Hot in Hellcat Canyon (18 page)

He stepped into the tiny bathroom, his hand lingering with bemused pleasure over the original porcelain knob. All the fixtures in the house—knobs, latches, hinges, lights—were pretty much original. There was a shower over an old claw-foot tub, and a vintage porcelain sink, a little rusty now, with a separate knob for hot and cold. He tried both, casually. Water spurted from each.

And still he didn’t say a word.

She felt like he was mulling over a decision, and it had more to do with her than with this house.

She found her voice, but it emerged pitched a little high. “Want to see the kitchen?”

She led him in there.

He followed in almost dreamlike silence.

The floors were wood, and a huge old farm sink sat below a little window letting in leaf-filtered sunlight. A bird flew up to it and split when it saw them.

A huge, sturdy slab oak table sat in the middle of the kitchen. It was the only piece of furniture in the house.

Britt touched it. “Jonah Greenleaf owned this house. He made this table. Apparently he was good at stuff like that before they hauled him off.”

“ ‘Hauled him off’?” J. T. was amused rather than alarmed. He was ready for another Hellcat Canyon story.

“Drugs. Sheriff Barlow arrested him for running drugs out of the Plugged Nickel. Scary bar up near the Coyote Creek settlement. He’s doing time. Bank repossessed the house and Gary bought it a short time ago. Remember the woman from the open mic? Glory Greenleaf? Her brother.”

“Mmm,” was all he said.

The stove was an ancient gas model, gorgeously made. She touched it, too.

“It works,” she told him. “But you’ll need to get a fridge in there. A wood stove heats the place, and I don’t know if the heat reaches the bedrooms very well. There are fans in the bedrooms, though. Want to check out the back deck? It’s a little on the rickety side.”

Her voice was still rushed and breathy, as if he’d been chasing her through the house. It was pure anticipation.

She opened the kitchen door, which creaked on its hinges. She took two steps out onto the deck. J. T. wrapped his hand around Britt’s arm and drew her swiftly backward.

And then he pointed upward silently.

Her eyes followed the direction of his finger.

A huge black widow spider was hovering up high in the web in the eaves of the house over the kitchen door. Clearly hoping not to be noticed.

“Holy. . . .” she breathed.

The spider backed swiftly up like a square dancer getting ready to do-si-do with a partner, scrambling to get away from them.

“You know what they say. It’s more afraid of us than we are of it,” he said dryly.

“Then we’d better get out of the way in case it faints and falls out of that web.”

Simultaneously, it seemed, they both realized his hand was still on her bare skin.

She looked down at it, curled around her, and suddenly her skin felt feverish.

“Britt?” he said softly.

She raised her head slowly and looked up into his eyes. Which had gone so black she could see herself in his pupils. She couldn’t speak.

And then his hand slowly, deliberately, slid the length of her arm, down to her wrist.

A bold, unabashed, caress. And if she had to guess, a statement of intent.

And he released her.

Her heart drummed so hard her blood whooshed in her ears. Her every cell was lit up with hunger.

“Let’s go back inside,” he suggested in something close to a whisper. Oh, so casually. Like the sexual hypnotist he was.

He turned, apparently confident she would follow.

Of course she did.

He held the door for her. It clanked shut behind them. The sound seemed to echo, but then all of her senses were wildly sensitized.

J. T. stood in silence near the sink, studying her.

She stood a few feet away from him.

The quiet in the kitchen almost had a roar, like a river.

And then J. T. reached out, curled his fingers into the hem of her tank top, and furled it up as smoothly as a window blind.

Her arms came up to help him, probably more out of sheer surprise than anything else.

Now she was nude from the waist up.

And then, absurdly, he handed the tank top to her.

As if to say: “There. Problem solved.”

She took it, with a short stunned laugh.

The sight of her went straight to J. T.’s blood like Everclear.

She was smooth and tanned gold except for her breasts, which were white, small, tipped in little pink ruched teepees and curving up at him. Her little waist flared into round hips. Her low rise denim shorts showed him her belly button. He was going to make short work of those shorts.

Lust sank its talons fully in.

He made a little sound, almost of pain. The breath went out of him as if he’d been dropped suddenly from a height.

She dropped the tank top.

Later he couldn’t remember what happened between that moment and the next.

Only that one moment she was standing half nude, illuminated in filtered sunlight.

And the next their bodies and mouths were colliding with greedy near-violence.

They all but climbed each other. Her arms went around his neck and he pulled her up roughly against him, his hands slid over the satiny heat of her skin, over the delicate blades of her shoulders, the nip of her waist, sliding down into her shorts to cup her cool, smooth butt. He groaned with a shocking surfeit of pleasure.

He was awkward and greedy and practically shaking with the effort of asserting some sort of control on all that unleashed lust.

She was shaking, too. “Oh, God, yes, J. T. . . .” She whispered this against his mouth.

And she tasted amazing, dark and sweet and hot and set. She kissed with carnal strategy and so did he, each curl of the tongue, each brush of their lips designed to make each other crazy hot. They both knew what they were doing and they were good at it, and if they weren’t wild before they started, they were beasts now.

In her ferocity she was hurting him a little. But he liked it. He was likely hurting her a little. It only seemed to spur them on. They were both so hungry they’d forgotten how to calibrate and it was all urgency and take take take. She came at him so hard he nearly staggered backward.

He slid his hands beneath her butt, lifted her up against his swelling cock, and they ground together gracelessly groin to groin, and her head went back on the most erotic gasp he’d ever heard. He buried his mouth in her throat beneath her ear, where the skin was tender and satiny and her heart was beating hard as a kick drum, and he licked, then laid his lips there and her head fell back.

And he carried her like that three feet to the old slab table and laid her down.

He hovered over her for a moment of near quiet, and he propped himself above her on his arms and kissed her, more softly now. He was like a drunk man. Her fingers wound through his hair, traced his ears, dragged lightly down his throat and it was like her fingers were magic wands lighting fires everywhere in him.

He touched his tongue to her nipple, then drew it into his mouth and did fancy twirls with his tongue and then sucked until she was writhing from the pleasure. His other hand savored the silky give of her other breast, his thumb chafing the hard peak. Never let it be said he couldn’t multitask.

He knew how to get the job done fast. And the job was to make her wet and begging.

She arched upward, groaned and slid one bare foot up between his legs, and dragged it hard and surprisingly dexterously up over his bulge, and stroked by way of encouragement.

“God,” he swore.

He was going to lose his mind.

“Take them off.” Her voice was ragged.

He didn’t know whether she meant his or hers, but he started with hers. He dragged her shorts down over her legs, and with them came a practical pair of underwear. Two birds with one stone! She gave a little kick and they were on the floor. He kicked them aside.

She was completely nude and lying on that table like a feast and he leaned over to kiss her and murmur, “This is going to be fast.” Part apology, part promise.

“It had better be,” she rasped.

He got his own jeans unfastened and open and his cock sprang free, and then he dangled his fingers in the dark blonde, neatly trimmed fluff between her legs and then slipped one finger into the slick heat of her, dragged it over her hard again.

She moaned low, and it tapered into something like a despairing laugh. “J. T. . . . I swear . . . I’m so close . . .
please . . .
”

And then he tucked her calves against his rib cage and she locked them around his waist, and he was inside her in a swift thrust. His head fell back and he swore hoarsely at the staggering pleasure. He was sure nothing in this world could ever feel as good as his cock sheathed inside the tight heat of her, right now, in a falling-down house in the middle of the woods.

There was no finesse attempt. He was dying for it and she was begging and it was, as he’d promised, fast. He drew back, dove in again, and she hissed at the pleasure of it. And then plunged and thrust with a speed his eighteeen-year-old self would have been proud of, and he was going to come with almost embarrassing speed, he could
feel
it, hovering like a presence about to yank him from his body right into the stratosphere. He kept his fingers on her in a steady rhythm, too, and judging from the moans torn from her this pleasure was nearly impossible to bear, which was reasonably true for him, too.

And then her body whipped upward and her head fell back and he could hear the raw soundless scream of his name and her fingers clutching the edge of the table as if to brace for an earthquake, as she pulsed around him, absolutely coming apart as she came.

And then he was right there with her, his head thrown back, and he roared like an animal, racked with wave after wave of white-hot pleasure.

W
hen it was over, it was, in fact, like the aftermath of a real earthquake.

The part where everyone looks around and says, “What the hell was that? And how did we survive?”

Sounds sifted into his awareness again. Singing birds outside. Her breath. His.

He leaned forward to kiss her mouth lightly. Her hot, swift breath mingled with his. He rested his head lightly on her sternum. She was damp with sweat. He could feel her heart hammering beneath his cheek.

“You okay?” he murmured.

“I’m good. But you’re breathing pretty hard there, J. T.”

He laughed. “That was a sprint. You got to do most of it lying down.”

Her rib cage leaped in a short laugh.

Slowly, reluctantly he stood up. And looked down on his conquest.

She sat up and leaned back on her elbows, still disheveled and nude, looking pleased with herself and with him and the entire world. Her mouth was rosy and swollen and her face was flushed and her eyes were heavy. She was really astoundingly luscious. He felt a fresh wave of hot weakness.

He retrieved her tank top from the floor and tossed it to her.

She caught it one hand and shook it out and pulled it down over her head, then gave her hair a cursory rake with her fingers.

He watched all of it with great satisfaction.

She was just as sexy in that tank top as out of it. More, maybe. Because now her hair was a shambles and her skin glowed with a slight sheen of sweat. All caused by him.

“Foreplay. It’s overrated,” she teased.

“Everything from the moment we met up until now was foreplay.”

She went still for a moment.

Their eyes locked again.

She didn’t disagree. She smiled slowly and stretched.

“Shorts,” she demanded lazily, as if he were a peasant.

He fetched her shorts and tossed them to her. She wriggled into them and buttoned them up, graceful, swift, natural.

Then she slid from the table.

They were quiet a moment, studying each other almost shyly. As if hot sex on a wooden table was a long overdue conversation they’d been meaning to have and now there was nothing left to say.

“Hey.”

He curved his arm loosely around her and spooled her back against his body. Her arms went around his waist.

He wrapped his around her, and when her body was against his, lust surged up again in her like a wave.

There appeared to be a whole ocean of it.

She closed her eyes.

She could feel his heart beating hard against her cheek. She savored the triumph and pleasure of making his heart beat that hard.

He didn’t say anything else.

She held him close, because it seemed as though he needed it.

Or maybe it was because she needed it.

He kissed her lightly on the temple.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

She eased from his arms with great reluctance.

“Thank
you.”

For God’s sake. Next thing you knew they would high-five each other.

But they both knew this casual stuff was a way to diffuse the shocking intensity of what had just happened.

“I . . . I . . . have to go,” she said. She was already backing away. “My other job . . . the Misty Cat . . . afternoon shift . . . have to get to it . . .”

“Sure,” he said lightly. “You want to leave the key? I’ll lock up.”

She fished it out of her pocket and handed it over to him, and even though they’d been naked savage lovers a moment ago, the feel of his big hot hand against hers as she handed him the key made her blush all over again. And their hands lingered.

“I’ll see you, Britt,” he said softly.

And she left.

Quickly.

She did have somewhere to be. Though in truth she was kind of running away.

At least she left backward.

And she walked backward for as long as she could, so she could see his smile until she got into her car.

CHAPTER 10

O
h my God oh my God oh my God oh my God.

A hosanna, a prayer, three useful little words that could be used to express anything huge and inexpressible. They were a song in her head as she drove down the hill again.