way down, starving myself, which, believe me, never lasted. At my heaviest I was two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds, Cole. I don’t think you realize what that is.”

“Babe, I weigh more than two hundred pounds.”

She snorted. “Duh! Hard muscle all of it, not to mention you stand at six feet four. I was six feet four…wide. I know it’s difficult to imagine now that I’m more or less a normal size, and I look more acceptable…”

Acceptable? She thought she looked acceptable? Cole couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d seen her bossing his men around in the library, and although she’d said she was just a programmer, Annie had mentioned that Christy was considered something of a software genius. It was unbelievable how someone as confident and as smart in other areas would now look so vulnerable and unsure when talking about her body. A body that was making his cock stand so hard for so long he feared it was going to crack at the base every time he tried to separate it from his stomach, where it had taken up permanent residence since first seeing Christy.