Outlaw Cowboy (13 page)

He couldn't possibly blame her for that, but he didn't have to accept it. “I am going to make you trust me.” Maybe if he could earn her trust, deserve it, he could stop believing his mother's voice in his head.

“Good luck with that.”

“I am. I know I screwed it up once, but I'm going to fix it. It's not my area of expertise, but I am going to do it.”

“You can try.”

“I will. And I'll succeed.” Damn right he would. Save Shaw. Find Delia some peace. He was going to do all the things he'd screwed up in his past. Something about Summer's note and that sunset and Delia's kiss had changed him, and he was going to hold on to that change, and fuck every old voice in his head telling him he couldn't.

“Well, there's something I want you to do before you start trying.”

“Name it.”

Her hand not touching his jaw knocked his hat off his head, curled into his hair, and tugged him down onto her mouth. The kiss was lacking all sweetness, all gentleness they'd had in the truck—this was hot and hard and maybe a little mean, and he gave himself over to it.

Because he had no answer for the
why.
So maybe it was time to ask himself a different question.

Why the hell not?

* * *

Delia wanted something raw and kind of wrong and all kinds of twisted. She wanted to forget there was bad and good in the world, because as much as her father was the bad, most of the rest was a nasty mist of gray.

Bad and good and wrong and right, and she was tired of trying to find the right path in the murkiness of it all.

So she'd fuck something senseless to feel good. She pressed her entire body to Caleb, and even with the bulky coat between their chests, she could feel the warmth of him. And when she arched her back just so, she could feel the hard line of his erection.

That was what she wanted. Something that didn't involve words or thinking or hard stuff. Just sex. Sex, and then she'd use him to get Steph out. Tomorrow first thing. Somehow. Someway. He'd offered his help, and she would use it.

But for now the sun was down and her heart hurt. All she could think about was all the ways she'd failed Steph, and all the ways she'd keep failing her if she wasn't more careful and more thoughtful. Like not tearing off in a huff because she was getting the boot.

She had to be smarter, above all the emotional shit. What would she have done when it was dark and cold and she was traipsing through the woods?
You would have survived. It is what you do.

Yeah, well, her survival was about to include hot, sweaty, not totally nice sex.

The best kind, all in all.

She tugged at the zipper of his coat and pushed it off his shoulders. He didn't move to do the same for her, so she did it herself, all but swearing when the zipper got stuck at the bottom.

“Lift up your arms.”

“Lift up my—” He tugged her arms up. “Why, yes, I've been in this position before. Don't shoot.”

But without even a crack of a smile, without any of the painful intensity leaving his face, he simply pulled the jacket up and over her head. He dropped it to the ground and caged her against the door. Thrill and excitement zapped through her, a sizzling heat. She wanted to be caged, and she wanted his body against hers. She reveled in the excitement that pooled low, and gave herself over to it.

He grasped her chin in a way that should have felt threatening, not exciting. But every hard groove on his face, and every expelled breath across her cheek all worked together to make her desperate for sex—desperate for him to focus his intensity on her instead of all the crap that surrounded him.

“No jokes. Got it?”

She batted her eyelashes at him, because as desperate as her body felt, she was still in control. He did not get to tell her what to do, even if that gruff command made her stomach flip and her pulse beat faster. “And what are you going to do? Punish me?”

His grasp on her chin tightened, and he leaned closer, until they were almost nose to nose. “No. Jokes.” He held her gaze as he brushed his mouth across hers, gentle, sweet.

No, no, no, that was not what she signed up for. She did not want sweet. She couldn't help but feel they'd been destined for this—this moment. It had been undeniable since they'd understood what sex
meant
.

But it had never been meant to be gentle. Not between them. There was too much energy and too much drive for either of them to bend easily.

Or so she would have liked to believe. The way his hand slowly, softly stroked down her throat, between her breasts, across her stomach before reaching the hem of her shirt and tugging upward, she didn't just bend, she nearly melted.

She'd had a decent shower at the Shaw house this morning, but her bra was still the ratty, graying thing she'd left Eddie's apartment in, and though there were a multitude of things she refused to be self-conscious about, this was one of those things she couldn't quite stomach.

What was sexy about standing in front of a man in a piece-of-shit bra that had obviously made the rounds for a long damn time? He pulled the shirt completely off of her, and then she managed to leverage some space between her back and the door to work the aging clasp apart and drop the bra. She needed no reminder of what little she had.

Luckily, an interested man's gaze on her chest was a great antidote for feeling self-conscious about her underwear.

He dropped her shirt next to the bra, then his hands squeezed onto her hips, anchoring her in the spot. Against the door.

His palm was hot and hard and rough as it slid up the curve of her hip, the dip of her waist, the flare of her shoulder. She wanted more of that scraping, possessing touch, more of the tightness in her chest, the jittery longing low in her belly. He delivered, his entire hand following the line of her collarbone, the other hand still gripped tight and centering on her hip.

When his palm covered her breast, a callous scraping over her nipple, her head thunked back against the door. It had been a long time since someone had touched her in a way that hadn't felt like… Well, she really didn't want to think about how a lot of the sex she'd had felt more like payment than lust. Not when this felt like none of the former and all of the latter.

He needed to lose some clothes so she could keep riding this wave of good feeling. “Your turn,” she managed to croak. Unsurprisingly, because she was almost certain he'd do anything she told him to right now, he whipped off his shirt and let it fall on top of hers.

She sighed. Even though she'd seen that sight just last night, it wouldn't ever get old. Caleb didn't have to worry about old bras or bad razors or any number of things that severely threatened all the ways she made herself feel beautiful, put together, or ready to face the world. He was perfection. Unfair, really, that he could be perfect, but for the moment that broad chest, with dips and ridges of muscle, was hers.

And she wasn't going to settle for less than everything. “Now the pants.”

“You first.”

“Uh-uh. I started this. I get to be in charge.” Because something was going to go her way. She was going to make sure of it.

He quirked a brow, as if to say
yeah right
, but his hands went to his belt, which he carefully unclasped. Then he stopped abruptly, his cocky expression falling into something like intense remorse. “I do…not have a condom.”

For the first time, her hastily packed backpack was about to be her saving grace. She rolled her eyes, pushing past him. “Ugh. Men.” She sauntered over to the pile of things she'd tossed out of her backpack when she'd packed earlier, holding up a hand to shush his protest. Amid the lipstick and the change of clothes, there was the little foil packet that had been left over from the time she and Eddie went to Summerville and she'd packed this bag.

Good luck charm indeed. “You're in luck, but I've only got one, so you better make it good.”

The cocky quirk of a smile was back. “That is one thing I have no doubts about.”

She held the package between her index and middle finger. “So, drop the pants.”

The smirk turned full-on arrogant grin, and without looking down or breaking any kind of eye contact, he finished removing his belt, undoing his button, lowering the zipper.

A dreamy sigh would undoubtedly go to his head, but she couldn't manage to keep it in. He was not a man who'd gone soft with age, or gaunt with the loss of alcohol in his life. Instead, that teenage ranginess had been honed into something broad and lean and… She wasn't sure she had the vocabulary for what he was.

Strong, competent, gorgeous. Objectively, he looked like a dream or a movie star, and yet she knew this man's faults, and they were legion. The bigger problem was she knew his good too. The calloused hands were from hard work, just as the masculine curve of muscles were.

His pants were undone, spread apart, but he stopped just short of pushing them over his hips and giving her what she really wanted. A faint frown creased his brow and he looked around the mostly dark room. “Christ, it's cold in here. Haven't you been building a fire?”

She pointed at his still-on-if-unfastened pants. “Are you changing the subject?”

He frowned at the fireplace. “You
haven't
been keeping a fire,” he accused, his baffled expression meeting what had to be a baffled expression of her own.

She shrugged. “Didn't want to draw any attention.” Hadn't been able to coax the random pieces of wood she'd stockpiled to flame, but she wasn't going to tell him that.

His frown went deeper, faint lines etched from the corner of his mouth outward. It was a frown that was frustration and goodness all wrapped up into one. He frowned like that when he was confused, when he was wrong, and most especially when the right thing was also the hard thing.

He reached for his coat.

“Hey, where are you—”

He shoved his arms into sleeves, not bothering to redo the button or zipper of his pants. “Don't move,” he instructed.

“Don't…move. I'm half-naked and you're putting on your coat and telling me not to move?”

But his frown lifted and his eyes took their time roaming the part of her that was naked. “Yes, that is what I'm doing. I'm going to get some wood—” When she opened her mouth to make a joke about wood, he steamrolled right over her. “And something to light the fire with—barring nothing has made its nest in there. You are going to stand there, or sit if you prefer, but you're not going to put your clothes back on—got it? This is a pause, not a cease and desist.”

She took a prim seat on the couch, crossing her arms over her chest. It was cold. She should put her shirt back on. “Who says I'll want you when you get back?”

He crossed the room, zipping up his coat. Then he grabbed one of the blankets he'd left her that first day from the end of the couch, and leaned down to wrap it around her shoulders. His mouth brushed her temple, lingered. “Oh, you'll still want me.”

Before she could get irritated or come up with a pithy remark or, worst of all, laugh, he stalked to the door and disappeared outside.

She should put on her shirt. She should put the kibosh on this whole insane turn of events. Instead she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and waited.

Caleb gathered everything he needed for a fire as quickly as humanly possible. He hadn't wanted to leave, not when he was pretty sure they could make enough heat together to keep all of Blue Valley warm, but it had been unsettling to know as much as he'd helped her by getting her some food and supplies, she was still…barely existing, hiding in Gramps's old cabin that he'd tried to kick her out of, with no fire, the crappiest food…

He cursed under his breath as he got back into his truck. It was wrong.
Wrong.
She shouldn't have to live like that because she had a bastard of a father. And it had been wrong to let the thing with Tyler make him forget that.

If it came down to it, he'd just have to explain to Tyler that Delia's presence wasn't anything that would threaten the lease. He would explain,
rationally
, that he was being the good guy here.

Mostly, he'd just be careful and hope it didn't come to that. Besides, if he kept himself so busy trying to make
everything
right, maybe he wouldn't give himself a chance to screw it up.

Or you just really, really, really want to have sex.

Well, he couldn't rule that totally out.

He bumped across the yard between the house and the cabin. The world was completely dark now, except for the stars and the hint of moon behind a wispy cloud. The cabin was a dark shadow against the velvety air of night.

He stepped out of the truck and gathered the supplies he'd collected. It was cold without a shirt on under his coat. It was cold, period. Cold and dark and silent, and inside that cabin was a woman who was none of those things.

He took a moment to breathe in and out. It felt like something else entirely waited on the other side of that door. A different road than he'd been on. It might not have been in the forefront of his mind the past two years, but for a long time there his life had purposefully not intersected with Delia's.

And now, if he walked through that door, he was very purposefully intersecting. He could still turn around. He didn't
have
to do this.

His brain told him that. Everything else in him moved for the door, turned the knob, and opened it.

The room was dark, so he put down the food he'd packed into a little cooler and used that free hand to flip on the flashlight he'd brought.

He trained it on the couch, and she was still sitting there, the blanket pulled around her shoulders. He did a quick check to make sure her shirt was still on the floor next to his.
Hallelujah.
He hadn't totally screwed this chance yet.

“I'm going to start a fire.”

She made a yawning noise—exaggerated, he hoped. “I'm going to fall asleep and pretend I never invited you in to be a raving disappointment.”

He used the flashlight to check the chimney flue. Satisfied with the state of the chimney, he set the logs in the hearth. “Then why didn't you get dressed?”

She was silent in response, which made him smile as he fiddled with getting the fire started. Once it was satisfyingly crackling to life, he brushed off his hands and turned to face her, still crouched down by the stone some ancestor of his had laid.

In the low, flickering light, he could just barely make her out, sitting on the couch, looking completely unimpressed with him.

“Are you hungry?”

She scowled. “Are you serious?”

The fact that she was getting irritated by his stall tactics made them that much more enjoyable. He couldn't remember the last time he'd good-naturedly messed with someone. “Maybe I'm trying to build your strength.”

She rolled her eyes. “How about this…” She got to her feet and slowly let the edges of the blanket fall through her fingers, and then to the ground, which eradicated any desire to make her eat right now. Eating could wait until they were both as pants-less as they were shirtless and exhausted from finally doing this crazy thing they shouldn't do.

Why not? Why the hell not?

“I'm going to walk into that room. I'm going to take off
all
of my clothes. I will give you approximately two minutes to join me, and if you do not, I'll take care of myself.”

He didn't make a move—mostly because he was trying to process the two parts of that sentence: her naked and taking care of
anything
…and the fact that she was talking about his deceased grandfather's bedroom.

“There is something not right about you, Caleb,” she muttered, stalking toward the room in the back. But when she tried to walk past him, he managed to kick his brain into gear, and his hand closed over her ankle.

She glared down at him, so he smiled up at her, still crouched near the warmth of the slowly building fire. The upward curve of his mouth felt foreign, intoxicating. When was the last time he'd smiled at a woman, charmed a woman, without alcohol pumping through his blood, helping him forget who he was?

He didn't want to forget who he was with Delia. He wanted to make himself better. So he stroked a finger up the surprisingly narrow ankle and kept smiling. “Don't go in there.”

“Dear Lord, Caleb, if you don't want to have sex with me, don't have sex with me. Putting it off—”

He released her leg, but not long enough for her to get away, only long enough so he could get his arms around her waist, pull her down, and
mostly
gently pin her beneath him.

“What the fu—”

He grabbed each wrist as she tried to hit him, keeping her legs still by clamping them tight between his knees. “Say that again.”

“Say what again?”

He tugged her hand toward his straining erection, releasing one hand so he could pry the fingers of the other out of the fist she held them in. “Say the part about me not wanting to have sex with you.” He pressed her palm to him then, because he didn't trust his words to show her just how wrong she was.

Everything about her stopped fighting, so he released her completely. If she wanted to, she could escape from in between his knees. She could end this right here.

Of course, he knew she wouldn't.

“I…” Her finger traced the length of his erection, and he bit back a groan when she licked her lips. “Okay, so I miscalculated,” she said with an ineffective shrug.

“Big time.”

“I can give you compliments about your size later. Why don't you put yourself to work?”

He pulled over the blanket she'd dropped, laying it close enough to the fire to keep them warm, but far enough away for safety. Then he got to his feet and began to pull off his boots.

Delia crossed her arms behind her head. “Now, this is a delay I can get behind. When you get to the pants, take it real slow.”

He shook his head as he got his feet free of boots and socks. Then, because the ground was awfully hard and cold, even with the fire going, he grabbed another blanket off the couch and laid it over the first, then plopped a pillow at the top. “Get on the blanket.”

“I have never seen a guy put so much unnecessary work into getting laid.” But, only somewhat grudgingly, she scooted onto the makeshift bed.

“Well, you've slept with a lot of the wrong kind of guy.” Not that he was the right kind. With anyone else…he wasn't sure any of this would have gone down this way. No, it'd probably be done and over, but if he was going to cross this line he'd promised himself he wasn't going to cross, he was at the very least going to do it right.

The firelight made her skin glow like the mountains at sunset, and he wanted to take the time to appreciate that. Remember it. So, he did make the removal of his pants as slow as he could manage, but the way she bit her lip and let her fingertips trail across her breasts sped it up a little bit.

“Are you going to get down here and get this show on the road or what?”

“You, Delia, need to work on your patience.”

“I prefer to get my mistakes over with quickly. Like taking off a Band-Aid or drinking a shot.”

Something about that didn't sit right. The word
mistake
. Oh, he knew it probably wasn't a
great
idea, but he wasn't going to speed through it. And he wasn't going to have her wishing she hadn't been with him.

So he did exactly what she asked. Got down there, covered her body with his, let that electric shock of being skin to skin settle through him. It took great effort to look her in the eye, but he made himself do it. “I'm not going to do this with you if you're going to view it as a mistake.”

“Stop being so…noble about it!” She pushed him, but just enough so she could get her hands to the snap of her jeans. “Just fuck me, okay?” She started pushing the pants over her hips, mumbling about him being an idiot. “All I want is an orgasm. The rest you can shut up about.”

It had worked well enough earlier in the evening, so he grasped her chin again, with a little more force than necessary, but everything about this was…forceful. Important. Weighty. “If that's all it's going to be, we would have done it a long-ass time ago.” And then he crushed his mouth to hers, because for all his grand proclamations, he wasn't sure how much longer he could breathe without being inside of her.

* * *

She tried to get her pants off, but Caleb's kiss was doing a lot to make her hands not quite listen to her brain. She wanted to feel every inch of him. Currently, her hands were busy smoothing over and then grabbing his tight ass as she arched against him.

It was not the most seductive she'd ever been, but it didn't seem to matter. For all his fire-starting and food-suggesting, the wall of that control seemed to have broken. His mouth claimed hers—lips, tongue, teeth—and his hand, in some amazing feat of dude-about-to-have-sex contortion, managed to slide under the half-undone zipper of her pants and the hem of her underwear.

She wasn't cold any longer. She wasn't even sure she remembered what cold felt like. She was all liquid heat—hell, even her bones felt something less than solid. She'd spent her life being an impenetrable wall. A protector. A savior.

It was such a release to let that go. To drown in desire, in something she'd wanted and denied herself far too long.

When his finger slid inside her, she was convinced she saw stars. She'd love to blame that on a sex drought, an emotional breakdown, or a million other things, but she knew, as much as she didn't want to admit it, that Caleb was different. Because if he wasn't, he was right—they would have done this a long time ago.

His mouth left hers, and she tried to stifle the protest, but it didn't quite work out. The groan that escaped her mouth was nothing if not protest.

Luckily he was immediately tugging at her pants, taking her underwear with them over her hips. At this point, she was pretty sure she could lie here naked for close to eternity and remain warm.

Once he'd divested her of all her clothes, he smiled down at her, and her heart did that weird, extra-thump thing it did whenever the corners of his mouth curved upward, whenever he seemed happy or pleased, and somehow the twin emotion surged from her heart.

Oh, he was such a problem, but he kept touching her, smiling at her, and she couldn't muster the concern to do anything about it. Not when his hands resting at her waist slid up over her rib cage. She could forget her name if he kept touching her like that, gentle but with the scrape of work-hardened hands, reverent but possessive.

As a woman who'd spent her life feeling like nothing really belonged to her, that nothing could stay or be hers, she couldn't mind being possessed. It meant more care than she'd ever been offered.

The fact that her eyes were burning was sign enough there could be no more of this lazy touching. “I left the condom on the cou—”

“I won't be needing that yet.”

“But—”

He kissed her shoulder, between her breasts, down her stomach. His lips were soft, featherlight brushes, and her skin relished the attention. Every tension she'd been holding on to released into this.

He laughed against her hip bone, and she had to fight the urge to arch up, to find his mouth. All she could think about was the tight coil of pleasure building inside of her unwinding. Unfurling.

“Remember that thing I said about patience?” he murmured, running a fingertip along her thigh before grasping her leg and leveraging it over his shoulder.

She squirmed, trying to get him to move a little faster. She was tired of talking, thinking, and worst of all, feeling anything in her heart. All she wanted was
doing
. “Remember that thing I said about an orgasm?”

His eyes met hers. “One isn't very ambitious, is it?”

She didn't want to smile back at him or laugh or let him think that he had the upper hand here, because…she didn't even know why. He had all the power—or it felt like she had none—and for the first time, she didn't care. Let him have the power and do the work. If it brought her pleasure, if it gave her over to physical feeling, so be it.

He held the one leg over his shoulder and ran his palm up the other, moving up her inner thigh with lingering kisses. A lick so she'd sigh, then a nip so she'd squeak. She could all but feel his cocky grin against her leg, and then
her
.

When his tongue touched center, she nearly leaped off the blanket, but his hand clamped on her hip and held her to the ground, which somehow made everything even more…
more
. She couldn't move, couldn't squirm, and yet he seemed to know exactly where to go. No leading or nudging needed—Caleb found all the right spots.

She tried to use the blanket as some kind of anchor, twisting her fist into it as Caleb's mouth tortured her closer and closer to release, always pausing right before she'd fall off the edge. But even with him clamping her in place on the floor, she needed something more to hold on to.