CHAPTER 55
Our house was always hot in the morning. It was built in 1904, a sharecropper’s cabin to the Holdens’ plantation and was put on the dirt facing west, in order to capture the morning sun. That might have been great for cotton pickers who rose at five, but for Mama and me it was a pain in the ass. More for me than Mama. She was out of bed by seven, in her car by eight, and at work by eight-fifteen. Me, I liked my sleep. When our house phone jangled sometime around nine o’clock, I kicked off my hot sheet, rolled over on the bed, and shoved a hand in the general direction of my bedside table and the telephone. There was a crash, my wandering hand a little too energetic, and the phone stopped ringing. I went back to sleep.
A throat clearing awakened me. A man’s throat. I opened my eyes, my yellow sheets coming into focus, and slowly rolled over. Cole stood at the foot of my bed. Shirtless. In black running shorts. Staring at me. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I had gone to bed wearing. I felt something hit my foot and reopened my eyes.
Cole was leaning forward, his hand on my foot. He straightened when our eyes met. “Summer,” he said quietly—a stupid thing to say as we were looking right at each other.
“Why are you in my bedroom?” I had to look down, just to see if… oh God. I was only wearing underwear and a wife beater. I looked back at Cole, and he was staring, his eyes following the path mine just took, his jaw tightening, one finger twitching against the top of his hip.
“You didn’t answer your door, your front door was unlocked, and your phone line is busy.” He clipped out the sentences without looking at my face, his eyes still on my body, and I shifted a little on the bed when I realized that the front of his loose shorts was tenting. Tenting. I hadn’t been touched, hadn’t been kissed—other than that kitchen disaster—in three years, and this man, this sex god who’d had Nadia Smith, was aroused by me. My inner mention of his wife shut down my sex drive, and I rolled over, trying to block out the image of the arousal on his face, the push against his pants, the roll over preventing my legs from opening up for him. And holy crap, I’d been about to do that. Invite Cole Masten, my costar, into my bed. I reached out for a sheet, something to cover me up because my butt was now right there in front of his eyes. My hands found nothing, and I stopped moving, stopped breathing because I could hear his breath, hard and loud in the room, and ohmyword it was sexy. The bed sank beside my right knee, then beside my left, and I felt the brush of soft fabric against the bottom of my feet—his shorts—and it was so erotic I almost moaned.
“What are you doing?” I gasped, a set of fingertips moving slowly, from my right knee up, along the side of my thigh and drifting gently over the curve of my butt.
“Shh…” he whispered. “For once, Summer. Just shut up.”
I didn’t respond because his hand fully settled on my skin, sliding under my cotton panties, and palming my bare skin, squeezing the flesh so hard that I gasped, my shoulders lifting, his other hand pushing, holding me back down.
“Don’t move. Don’t think. Please. I need this.”
“Nadia,” I gasped out her name, my only protest, and his hand instantly stilled on my ass.
“Summer.” He leaned forward, the change in position pushing his pelvis, his hard-on, against my feet, his hand harder on my butt, and his breath was suddenly hot on the nape of my neck as he softly spoke. “If I never hear that name again, I will die happy. There is nothing about her that needs to be in this moment.”
“But—” My protest died when his lips settled on the back of my neck, his teeth following up the kiss with a scrape against my skin.
“For the love of God, Summer. If you want me to stop you need to tell me right now.”
Tell him to stop? I couldn’t. He ground his hips and my feet lifted, apart from my brain, and brushed against one large, hard item. “Yes…” he hissed, sitting back, his mouth leaving my neck, his hand running slowly down my back. The other slid from my thigh up, underneath my panties, both of them palming my ass. The man appeared to have all of the time in the world, and I swallowed a moan as he squeezed, rolling his hands up and out, in small circles, the place between my legs affected by the movement, the cotton of my panties pulled tight by his big hands, the friction just one more piece in the unraveling of my sanity in this moment.
How would I ever recover from this? How would any man ever be able to compete?
He spoke, his words gruff and barely controlled, and I lost all reason with the next words out of his mouth.
“Summer, what will happen when my hands move lower? When I slide my fingers in between your legs?” I felt the pressure as one of his hands moved, teased me, fingers sliding over my ass and almost lower, almost there. I hoped his question wasn’t a literal one because I couldn’t form words, or thoughts, or anything right then. “I’m about to find out exactly how much you’ve been wanting my cock.” He growled the last word, and I almost bucked under his touch, my need burning, crying out, my legs scrabbling underneath him, crawling up the bed, a feral desire deep inside me wanting to be on all fours, my butt in the air, ready for him, frantic for him.
“No,” he said, holding me down, his knees tight against me as he held me in place, prevented my climb, one hard finger sliding back down the crack of my ass and further, in between my legs, and he swore in the silent room, my low groan joining his curse. “Do you get this wet for all of these country boys?” His fingers played with the soaked material between my legs, my thighs fighting to part, and he gave me a little room, my knees urgent in their spread, my feet clamping around his arousal, and he groaned, the sound deep and needy, pouring fuel on my need and pushing it further, more intense, my initial shock at how hard he was replaced with a constant hammering in my brain to have it now, right now, because I swore I would die without it.
He didn’t push aside my panties; he didn’t rip them off; he just moved, with slow and patient strokes, from my ass to my taint, back and forth, and I pushed my hips higher in the air, my face buried against my fitted sheet, any composure lost as I begged him to go lower, begged him for more.
“Jesus, Summer, I want to taste you so badly,” he whispered, his head dropping, his teeth softly biting into my left butt cheek. “I want to flip you over and bury my face in between your legs and fuck you with my mouth. I want to make you scream my name and come underneath my mouth and taste the moment you fall apart for me.”
“Then do it,” I challenged. “Shut up and do it.” I may have told him to shut up, but I had coveted every word, every sentence—words uttered to me, about me, from him. I could hate this man, curse him to hell, but there had never been a question on this earth that the man was beautiful, that his body was sin, that his sexuality was addicting. And now he was here, in my bed, his hands on my skin. Skin that hadn’t been touched in so long. Skin that begged for more, raw need pulsing through me.
“I can’t.” His voice broke on the two words, his fingers frantic as they pulled at my hips, pulled them up, his fingers skimming my soaked panties down, and I was suddenly bare before him, bent over, the hum of the fan brushing air over my most sensitive place. “Where’s your condoms?” he rasped, and I tried to find reason and came up short. Condoms weren’t an item I had ever stocked, and I couldn’t think of anything right then but having him.
“I don’t… please. Just please…”
He didn’t ask questions; he didn’t do anything but yank at his shorts, and push, bare and beautiful, inside of me. In that moment, that push, I lost every hold I had on myself and became his. He shuddered out my name, pressed himself fully inside, and waited for one long breath.
“Are you okay?” His words were painful and tight, gritted out between his teeth, and I nodded, unable to form words, unable to do anything but worship at the altar of Cole Masten from that moment forth.
“Good,” he moaned. “Because I’m about to unleash hell.”
He was wrong. It wasn’t hell. It wasn’t anything close to hell. It was beautiful, fucking heaven, his hands tight on my ass, his pumps fast and quick and barely controlled, the perfect, rapid rhythm pushing me to a place I had never been from just sex, a completion that took me completely by surprise and caused my body to tighten, my breath to gasp out, my fingers to dig into the mattress, and my world broke, around his heaven and to my hell. I came, screamed his name as I did it, and his arms came around me, pulling me up against his chest, his final thrusts done with his mouth on my neck and his hands up my shirt and tight on my breasts.
He pulled out at the last moment, his hand fast, his body rolling, taking me onto my back against him, his orgasm hot and wet against my back, and he moaned my name as if he was breaking. I rolled over, for no sane reason, straddling his body, and pushed down, taking him in me, my mouth covering his as I filled myself with his cock and rode out the last tingles of my orgasm, his hands gripping me down, hugging me to his hard chest as he gasped against my mouth, his kiss desperate, hard and needy, his hands moving with manic need, squeezing, gripping, sliding over me as he feasted on my mouth.
He was hell. But his body, his cock, what he did to me? It was heaven. And I wasn’t sure, in the moment that I finally pulled away from his mouth and rolled off him, how I would handle that. I wrapped the sheet around me, stared at the ceiling, and felt the push of a thousand questions welling in my throat. Why was he there? Why had he touched me? Had it been anything other than a basic need fulfillment? What did he think of me now and how would this change our dynamic?
I was a Southern girl. We were all born to go to heaven. Even if it was the last place I belonged.