Chapter 7
Dunk
Dunk followed Daisy down the annoyingly shallow steps at the movie theater, mesmerized by the tick-tock sway of her ass under her long-sleeved leaf-patterned dress, the little white belt cinched around her tiny waist for some reason just as sexy as thigh-highs on a lingerie model. His right side still sizzled from where she’d snuggled up into it during the movie, his right palm buzzing from where it had cupped her shoulder. He was practically dizzy from two and a half hours of her perfume wafting off her curls, which were loose for the first time on one of their dates.
Their dates.
This was their sixth date, and it had been just as fun, just as flirtatious, and just as nerve-wracking as the first five. He’d never really dated all that much, and it had been taking every cell in his brain to not make another mistake as dumb as telling Daisy that she was his sex Cinderella.
Tonight was the first night that her beauty, her sexiness, her scent, her everything, had nearly overwhelmed what little common sense he had.
He grinned as she caught his eye, taking her hand and swinging it.
Every ounce of willpower had been spent keeping it light, keeping it gliding along at its natural pace. He hadn’t dated that much, but he had two sisters and a ton of women in his life. He had spent his whole life listening to women complain about the cavemen who’d taken them out on dates and tried to put the moves on them left and right, or outright expected sex. No way would he want to be in a category with those dicks.
Even if his dick was perpetually half-hard these days.
He hadn’t thought that was possible for any man over nineteen.
The movie theatre was on the back side of Maybelle Square, near enough to the diner or the Three Brothers if they wanted to get some dessert or a nightcap. He paused on the sidewalk and she looked up at him, her eyes sparkling. “Do you want to have a drink or dessert?”
“I have Archer Farms hard apple cinnamon cider at my place,” Daisy suggested. “Or I think my brothers left beer the last time they were over.”
Was she trying to kill him, with that soft, eager smile and her breasts practically quivering above her dress? He didn’t think so, because she might enjoy teasing when it came to their great back-and-forth conversations, but she’d never seemed to be deliberately provocative.
He might not want to pressure her or push her, but she was a woman and she knew what she wanted and when she was ready to have it.
So he replied roughly, “That sounds really nice. Can we swing by my place real quick so I can let Tugger out and give him a walk?”
“Absolutely, I love him,” she agreed.
She squeezed his hand and bounced along to his truck, her happiness radiating off of her as if it were actual golden energy he could see.
Dunk drove them over to his place and while Daisy looked around at the house and its landscaping, he opened his door, letting Tugger out. He streaked directly to Daisy, barking a couple of times until Dunk gave a low, sharp whistle. Daisy giggled as he slobbered all over her hands when she rubbed along his ribs and belly, her face wrinkling adorably.
“Go take a piss,” Dunk commanded the dog.
He started to hunt for the perfect place, circling trees and a fire hydrant, while Dunk went to slide his arm around Daisy’s shoulders.
“He’s very well-behaved,” Daisy praised the puppy.
Dunk snorted and shook his head, pointing at the black box on Tugger’s collar. “There’s a buried electric fence around the property for Fudgesicle, who used to try to tackle every goose and squirrel in a five-mile radius, I swear. He’s just learned how far he can run, too.”
“Well, he listened to your command to piss,” Daisy said, and Dunk cracked up because he’d never in his life heard someone say piss so prissily.
Tugger came back to Dunk, bumping his hand with his cold nose, and Dunk obligingly scratched behind his ears, his whole hand covering the dog’s head like an NBA player palming a basketball.
“Let’s get you inside,” he told his dog. “Inside. Bedtime.”
While Tugger ran into the house, Dunk said, “Give me a minute, okay? If you come inside, he’ll want to show you every toy he has.”
“You have a minute,” she teased, dimples flashing. “I’m timing you.”
“No guy likes to hear that,” he half-grumbled, half-teased back as he jogged inside, Daisy’s delighted laughter floating after him.
He got his dog settled in for bed in record time, turning the radio on low in case he slept at Daisy’s. Not that he was presuming she’d ask him to, but he could be prepared and plan for the best case scenario.
Easing the door shut behind him, he jogged back to Daisy, who had her elbows on the hood of his truck so that she could tip back to stargaze.
“See something good?” he asked, looking up too.
“Definitely,” she practically purred.
When he looked down, her eyes were locked on him. She was impossible to resist like that, so Dunk hauled her into his arms and tossed her into the truck. After he jumped behind the wheel, he drove so fast to her apartment that the truck rocked once he killed the engine.
They hurried up to her place, her eagerness seeming to mirror his as she unlocked her door with a wrench of her tiny wrist.
He hadn’t been in here yet, so he looked around, some of his desire pulling back under the force of his curiosity about her living space. It was a studio, the appliances that old overripe avocado color, but it had scarred bare wood floors instead of that terrible yellow-brown carpet.
The cushion on her white metal framed futon was covered in a Jackson Pollock painting. It was gorgeous, its energy almost frantic.
And it wasn’t until Daisy cleared her throat that he realized that he wasn’t admiring her couch cover, he was admiring her bed. Her living room wasn’t just her living room, it was her bedroom. Damn, he wouldn’t have imagined how sexy a studio apartment could be.
“Did you want a cider or a beer? The beer is just Heineken.”
“I’ll try the cider,” he decided. “In the bottle is fine for me,” he added almost desperately when she stretched one hand way up towards a pint glass on her kitchen shelves. It put the slim muscles of her calves and shoulders in sharp relief, and he swallowed dryly, imagining her stretched out like that on her Pollock comforter, his body above hers.
She hummed and pulled two bottles from the refrigerator, pouring one into the glass and joining him where he was glued to the floor. She handed him the other bottle and clinked it with her glass.
“Cheers,” she said, dimpling.
“Cheers,” he echoed, and his voice sounded rough and tight to him.
Then she sank onto the futon and toed off her shoes, sighing in relief.
He stood there, feet planted wide apart so that he wouldn’t drop the bottle, leap over her coffee table, and tackle her onto her back.
“Are you going to sit?” she asked, waving at the rest of the futon.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he mumbled and sat gingerly far enough away from her that he could spread his thighs a bit, to keep distance from her.
But Daisy had no such issues; she wriggled against his side, up under his arm, and sighed with her head against his chest, over his heart.
“This is nice,” she said. “I liked the movie. What did you think?”
“Yeah, it was fun,” he said, the words almost mechanical.
His entire focus was on her heavy breasts crushed to his ribs, her hot breath sloughing over the neckline of his shirt and across his throat.
She was so incredibly sweet and trusting. She deserved long, drugging kisses and soft, slow sweeps of his hands over her body, to start. She had deserved so much more care than he’d probably given her in the back office during the wedding reception. And now, he wanted her so badly that he didn’t think he could do that for her. He was wound too tight.
“Dunk?” she asked.
“Yeah?”
“What are you thinking about?”
It was such a stereotypical question for a woman to ask a man that he barked out a laugh before he could stop himself. She levered up using a hand on one of his tense, bunched-up thighs, so that they were eye-to-eye.
Three inches higher, his brain pointed out, is the base of your semi.
“Why is that funny?” she demanded.
“It’s not,” he hastily assured her. “It’s not funny at all.”
“Then why did you laugh?”
With his brain so full of desire, he didn’t have any space left to think of something to say but the bald, rude truth.
“I was thinking about how this couch is really your bed.”
A breathy whimper broke over Daisy’s plump bottom lip.
“Yeah?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he admitted.
She shifted suddenly, her breasts smashing against his face for one unbelievable second while she got onto her knees and then straddled his lap. Her hands clutched his trapezius muscles and her eyes were wild.
He held still, his hands flat against the futon to either side of him with her tights-covered shins pressing down on them. “Daisy?”
“Why… why haven’t you kissed me yet?” she whispered. “I think you like going on dates with me, but you haven’t kissed me, so I thought—”
“You think that I’m not interested in kissing you?” he interrupted in shock. Her eyes fell away from him and he shook his head fast and hard. “No. That’s not it at all, Daisy Rhys. I… at the wedding… you deserve—”
“Please don’t say you deserve to be treated like a princess,” Daisy whispered, sagging onto his thighs as if in defeat, not even seeming to notice that his now fully hard dick snuggled between her ass cheeks.
A lot of responses flitted through Dunk’s mind, but he discarded all of the serious ones. “How exactly does a princess deserve to be treated?” he decided on, screwing up his face in exaggerated confusion. “I mean, are we talking a woman who was born a princess, or one who married a prince?”
She gaped at him.
“I’m going to assume a born princess. Now, why’s she so special? She was just born lucky. Unless her dad’s a jackass who wants to marry her off to the richest, most advantageous foreign prince he can find. Or, if we’re talking current-day princess, I’m thinking she’s a very pro-equal-rights type of princess, so she deserves the same as every other wo—”
Daisy kissed him, cutting off his ridiculous philosophical musings on what princesses may or not may not deserve in the past and present.
“Wha—”
“Shut up and have sex with me, Dunk,” Daisy told him firmly.
“Alrighty then,” he agreed.
He sank his hand into her curls and angled her mouth against his. She whimpered as his tongue slid along hers and her hips started rocking over him in quick, short strokes that he didn’t think she was aware of. Her breasts pushed against his chest over and over with her quick breaths and he dragged one hand up from her ankle, next to his knee, up that shapely calf and under her dress along her surprisingly big thigh.
She tugged her lips free and nipped his chin and down his throat, then licked the vee of skin at his open Henley.
His head dropped onto the top of the futon as he swallowed roughly. “Daisy. I wanted this to be special. To be… better than the night of the wedding.”
With a soft sound, she lifted her face and studied him intently. “Why do you want it to be special? And why does that involve waiting for so long? Do you think that the sex at the wedding was bad? Is that it?”
Dunk’s breaths were ragged and his shook his head, as if that would clear the muzzy ecstasy coursing through his mind and body.
“I always want it to be special,” he said.
A moment later he realized that that was bad dating protocol, referring to all of the times he’d had sex, obviously all but once with other women.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
There was this glint in her eyes that he couldn’t interpret. It could’ve been anger, but it could’ve been amusement just as easily.
The only solution was to forge ahead fearlessly. “I don’t remember everything about when we had sex, but I know it was so good that I was sure it was a dream when I woke up. I didn’t hunt you down and take you out only so that I could immediately tackle you into the sack.”
“Hunt me down?” Daisy repeated, her voice rising.
“Sorry!” he cried. “I don’t have any blood left in my brain, you know?”
Daisy’s arms, which had fallen limply around his shoulders while they’d been kissing, bent so that she could take his face in her hands. She studied him, his embarrassed face that seemed to be ruddier than usual.
“You have a great reputation among the women of Maybelle,” she reported candidly. “How is that true, when you say idiotic things like tackle you into the sack?”
“I usually don’t talk,” he mumbled.
“I can see why,” Daisy retorted, shaking her head.
He tried to sneak out a big sigh as his hands wrapped gently around her waist and levered her back to her original spot on the futon.
“I’ll go, then.”
“Whoa, whoa, Dunk, wait!” Daisy’s fingers scrabbled at his belt until she caught hold of it. He stopped moving so she wouldn’t get dragged off the futon with her fingers wedged around it. “I was aiming for a joke there,” she said, looking up at him from right in front of his fly, contrite.
Carefully, he sank to his haunches, his hands cupping her knees where she was now sitting with her ass on her heels, folded like a supplicant.
His eyes darted across her features, mostly her face with one quick detour to her cleavage that he couldn’t seem to help.
He pursed his lips for a second and then his face transformed into a cocky, toothy grin. Then he informed her, “Usually my mouth is full.”
“Sorry?” Daisy mumbled.
“With women,” he reiterated, not sure why he was suddenly confident that this was the right kind of teasing to get into, in their current situation. “I said I don’t talk much with women, because usually my mouth is full.”
That gape reappeared on her plump lips, bare now of the lipstick she’d had on when he picked her up, between the popcorn and the kisses.
“How do you turn this thing into a bed?” Dunk asked after the silence had stretched out into the thinnest, most tense wire between them.
Daisy gripped one of his shoulders, using it to get to her feet, and daintily stepped over one of his legs. She went to one end of the futon and demonstrated the move to him, then did it again, him with her this time.
The futon screeched from a couch shape into a bed shape.
“I got to admit, that wasn’t as sexy as, like, sweeping all the shit off your desk to make passionate love on top of it,” Dunk commented, glaring at the futon in pouty disappointment. “But if you still want to have sex, then there was no way I could get anything done when this is a couch.”
Daisy stood there with her hands on her hips, her expression caught between amusement and exasperation, an expression he was painfully familiar with, since his friends wore it a lot. He would’ve been crushed, if there hadn’t been this gleam of playfulness in her eyes too, and if her breasts still hadn’t been practically bouncing from her fast breaths.
“You were pretty good with your mouth at the reception,” Daisy finally settled on offering him, lifting one hand to rub over her mouth absently.
“Second chance,” he breathed out in satisfaction as he tumbled onto the futon. “My third-favorite trope,” he whispered mostly to himself.
He tore off his shirt and boots, then got to work on his belt.
“We aren’t going to undress each other?” she asked plaintively.
His hands flew away from his belt as if it were suddenly white-hot. He curled up just enough to get his elbows under him so he could meet her gaze. Her gorgeous eyes were positively glazed over, tracking over his torso hungrily, as if she were starving and he were a fucking feast.
“Damn, Daisy, you have to know I want your hands all over me,” he confessed in a rough rasp, “but I’ve been holding back for five dates. That’s a lifetime achievement award for me. If you try to take your time with me right now, you’ll just wind up with a mess on your sheets.”
“But I’d still have your mouth, wouldn’t I?”
The question, sly and bold and so incredibly hot, sizzled between them.
“Never mind,” Dunk groaned, his chest heaving, “you can have whatever the hell you want from me, however the hell you want it.”
Now that was the right thing to say, because the playfulness and amusement drained out of her expression, leaving only the intense hunger. He might’ve expected that to look ill-fitting on her delicate face with her doe eyes and little nose, but it didn’t. It looked made for her features, as if all she’d needed to go from adorable to sexy as fuck was to let all of her hunger fill up every cell of her body and radiate.
Excitement and anticipation exploded through Dunk’s veins from his heart when she artlessly stripped off her tights and dress. Her bra was built for function, solid cups with lace over them to make them classy, and her panties weren’t a matched pair with the bra, but they were silk and lace. Her skin was pale, her muscles were sleek, wrapped tightly around the bones of her arms and legs and neck. Her hips and thighs were even more lush than they looked beneath all of her cute sundresses and skirts.
“You’re so beautiful,” Dunk murmured, sitting up with a contraction of all of the muscles in his torso. He skimmed his fingers over her cleavage, then skated his palms down her waist and belly to take hold of her hips, testing the feel of her between his hands. “Sexy, too. Can’t forget that.”
She grabbed his shoulders again, but this time, she shoved.
He flopped onto his back in surprise.
He cursed a second later when she bent over and started to pull down his jeans and briefs. Her hands expertly hooked in his socks and took them off with the rest of his clothes too, and he felt a strange flash of jealousy.
But when she straightened, her panties were gone and she was unhooking her bra. All of his thoughts—except for want her, want to give her what she wants, want to give her what she deserves, want her—disappeared in a flash.
She crawled over him until her knees were bracketing his thighs, then she stroked his jaw and the grooves between his muscles. She teased her nails in gentle swirls through his chest hair and his happy trail. She even bit her lip, which he hadn’t thought women did unless they were playing coy.
“Come here, God, kiss me,” Dunk blurted out after who-knows-how-long of her sweet torture. His dick felt the kind of hard that meant it was purple, and he could feel precome pooling on his abdomen.
“You finally asked,” she murmured, bending down to his mouth.
He nipped at her bottom lip and spread his hands around the flare of her waist, then surged up to her breasts. They overflowed his large hands, and he loved it. He loved the way she sighed into his mouth, the way her inner thighs brushed his quads but didn’t settle onto him.
But he hadn’t lied earlier; he’d been keeping a short leash on his desire for so long now that that leash was one good yank from snapping.
One arm curled around her waist and he flipped them smoothly so that she was spread out beneath him, her hair wild, falling into her panting, wide-open mouth and across her pillow.
She scooped it up and shoved it aside impatiently while he dove for her neck and began to lay sharp, short bites along it. She moaned and wriggled, so he moved to her breasts, worshipping them for as long as he could, until her thighs were clenched so hard around his hips that he would have to really use his muscles to break her hold.
Her hands were threaded so tightly through his hair that he thought she was going to tear it out one follicle at a time. But he took the pain with pride, knowing it was a sign he was giving her almost too much pleasure.
Then those tiny hands were exerting a steady pressure downwards.
It took almost no effort on his part to pop his head up from the heavy undercurve of her right breast and grin cheekily at Daisy.
“Something you’re trying to do up there, Daisy Rhys?”
She hissed, out of breath and flushed, the wisps of hair around her forehead damp with sweat from the rising temperature between them.
Dunk dragged his teeth along her bottom rib, the very tip of his tongue trailing after, making her thighs quake against his hips.
“Are you going to tell me what you’re trying to get me to do?”
Her head slammed back into her pillow. “I thought you couldn’t take your time. You were going to die if I took my time,” she accused him.
When he started trailing his tongue along the curving lines of her belly and hips, her legs jerked up and tried to spread, her knees winding up jammed into his armpits. Chuckling against the softest skin in the universe, just under her belly button, he pushed up and let her rearrange her legs.
“Please, Dunk,” Daisy all but sobbed, “it’s been so long.”
“Since someone took care of you?” he whispered as his broad shoulders pushed her thighs wider, his hands bracketing her hipbones and pressing down gently to pin her against her bed. “I got you, darlin’.”
His tongue fluttered up the creases of her thighs, then around the hood of her clit and down to just below her entrance, like a feather.
Knowing it was driving her crazy helped him stay in control, in focus.
Or, it did until he got his first deep, full taste of her.
All of the lessons he’d learned about pleasing a woman were forgotten.
His tongue didn’t dance over her clit, he didn’t suckle her folds, he didn’t ease one finger inside her. None of the loving, caring, careful, respectful magic he’d always used with women and wanted to use on her.
No.
With Daisy Rhys, there was none of that.
Dunk ate her pussy.
He’d never liked the phrase before, but there was nothing else to call what he was doing. He was slurping, he was gulping her down, he wedged two fingers into her and reveled in her groans as her body adjusted.
High-pitched whines of overwhelming, relentless pleasure winching tighter and tighter filled the air while she clutched the Pollock comforter. Sweat rose all over her skin now, making her scent a thousand times stronger.
There was nothing driving him but instincts. He devoured her until she pulsed and cried out brokenly, and then he kept going until she shuddered and gasped again and reached one hand down to cover herself.
Daisy shivered and moaned, dragging herself up to catch Dunk’s lips with hers, scrambling against him until she’d gotten him on his back again. She kept kissing him as her hand fumbled her nightstand drawer open and found a condom. She licked into his mouth, over his chin, as she put the condom on him, his muscles quivering like a stallion dying to race, to gallop, to blow past its competition.
“That was definitely a touchdown,” Daisy told him, her voice raspy from the cries she’d let out and the cries she’d held in her throat too.
“Two, really,” Dunk couldn’t help but correct.
But he cursed when the blunt head of his dick notched inside her, then forged into her as she lowered her ass until he was filling her up.
“Want to go for a field goal?”
“Daisy, I didn’t think you liked football,” he gasped playfully.
“It’s not really a good analogy,” she murmured as her palms planted themselves firmly over the cut of his hips and she began this torturously slow rise and fall, with some swivel worked in on the bottom of every downstroke. “Since women can score as many touchdowns and field goals as they can manage, while men can only score once.”
“Yeah, okay, but when I come, I win the game,” he groaned, the air punched out of his lungs. “Like catching the Snitch in Quidditch.”
“Don’t I win, since I’m going to be the reason you come?”
Dunk’s whole body shuddered hearing her say that, then every single muscle in his arms and his thighs and his abdomen and his ass locked up, fighting against coming right that very second.
“You fill me up so well,” Daisy gasped, her eyes closed and her head thrown back, her curls a crazy cloud over her shoulders and brushing his thighs behind her ass. “Is this as good as you remember?”
“Better,” he promised mindlessly.
“Don’t fight it,” she gasped. “I want to win.”
“God!”
“That’s it, baby, please,” Daisy pleaded. “I need to feel you come.”
As if she’d pushed the Launch button, Dunk exploded into pure ecstasy. He came so hard, he swore he could feel the spurts ricochet off the condom and land on the head of his dick. His fingers tingled and his teeth ground together so hard that he felt all the tendons in his neck pop up.
“Yes, yes,” Daisy chanted as she rippled around him again.
“Three to one,” Dunk slurred as Daisy slumped down over him, “pretty damn good odds in my favor.”
Daisy laughed weakly, breathlessly, and smoothed one hand over Dunk’s hair and pec and along his side, then slid it back up over his stomach to rest between her cheek and his heart. “That was so good.”
“Yeah,” Dunk agreed, and had enough brainpower left to take care of the condom before tucking her to him. His hand traced her shoulder, swept along her spine, cupped her hip, and repeated the pattern until he felt her go completely boneless with sleep. He used his other hand to snag her comforter, which had fallen to the floor in a heap at some point.
Daisy burrowed against his chest and sighed happily.
Dunk’s chest rumbled in contentment. “Better than any dream I’ve ever had, Daisy Rhys,” he whispered into her hair.