Restless Spirit (8 page)

He laughed. ‘I wondered if that would work with you. You like a chaser of ouch to your ahhh, I see. I could be wrong.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think you’re wrong.’

It was something I’d never really realised until recently. And now that I did, it was like a secret power or a hidden weapon. You could only hurt me if I let you … or in some cases, if I begged.

‘Put your hands over your head.’

He waited and I considered. I studied his face and thought of his kisses and nodded, putting my hands high. He held them there and drove into me with more force. Hiking my leg high to my waist, pausing to draw back and watch his cock spearing in and out of me.

‘I’m about done for. Watching you take me. Watching myself disappear into you …’ He shook his head and then blue-eyed boy that he was, stared me down and said so sincerely I felt panicky. ‘I imagine it would be easy to disappear into you, Tuesday. You get into a man’s head and you take root.’

I shook my head. None of that. No niceness on that level. No serious words.

He caught my emotion, smiled at me and said ‘But enough of that poetry and fancy talk. I think I’m going to come. Do you think you can come with me? I’d like that.’

His kiss was sweetly scented. A ghost of toothpaste and something sugary and Reed himself.

‘Do it again,’ I begged. ‘Hurt me. Softly.’

So he wrapped his slender hand in my hair and we rocked together. When he was so close he was damn near growling, he thrust hard – harder than any other time – banging against every greedy nerve ending in my pussy. And at the same time he tugged. Tugged my hair just hard enough that a line of fire erupted on my scalp but started to fade as fast as it had emerged. The pain bled to pleasure, the pleasure to joy and I was coming with him. His hand still caught up in my unruly hair, his sweet mouth crushing down on mine.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Coffee?’ I chuckled as we sat up. He looked stunned and my emotions mirrored his appearance. Outside, something scraped on the deck. When I started to stand, Reed grabbed my hand, squeezing.

‘Just wind. It’s tossing everything around out there today. And yes. I would fucking love some coffee.’

The phone rang and I snagged it on the third ring. Dancing away from him when he reached for me.

‘Oh, hi, Irv!’

Reed frowned but then the frown bled into a smile and I winked at him.

‘Sure, sure,’ I placated my new boss. Apparently, Delores was dilating and the doctor had said work was done for. ‘I can do dinner shift. No problem. I’ll be there with bells on.’

‘How about just your work tee?’ Irv said.

‘That too,’ I laughed and hung up.

I took the cup of coffee a put-back-together Reed offered and sipped it. ‘Perfect. How did you know?’

He shrugged those lanky shoulders and touched my hair. It was a sweet gesture that unsettled me a touch. ‘You just look like a two sugars and dollop of cream kind of girl. Though this stuff is not cream. But I found it unopened in the fridge.’

‘We can pretend.’ I sat at the counter and he joined me. His foot knocked over a neatly stacked line of Nan’s cookbooks. Who stored cookbooks on a bottom shelf, a counter meant to seat folks, I didn’t know.

Someone who lived alone and set stuff up damn well how they pleased …

‘Touché,’ I muttered.

‘Pardon?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I talk to myself a lot. I guess that includes when others are here too.’

I leaned over to straighten the pile and he helped me. Reed studied one red and white chequered book. ‘She had a lot of nice cookbooks,’ he said.

‘She loved to cook. And bake. And craft. All the stuff I suck at,’ I said.

‘Oh come on, I’m sure you can make …’ He randomly opened the book and smiled broadly. ‘Ah, see, Kismet. Blueberry cobbler.’

I rolled my eyes and we righted ourselves, laying the book flat on the counter. ‘Cobbler? How about we start with boil water?’

Of course, I was exaggerating. I had made a rather nice thrown together meal for Shepherd and I the day before. But Reed Green did not need to know that. And he didn’t need to know I could sort of kind of be creative in the kitchen beyond fucking on the rag rug on the floor. I was more guarded with him than Shepherd, I noticed. I wonder if that was a TV persona thing or a, Tuesday is paranoid about men, kind of thing.

‘Sure you could. What time do you need to work?’

‘Four, I think.’

‘Come home with me.’

‘Wow you’re randy,’ I teased. ‘We just–’

‘I mean to pick berries. We’ll take your grandmother’s book, we’ll pick some couldn’t be fresher blueberries and I’ll school you in the ways of cobbler.’

I raised an eyebrow at him. ‘School me? That implies a vast knowledge of cobbler.’

He grabbed the ends of my hair and tugged me to him. Barely an inch remained between his lips and mine. I felt my mouth tingle with the nearness of his energy. I still smelled like him, and him like me.

‘My aunt Ruth made the most kick ass cobber in the world. Blueberry, strawberry, peach and apple. Even cherry.’ His hand slipped inside my robe and he pinched my nipple so I inadvertently gasped.

My body responded to his touch instantly. I wanted to fuck him again. I swallowed hard. ‘Sounds yummy,’ I managed.

‘Her blueberry was the most kick ass, though. And I bet we could do your grandmother’s cookbook justice. What do you say?’

He hefted my entire breast, not much bigger than a standard teacup, but pretty nice if I do say so myself. His touch was possessive and it thrilled me just enough to make me uncomfortable. ‘I say let me get dressed and we can go pick some of your nice juicy berries.’

‘You make it sound dirty,’ he said, grinning. Those teeth flashed at me and I remembered the feel of them pressed to my skin. Wanted to feel them again.

And then Shepherd reared up in my mind, pinning me to his rugged wood table. Taking me.

I cleared my throat and shut my robe. ‘Let me hop in the shower for five and I’ll get some clothes.’

‘Bring your uniform for Irv’s in case we make a day of it.’

The look on his face made me think he had plans to make a day of it. A day of baking and a meal of me. I could live with that.

I hurried upstairs and from the bathroom window caught sight of Shepherd climbing into his truck. I turned the water on and waited by the glass for a minute, hoping he’d turn and I could wave.

The truck sped backwards in reverse and I realised that he could see whatever vehicle Reed had shown up in parked out front.

‘You don’t owe anybody anything,’ I reminded myself. ‘I belong to nobody. Nobody but me.’

Still, when he backed out fast, spewing gravel, I put my hand to the chilly glass and watched him go.

‘Perfect time,’ Reed said, holding the door to his car for me.

‘What?’

‘The berries, they’ll be dying off soon enough. Now that the fall is really here. Once it hits Allister Lake and the first frost comes, that’s it for me. I spend the winter just living on royalties.’

My brain kicked in and I stopped the car door with my boot. ‘Maybe I should drive myself,’ I said. ‘I just realised I’d need to rely on you for a ride and then I have to get home somehow. It’s too far to wa–’

‘I’ll bring you back here to get your car before your shift, OK?’

I hesitated and he good naturedly took the toe of his work boot and nudged my foot back inside the car. It was a vintage Corvette. Year, make and model escaped me but it was the kind my friend Mary’s ex-husband drove. I used to call it his penis on wheels. I bit the inside of my lip to keep from grinning.

‘OK,’ I said and sat back.

When Reed got in the driver’s side he buckled up. ‘Plus, I eat at Irv’s almost every night anyway. It’s a social thing. Beats sitting out here on the outskirts of town by myself. Unless I’m feeling particularly monastic or hermit-like.’

‘That would be me,’ I confessed. ‘I actually love being alone.’

‘Really? I’d never guess it. You seem so … open and friendly.’

‘Is that a sex joke?’

He snorted, eyes on the road, hands casual on the wheel. ‘Not at all but I could make it one if you like.’

I punched his leg lightly to show I was kidding. I didn’t feel the same ease joking with him that I did with Shepherd. And I wondered again if it was the TV thing or me. Either way, I wanted Reed to know I was kidding. ‘I am all of those things. But given my druthers, as Nan would have said, I like to curl up alone or maybe, sometimes with one single person I feel totally cool with.’

‘That’s nice.’ He tucked a stray piece of warm chocolate hair behind his ear and glanced at me before putting his gaze back to the road. ‘I hope I’m on that short list.’

‘You’re getting there,’ I said. Then I worried but he smiled and I knew he’d taken it the right way.

‘So we’re going to pick and bake and …’

‘Eat,’ he said. ‘And a bit before four I’ll take you back to your car and let you go spread your warmth and magic at the dinner shift.’

I snorted. ‘I think I’ll like Irv’s. I love that he calls it a restaurant …’

‘When it’s clearly a diner,’ he said.

‘Exactly!’

We laughed all the way down the winding road to his pretty TV star house. I managed to only wonder about Shepherd and how his demeanour, even from a distance, had somehow been angry or upset.

And then I refused to question why the fuck I was worried about a man I’d just met and hadn’t even seen today.

Reed parked by the front deck and opened the front door for me to drop my purse. He handed me a wicker basket that had a plastic liner and grabbed an identical one. ‘Ready?’

‘Berries, ho!’ I called.

I let him pull my hood up – my own red one, not Shepherd’s oversized grey one – and tuck my crazy white-blonde hair inside and tug the strings. ‘It’s windy and if you can feel …’

He put his hand out and I tilted my face to the greying sky. ‘It’s drizzling,’ I said. ‘That’s OK. I love drizzle. I love rain and I love snow. I think I’m a freak.’

He took my hand and led me toward the copious bushes along the perimeter of neat rows of strawberry plants. Or an attempt at neat rows, it appeared that some time over the summer the plants had decided how they wanted to grow and had taken over. It was a nice wild sexy plot of land with lush berries peeking through green leaves and stems.

‘Nah, I like it too. Something about bad weather instils a cosy feeling. And it gives you an excuse to lie around and drink warm things and read or watch movies.’

I nodded. ‘Exactly.’

We started to fill our basket with berries. Reed said they were sparse, I couldn’t believe that. Some of the bushes were so full, all I had to do was put my basket underneath and shake it. When our baskets were heavy he set them under a bush and tugged me along.

‘Come look at the lake from here. This section of shore isn’t sandy. It’s overgrown and thick and goes right up to the edge.’

I followed and liked the feel of his warm hand over mine and the little flecks of mist that had settled in his hair. He caught me looking and when I blushed he touched my cheek. ‘Hot,’ he said.

I looked away and felt my cheeks grow even hotter.

Reed stopped at the edge in a gnarled thicket of bushes and overgrown vegetation. Strong hands turned me until we were face to face. ‘Kiss me, Tuesday.’

I tilted my head back and kissed him. A sweet shy kiss that somehow turned intense and demanding in a heartbeat. My chest thumped with my incorrigible pulse and I went wet between my legs when he squeezed my shoulders hard enough to sting.

‘Fuck me, Tuesday,’ he said. Laying down another order to see if I’d obey.

I didn’t think about it. I reached for his belt and tugged the worn leather. The buckle clanked and I pulled hard to get the metal prong from the hole. I managed to get a hand down inside his jeans. To feel the soft and impossibly hard terrain of his cock with my fingertips. Sweeping my finger over the divot at the tip of him, I felt a drop of wetness. I bit his tongue when I did it so the kiss faltered before raging again.

He grabbed me and moved me back and the sensation came. The falling-vertigo-tilting feel of him lowering me to the damp grass that smelled so dark and so green at the same time.

My jeans soaked with drizzle and dampness through the back, my body moving blissfully agitated beneath him. Reed filleted my jeans and pressed a heated kiss to my belly right above my mound. I didn’t want his mouth on me this time. There wasn’t enough patience in me for that. I just wanted him in me, filling me, splitting me.

He rolled me and tugged my jeans. My jacket caught up around my hips and he shoved. We were a wrestling match for sure: one woman, one man and a lot of clothes and finally, damp and tousled, we somehow managed to get ourselves bare and pressed together.

‘Condom,’ I sighed.

Reed rustled through is pants and found one. ‘I admit it. I stole one and pocketed it just in case …’

‘Just in case your strawberry field, blueberry bush seduction worked?’ I giggled.

He grinned at me with white even teeth, nodding and smiling in a way that turned something in my chest to a hot coal. God he was pretty.

‘And it did. So now I win and you win and I’m going to–’ He broke off, thrusting a finger deep into me to test me.

My eyes slammed shut, my head fell back and Reed’s tongue lapped the skin above my pulse.

‘Fuck me,’ I finished.

‘Exactly,’ he said and I heard the roll and snap of latex and he was in me. Sliding deep on one slick thrust and filling me so completely all I could do was spread my legs, wrap them around his trim waist and move up under him.

He took my mouth in a kiss and I took his.

Chapter Fourteen

My hood had fallen back and the wind tore at my hair. It tossed the bush that I faced and I was reminded of a film I’d seen on whirling dervishes. Had the bush not been rooted I expected it would spin.

‘Big one coming,’ he grunted, moving his mouth along my jaw and my neck. Hot kisses dropped on every available space he could find.

The big vehicle he’d predicted rumbled up the lake road and we froze. We weren’t easy to spot but here we were sprawled on his land in broad daylight. And yet …

‘Turn over,’ he rasped, the heat of his words snaking across my earlobe.

I nodded, turning when he released me and got myself on hands and knees. Reed looped an arm around my waist and forced into me. His bulk – so underestimated since he was so damn lean – crushed me and I was sliding. My belly and my chest hit the dirt, my fingers combing through the low branches of the bush as he thrust into me, pinning me, pushing me. His mouth on the back of my neck, my shoulder and his free hand trapped between me and the ground. Fingers working my clit with a perfect rhythm that I couldn’t ignore.

‘I’m going to come,’ I said bluntly.

The wind swallowed up my words and spat them in the opposite direction.

He scraped his teeth along the back of my neck and I shivered violently from the sensation. My nipples pointed rock hard and a chill worked through all of my skin despite being warmed by him.

‘Say it again,’ he said.

I didn’t have to lie. I was already starting that long wet slide toward the first pretty spasm of release. ‘I’m going to come’ I said louder. ‘Now!’

The orgasm hit me and I slammed my ass up with the pressure. Reed’s grip increased and I felt like I couldn’t get enough air and that only made my orgasm that much more sweetly devastating.

I trembled in his arms with the force of it and he kept his teeth on me, thrusting deep – so forcefully I could hear the wet marriage of our bodies even above the wind. And when I went limp in his arms, his voice snaked into my ear. ‘Good?’

‘Good,’ I agreed. ‘Good, good, good …’ I chanted, mindless from the violence of my climax.

He chuckled and released me only to grip my hips tight and lean back. He thrust slow and easy until I sank my knees down and out a bit more. Changing his angle, changing his trajectory and apparently sinking him deep into something even more blissful. I know because he puffed out the word, ‘Cheater,’ and then groaned out his own release, sounding like a wild thing from the woods around his house.

I rolled to my back and let him kiss me softly. There was a tenderness with him that came after. I found it both intoxicating and terrifying.

Reed smoothed my angled bangs from my forehead. ‘Um … before your shift?’

‘Yeah?’ I wriggled to feel the heat of his hand on my bare belly. More wind howled and we both saw my skin blanketed in goosebumps. He tugged a twig free of my hair and waved it at me.

‘You might need another shower.’

I snorted, rolled to my side to find my stuff. ‘I think you might be right. But first I need my clothes. All of them. Before I get pneumonia.’

My teeth had started chattering and the passion was gone so my skin was reacting to the deep bone-chill.

‘Let’s get those berries and get inside.’

I was wearing his sweats and a tee and watching him preheat an oven. My clothing was now tumbling merrily in his dryer and I was trying not to be enchanted by his warm kitchen and cool blue eyes.

‘So your mom must have baked a lot, then,’ I said.

Reed’s mouth went tight and he buttered a long glass baking dish. ‘Put those three ingredients in that bowl,’ he instructed. ‘That way the berries can start to get happy in the sugar and lemon juice.’

I did as instructed, stirring the berries with a wooden spoon to give them a pretty coating of raw sugar that resembled champagne coloured ice clinging to their indigo skin. I thought he wasn’t going to answer but as he bent to get the flour canister he said, ‘My mother didn’t worry about much beyond marketing me. She wanted me to be “on the TV” as she said it. So, I was her mission. Not baking, not PTA, not Little League.’

There was a bitterness in his voice that made me feel like a spy. I cleared my throat and wiped the counter with a rag. The Formica was perfectly clean but it gave me something to do.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your fault.’ He shook his head and his hair, silky to the touch – I knew that now – swayed around his jaw. His eyes held a world of hurt but his mouth showed his determination not to capitulate to it.

I knew that look. I had lived that look. I sympathised so much I chose not to coddle. It would only upset him more.

I pulled my hair into a ponytail but had no band, so I let it go. It tickled at my cheeks, completely out of control thanks to two showers, lots of fucking and rain. I grinned. ‘And here I just thought you were a god for walking away from the famous life.’

He grunted. ‘Never wanted the famous life. Don’t get me wrong. Getting known for Undercover Dad was a jolt for a kid like me. And then moving on to being an adult star was cool … in some respects. In others it was maddening. It took several months to keep the men with cameras out of my fucking blueberry bushes when I moved here.’

‘What finally worked?’ I sipped the tea he’d made me and waited.

‘I didn’t do anything worthy for a photo. I think when they realised that I was actually … done. Barring going back to the city for charity events or occasional cameos, they left. I didn’t have any picture-worthy scandals going on. No big parties, no gang bangs, no drunk driving. Just a man and his berries.’

‘I hear your berries have wooed more than one woman.’ I was sorry the moment I said it. I hadn’t meant to do that, it was a problem I had. Open mouth insert foot syndrome.

He barked out a laugh that sounded anything but amused. ‘Shepherd. Jesus. That woman had one foot out the door. And–’ He dumped the berries in the glass dish and spread them out. He handed me flour and then butter cut in pieces and motioned for me to mix it. ‘And he was kicking her ass out the rest of the way. Make it so it looks like chunky corn meal,’ he said, keeping me on edge with his back and forth conversation.

I mixed it with the spoon and when he said ‘might be easier with your fingers,’ I gave up the spoon and dug in.

Reed leaned in smelling of some manly scent and sugar of all things. ‘He didn’t want her. He just got his alpha jockeys in a twist because she ended up banging me on the way out.’

I knew he was right. Shepherd had pretty much admitted the same.

‘Men,’ I said, rolling my eyes. I was trying to be cute and funny to defuse the situation.

He grinned that famous crooked grin at me and I had the urge to kiss his pale pink lips. Such a lush mouth for a boy, I thought.

‘Yes, we are pretty stupid most of the time.’

‘Just territorial,’ I said. ‘He should have just peed on her to mark her.’

‘Oh, he did more than pee on her to mark her,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘But then he changed his mind.’

I wanted to ask what he meant.
He’s a sexual deviant
echoed in my head from Adrian. But I refused to get sucked in. I refused to care. I had walked away from Phil and his bullshit and Stan and his cloying too-much-love. I did not want to care what Shepherd did or how Reed felt or that under it all I felt like I was shafting Adrian. I didn’t want all that sticky messy feeling shit.

I just wanted sex. Was that so bad?

I put my hands up and laughed – letting the serious conversation fall away – and wriggled my messy fingers. ‘So, verdict Mr Green. Did I do a good job or what?’