Gator

I’m supposed to scare Poppy the Scientist. Make her fear me, make her listen. Instead, I’m fetching and carrying for her. I close my eyes and count to ten. Doesn’t fucking help. She’s my prey and yet… she’s something else too. When I open my eyes, she’s all I see.

She wraps her arms around herself as if she’d like to take up the smallest amount of space possible. Her body language screams that she’s scared of me, but her mouth… her mouth has other ideas, and I have other ideas about her mouth. Her mouth is pretty and pink, so impossibly soft looking that I want to get right over there and run some experiments of my own. Drag my thumb over all that plump goodness, drive my tongue inside. And then my dick. Because oui, the urge to fuck her mouth is suddenly overwhelming. I can see her on her knees, my hands fisting her hair and holding her still for my next thrust.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I drop her pack onto the deck and debate whether there’s any getting the mud off me. Or if it matters.

Nope.

Not really.

There’s no way I’m picturing myself banging the scientist I almost killed. She grabs clumsily at the blanket, the folds sliding off her shoulders and down her arms. Her fingers shake, from cold or fear or both. I’ve fucking aced this assignment, but I’ve still got a problem. I can’t tell what her face looks like but the rest of her… my tongue might be hanging out of my mouth.

Her tits are spectacular.

She’s wearing a bright yellow tank top beneath some kind of gauzy shirt that was probably white before she rolled around on the bottom of the bayou courtesy of our run-in. The wet fabric does absolutely nothing, however, to cover up the teasing glimpses of curves I get as she adjusts the blanket around herself. Her cargo pants hug her ass and her legs, and thanks to a liberal helping of bayou mud and water, not one glorious inch is left to the imagination. She’s not the tallest thing, but she might be mostly legs and tits and fuck me but I’m staring. Or maybe that’s because the rest of her is so covered in mud that it’s ridiculous. Or maybe it’s the bright pink Doc Martens she’s sporting. It’s like a rainbow or maybe a box of Lucky Charms exploded underneath that hippy-dippy exterior of hers. Who decided to let her run around the bayou by herself where she could get hurt?

Her nervous gaze flicks over me again, and I know what she sees. Even if you could ignore the scars, I’m an ugly bastard. I’m tall and broad-shouldered, with more rough edges than a file. In short, I’d have to be the last guy in the world any girl would want to be stranded with in the bayou. She probably thinks I’m an ax murderer or a psychopath. I cross my arms over my chest and wait for the screaming or the cursing to start. Since her ride’s now on the bottom of the bayou, she’ll have to accept my help, but I bet she won’t want to.

“Do you mind?” She finally breaks our staring contest, her gaze dropping submissively as she points to the cushioned seat that runs along the length of the boat. I guess she’s worried about mud or dirt or something.

“Be my guest,” I tell her, and she plops down, dragging the blanket tighter around her.

There’s a long, awkward silence. Awkward for her, that is. Not my fault if she prefers to fill up the silence with words. She bites down on her lower lip—definitely nervous—and my dick gets hard. It doesn’t care that we’re the big bad wolf or that we were one step away from blowing down that stupid, fragile blind she thought she could hide in.

The fear scent fades slightly, so she’s feeling better about me? Fuck if I know, and I need her scared. She moves hesitantly, her eyes constantly checking me out, like she needs to know where I am. What the hell is she thinking? Doesn’t she know that all that tentative motion just brings out the predator in me? She acts as if I’m about to pounce on her, bring her down, and do unspeakable things to her—and she’s not wrong.

She swallows, her gaze still firmly fastened on my deck. I follow the soft movement as her throat works. I could be across the deck and on her in seconds, my teeth, tongue, and fingers all over that sweet, anxious skin. Bet she’d taste fucking awesome. Bet…

Her eyes flash up and then dance away from mine. “What now?”

I bite back a predatory smile. She’s mine.

“I could take you back to wherever you docked.” She has to be cold and sitting around in wet cargoes sucks. She’ll bite. “But if you want to get that mud off you first, I have a place not too far from here.”

“Okay.” She swallows again.

I inhale, dragging her scent deep into my lungs. Taking that much of her. Beneath the ripe scent of the mud clinging to her skin, she smells good. Not like the orchids and roses and artificial flower shit that drench the skin of the women I’ve hired to fuck me, but something warmer and sweeter. I imagine what kind of flowers she’d like best. Something natural, I think. Not something that can’t survive in Louisiana outside of a hothouse. There’s a purple flower that grows almost exclusively in southern Louisiana. It’s pretty enough, five tiny violet-colored petals waving on a long, slim stalk, but it smells like sugar. Like something you’d lick just because it tastes good and you have to have more of it. And if you pick it, the leaves turn black because they bruise easily and you can’t ever be gentle enough to not break that flower.

“You okay?” It’s a stupid question. Of course she’s not. Her boat is gone, she’s covered in mud, and now I’ve all but kidnapped her. Her nominal consent doesn’t really count.

She uncurls just enough to rest her chin on her knees. Her wet, muddy hair is sticking up in back now in some kind of mutant cowlick. Her way-too-fuckable mouth opens, and I brace for an onslaught of complaints or explanations about her current fucking mental state or health.

“Sorry?” That’s it. That’s all she gives me—one word. She shuts up tighter than a marsh clam.

“Don’t be,” I growl.

Her eyes widen. Fuck. Now I’ve scared her worse. I open the boat up a little more. The faster we get to my place, the faster I can do… something. I drive hard through the waterways, taking the path almost no one knows about. There’s more than one way to approach my island, but most of them require a degree of skill and a knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of the bayou that most people lack. I take my eyes off the water for a moment to look at her because this stretch is easy and I know it like the back of my hand.

“Don’t ever be sorry with me,” I tell her. Somehow, this feels like an important point to make. Or maybe it’s just because the feisty, cursing, laughing woman who serenaded her sinking boat has been replaced with this timid shadow.

“Okay,” she says, too softly to be heard over the obnoxious roar of the engine. I see her mouth form the word, the sweet pucker of her lips like she’s on her knees, waiting for me to feed her my dick. I go straight back to my new favorite fantasy and imagine fisting her dirty, muddy hair and dragging her head back until all she can do is open up and up, giving everything to me.

The boat makes it hard to hear her, and I kinda want to. So I drive faster, concentrating on getting us to my island. It’s stupid, this desire I have to be alone with her. I do alone. Alone’s my thing. But dragging her into it, bringing her to my place? Oui, that’s fucking out of character. The boat’s not as much fun as my bike; she turns slower, flies a little less fast. Plus, you can take a bike pretty much anywhere. I’ve never liked sitting still. My earliest memories are of sitting a horse, tearing across a field. Skip ahead a few years, and I’m covering a battleground astride. You get in, you get out, and no one messes with you. Next year, I’m gonna learn to fly. It’ll be just me and a few fucking birds up there in the sky. No people and nothing but silence.

The island looms in front of us. It’s not that large—maybe fourteen, fifteen acres—and the elevation is practically non-existent. The bayou curls around every inch of ground. Some Southern aristocrat built himself a mansion out here more than two centuries ago, and the bayou’s been fighting to reclaim the land ever since. The house is two stories high with white columns across the whole front length, probably just to make an impression. It has one of those big verandahs on the front, and a balcony wrapped around the second floor. Might have been pink once upon a time, but now it’s the same ghostly white as a spider lily because the humidity and wet of the bayou have eaten away at it. And since my landscaping consists largely of gnarled trees, lots of Spanish moss, and the odd iris, it’s pretty fucking formidable.

“Is that your place?”

“Oui.” I kill the engine, bringing us in to the dock, as if a slow approach will make things easier for her. “Not breaking us into someone else’s.”

“You have a mansion.”

“Yeah.”

“On an island?”

Guess the island part may be a deal breaker for her because there’s a long pause while she starts looking around like she really needs to find the Exit sign and a way out. I take advantage of the silence to tie up.

“Private island.” I stand up. This is our stop, so it’s time to go.

Her arms tighten around her knees. Sure as fuck doesn’t look like she’s planning on getting up anytime soon, but she can’t spend the day out here. The sun’s already well up, and I don’t think she slept much at all last night. She’s got dark circles under her eyes and more than once I caught her head jerking violently backward as she fell asleep.

She looks at me. Cautiously, of course. “You own the entire island?”

I’ll give her two minutes to haul her cute little ass out of my boat and onto the dock, and then I’m doing it for her. I knew I shouldn’t have talked to her. I wish I’d stuck with the original plan and just scared her off. Set up our accident and then left her floating in the bayou. At least then she wouldn’t be staring at me with those brown eyes as if I’d just fucking shot Bambi and turned him into a nice venison patty. Jace keeps people away from me most days because my lack of interpersonal skills is legendary. Bloodbaths tend to happen when I enter a room.

“You’re giving me shit because my house is too big?”

She blinks rapidly. “I—”

Those brown eyes tear up, like maybe she’s trying not to break down and cry in front of me. My dick suggests that now would be the perfect moment to move in and offer a little TLC. As if she’d want that from me. Even by human standards, she’s a bit of a thing. She’d barely come up to my shoulder. No way having a mountain man wrap her up in his arms would be welcome.

Which she should have thought of before.

I scowl at her and she flinches.

“Sorry,” she says again.

I shake my head. “Babe, we’ve discussed this.”

Her head snaps up and she finds some spine. “No. A discussion involves two people having a conversation and some back and forth. That never happened.”

I only do one kind of back and forth, and that’s me shoving deep inside her pussy.

I vault out of the boat before I can pursue that thought too far, crouch down, and extend a hand to her. Christ, she’s a mess. She looks like a mud monster, so all I can tell is that she’s got a banging body, she’d totally rock my two chicks in a mud pit fantasy to life, and she must have some shit luck to end up covered with that much crap.

Does she take it? Of course not.

Not sure how she plans on making it up onto my dock, though. The boat’s low in the water, the dock’s high, and accepting an assist is the only logical solution. She makes a small sound and stares at my hand like it’ll morph into a nice, sterile ladder or a fucking elevator if she waits long enough. Or maybe she’s holding out for an angel with wings. Fuck if I know. It’s my unscarred side, so it could be worse, but she doesn’t budge. I’ll go after her if I have to.

“Come on.” Patience has never been my strong suit. There must be some magic incantation that can fix this situation, but fuck me if I know what it is. Sitting around covered in mud can’t feel good, and right now all I want to do is help her. Sounds like a good deal, right?

She sighs and finally uncurls. “Would you say this qualifies for between the devil and the deep blue sea?”

Because she’s asking me, I bother looking at the bayou surrounding my island. One thing’s for sure. Nothing here looks like the Caribbean. There’s none of that crystal blue shit going on or palm trees or white sand. And while I could probably manufacture a cabana boy for her because Fang’s always up for a prank, I don’t import anyone to my island if I can avoid it.

“Not looking too balmy, babe.”

Guess she must be a fan of the truth because she nods and finally gets her cute little ass in gear. The irony isn’t lost on me—I prefer living alone, and yet here I am, practically begging her to invade my space.

When she starts to shuck the blanket, I get an idea. I don’t want her cold. My wolf thinks we should… protect her? Yeah. My wolf is fucking crazy.

“Keep it on,” I growl.

She starts, obediently clutching the plaid more tightly around her shoulders. My wolf, he really likes the way she takes instructions. I’m smarter, though—I know this state is only temporary. Eventually, she’ll find her spine and be back to wanting to eviscerate me. Good times, right?

She lays her fingers in mine. Fuck me, but you’d think she’d grabbed my dick from the heat that sears through me. She looks up at me, one hand resting on the dock and the other dwarfed by my palm. She exhales slowly, like she’s gathering up her courage or possibly getting ready to rip me a new one for all but dragging her here. The blanket slips. Thanks to the way her wet tank top hugs her tits and a sodden shirt drapes every other wet, muddy, fucking glorious inch of her, I can see the exact moment she breathes in.

This has to stop.

I should drop her back into the boat and send her on her way. Bringing her here is stupid. I think about that for all of a nanosecond and then realize I’ve already decided to keep her. She’s here, she’s mine, game over.

I haul her out of the boat.

In the two seconds it takes me to lift her clear, my dick gets hard. Pretty sure she gets a good look at it too as she flies past the front of my jeans. As soon as she’s safe on the dock, I let go of her hand and stomp toward the house. Me and my dick need some personal space right now, or I’m gonna have her on her back, pants off, panties down, bare ass banging on the wood unless I’m feeling like a gentleman and let her be on top.

I suppose there’s a small risk she hops straight back into my boat and tries to boost it, but she won’t get far. I tie a mean knot, and she’d never be quick enough to get away from me. Sure enough, there’s a moment of startled silence behind me like she’s trying to figure out why I’d bring her here and then abandon her on the dock, and then she flies after me. I sense her hovering just behind me, trying to decide between hanging back and catching up. The thing is, there’s nowhere on this island where she’s safe from me if I want to hurt her.

What I can’t figure out, however, is why hurting her is the last thing I want to do. Why I’d rather cut off my own dick than scare her with it. Must have fucking swallowed some parasite when I dove in after her stuff. It’s the only possible answer.

We’re halfway up the path to the house when she decides to chance walking next to me. She catches up with a little hop-skip, her feet slapping the path next to mine. I slide her a sidelong glance, but she’s too busy taking it all in to notice.

“How long have you lived out here?” she asks. “How old is the house? Are there other places like this in the bayou? When did it go on the market?”

Not like I can tell her the truth. “Long enough.”

She nods like I’ve written her a fucking thesis in response to her interrogation. “Are there ghosts? Who lived here? Were they family? How did you end up with the property?”

Interest lights her face up, her pretty brown eyes flitting from place to place as she tries to take it all in. I’d noticed her banging body when I fished her out of the bayou the first time, but I hadn’t paid attention to much else. Plus, her extra-crispy coating of swamp mud was kinda a deterrent. Now with her drinking in my home like it’s the best thing she’s ever seen, I’m realizing that I like having her attention.

She’s got these eyes that draw me in. They’re brown, which isn’t uncommon. But hidden in all that brown are these little bits of gold, a kind of sweetness that makes you want to drink it all in or lick it. She’s the prettiest thing I’ve seen in forever, and my job is to scare the piss out of her. It sucks. I’d like to pretend that I hadn’t noticed her curves (I totally had) and that this insane urge I have to trace my fingers over each wet, muddy inch was easily tamed. But I’d be lying, and not just because I’m jonesing after her because she’s got a great pair of tits and even nicer eyes. There’s just a certain something about her that makes me want to look twice—or possibly a thousand times.

When I don’t answer her first questions, she moves onto the next batch. “How far from town are you? Don’t you get lonely out here?”

The women I’d fucked at the MC parties had been fine.

Poppy?

She’s something else. I give into temptation and run my hand down the straight line of her spine, resting my palm against the small of her back so I can guide her forward. She stiffens briefly before relaxing into my touch. I keep it PG—I don’t drop my hand lower, don’t cup her ass the way I’d like to. Since it’s not like she’s rolling out the welcome mat for me, I take a shot at answering her questions. Or at least a few of them because the woman has clearly mistaken me for Siri.

“You got any more questions?” I think I might be smiling just a little as I look sideways at her. Fucking kills my bad guy image but I can’t bring myself to care. She turns her head from one side to the other, trying to take everything in.

“Is that a heron? Do you have neighbors? How do you get supplies out here?” She frowns, her forehead crinkling up. “You do have supplies, right? Do you have running water?”

“I promised you a shower,” I say easily. She trips a little over the uneven path, and I whip my hand up to cup her elbow, steadying her. I can feel the warmth of her skin through the blanket and her shirt.

“You didn’t promise hot,” she mutters.

“Gonna be plenty warm.” My fingertips go AWOL, tracing small circles on her arm. I don’t know what I’m doing here or why I’ve brought her to my island. Not really. I just keep drawing her up the path, holding onto this little bit of her because letting go suddenly doesn’t feel like an option.

“I think I’d get lonely,” she says a little too softly, twisting to take in a particularly large cypress tree. Guess she’s a fan of Spanish moss because she makes an admiring sound and mimes taking a picture of it. Even I can admit it’s pretty and way better than those fucking hanging baskets of ferns and flowers half of Baton Rouge has hanging off their porches.

I head up the porch steps. On the other hand, maybe I should get a fucking hanging basket or six because empty floorboards stretch out left and right, a whole lot of nothing. I could even buy a chair or two because Poppy strikes me as the kind of woman who would like to sit and look out at the bayou.

“You’re not lonely?” She stops at the top step to pry her filthy boots off her feet.

Never. Alone is how I roll.

“Alone is exactly the way I like it.”

“But can you get to the store or see friends without taking out the boat? Where do you keep your bike?”

She’s lost in all her thoughts and hypotheticals. I can practically see her painting some kind of story in her head where I’m the lonely recluse who needs drawing out or some such shit. And see, that’s where she’s wrong. I like alone, but others like it for me, too. Who the fuck needs or wants a big grumpy beast thumping around in their midst?

“Fuck people,” I say firmly and shove the door open. I never bother locking it—who would come all the way out here just to mess with me? Plus, I’ve never bothered much with furnishing the place (I mean, you’ve seen my empty porch, right?), so it’s not like there’s much to take.

She hesitates, her bare feet digging into the wooden planks. I don’t even own a fucking doormat, an omission that strikes me as a problem for the first time ever.

“In.” I rest my hand against the small of her back and press carefully.

Fuck me if she doesn’t take orders. She brushes past me and only then, when she’s standing in my place and at my mercy, does the light go off in her head that maybe this isn’t the smartest idea she’s ever had. It’s cute, the way her feet stop moving, as if I couldn’t just pick her up and put her where I want her.

“Are you planning on going all Goldilocks and the three bears on me?”

What the fuck does that even mean? Since she’s standing stock still, feet frozen to the floor, eyes getting wider by the moment, I take a stab at it. “Do I look like a bear?”

There are bear shifters deep in the bayou, but you have to go deep to find them. Like center-of-the-earth deep. They make me look like Mr. Rogers singing happy songs about the people in my neighborhood. The odds of Poppy having encountered them are just about nil.

She winces. “No.”

I lean down and tap her bottom lip gently. “Good. So you want to explain it to me?”

“Goldilocks busts into their house, sits on all their stuff, and then falls asleep in their bed. They’re pretty pissed off when they come home and find her.”

She can get in my bed all she wants. I’d be happy to tell her which door and all my favorite positions. Fucking bears were morons, mouthing off at Goldilocks. They could have had some kind of kinky ménage a trois (after baby bear stepped out because even I have limits), but instead they scared the shit out of her and she ran. There’s a lesson in there for me.

She eyes my face again. Maybe she’s checking for signs of pissed off? Or I grunted my approval of the pornographic film running through my head? Fuck if I know, but she’s still wet, cold, and covered in the bayou, which are three things I—or my shower—can fix. I press the pause button on my mental fantasies.

“You think I’m mad at you?”

“I rammed your boat.”

And… we have a winner. I should probably feel guilty for letting her think that, but we’ve already established that I’m not a nice person. “Barely left a mark.”

“And then you had to rescue me.” She says this like rescuing is right up there with root canal or bail me out of jail. It’s not like I’m Superman or even something useful like a firefighter, but pulling her ass out of the bayou wasn’t much of an effort. Especially since I’m the one who landed her there.

“Anytime,” I tell her. I’m kinda surprised to realize that I mean the offer. If she falls in, I’ll be there for her, no questions asked. Yeah, as if that’s any better than killing her boat. I have no place in her life.

“So no Goldilocks?” She looks hopeful, which is my cue to nod—and tell her the truth.

“The big, bad wolf is more my style.”

She makes a choking sound that’s part mouse squeak, part WTF. And fuck me but now I’m imagining feeding my dick down her throat or licking my way up her pussy.

“Wolf?”

“My favorite animal,” I say, closing the distance between us.

Oui. I’m a fucking charmer. And maybe this is the first up close look she’s gotten at my face because she does some more staring, her fingers kinda twitching like maybe she needs to reach out and trace the scars on my jaw and my arm to make sure they’re real. My body scares most women bad. My face is a fucking mess on one side, and the rest of me doesn’t look like any kind of fucking teddy bear. I know she eyed me from the water, but it wasn’t like she had any choice out there. Between me and the water, I was the safer choice. My dick likes the way she looks at me, though. Hell, my dick wants to stake a claim on her. Make her mine. This is fucking stupid. I’m the beast man of the bayou, and she’s covered in mud.

She backs up one step. Then another. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that she agrees with my whole beast assessment.

“Sorry,” she mumbles.

Me too.

But since it’s not like I can change shit, and I have a job to do here, I give her what I can. The truth.

“We’re cool about the boat,” I tell her.

Her smile is hesitant, like she’s not sure if she should say anything more or not. “For staring,” she clarifies.

“You’ve got nothing to apologize about.” I don’t know what’s up with the apologies, but I don’t like it. Somebody’s made Poppy feel like shit at some point, so I immediately add him to my to-be-killed list. Her problem is my problem, and I’m fucking happy to be of service.