“What the fuck, Lucy?” Mack growled at her after they’d been driving for a few minutes. He was clearly fighting with anger.

“I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal for me to take your dad to his appointment tomorrow, Mack,” Lucy said gently, turning her body towards him. “He doesn’t seem to mind, and Tawny thought it was a good idea. This’ll give me a chance to get to know him better.”

Mack shoved a frustrated hand through his blond hair, spiking it up at odd angles. Lucy’s gaze followed the movement. She decided it was a very sexy look for him. Then she snapped her sex-starved mind back onto the conversation at hand. This was not the time for those sort of thoughts! Mack needed to get something out in the open.

He thumped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “You don’t need to get to know him, Lucy. What you need to do is butt out. You aren’t part of this family, so stop acting like it. I only brought you to dinner because you’re a piece of ass I happen to want, I didn’t feel like saying good-bye after seeing you at the laundromat and I had that fucking dinner so I took you.” He snarled. “Knew it was a bad fucking idea.”

Lucy sucked air in so quick her head spun. She fought with herself for a moment, debating whether to demand he pull the truck over so she could call Alexandr to come pick her up. She was so damn hurt by his words. But this was Mack. This was the damaged Mack the other waitresses had warned her might be lurking about, the man that held people at an arm’s length and lashed out when he couldn’t deal anymore.

When she didn’t speak he snapped again. “You’re such a fucking baby with little stars and hearts in your damn eyes all the time. What the fuck do you want from me, Lucy? Love, marriage, sex, kids? Because I’m telling you right fucking now, only one of those things will happen between us.”

“Mack,” she choked out pleadingly. “Just stop… please. You know what I want… what I need from you. What I’m hoping.”

“What you’re hoping,” he repeated bitterly.

Tears started in her eyes and she dashed them away with the back of her hand. “Look, I’m sorry if I overstepped with your dad. I can call him when I get home and cancel if you want.”

Mack jerked the truck over to the side of the road. Lucy looked around in alarm. The street appeared deserted, only a few flickering streetlights illuminating a bad area of the city. She wanted to ask him to keep driving, but the look on his face was enough to convince her to keep her mouth shut. She kept her hands on her lap. He took her chin in his hand and forced her to look at him.

“You will follow through on your offer and take Abel to chemotherapy tomorrow, got me?” Mack snarled in her face.

That’s when she got it. Abel had cancer. She should have figured it out sooner, only her experience with cancer and treatments were limited. Understanding and sympathy washed over her. Mack wasn’t truly angry at her; he was furious because he couldn’t control the cancer slowly eating away at a beloved member of his family. And if there was one thing she was coming to understand about Mack Hudson, it was that he couldn’t stand any kind of loss of control. She reached up to touch his face, tracing her fingers over the hard planes of his lips and cheek.

“I’m so sorry, Mack,” she whispered.

His face twisted with pain and vulnerability. Then his hand dropped to her seatbelt, he pressed the latch, releasing her and jerked her against him, draping her half over the console, and crushing her lips beneath his in a desperate, brutal kiss. She whimpered in pain, but absorbed the ravishing kiss, knowing it was what he needed right then. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him close, pressing her breasts hard against his chest, offering as much of herself as she could give. Offering him everything. He took without reservation. Took until she weakened against him and he was forced to let her up for air.

He held her immobile with a hand at the back of her head, broad fingers supporting her, controlling her. She stared up at him, tears sparkling in her caramel eyes, promising him everything. Because it was what he needed. He crushed her with his big body, shoved her skirt up and smashed his lips over hers until she was whimpering in pain and arousal. She gasped and squirmed against him, her moans turning quickly into cries of denial.

He licked a path from her lips to her ear and taunted, “Thought this is what you wanted, baby. You talk about sex and love like a big girl and then turn tail when things get rough. Not this time, sweetheart. This time you’re going to put that sweet mouth to good use.” He nipped her throat and made sure he stroked her body with enough finesse that she was writhing beneath him despite the edge of panic betrayed by her sharply indrawn breath. “Maybe by the time we’re done, you’ll stop teasing so much and I can go back to life the way I liked it.”

She jerked her head to the side, pulling her flesh away from his questing lips and muttered something. He grabbed a fistful of her long hair and pulled her head back to his, forcing her to look at him. “What was that, Lucy? You got something you want to say to me?”

Tears escaped her eyes and trickled over her cheeks. She glared up at him. “F-fuck you Mack!” she snapped shakily, her chest heaving beneath him. “You’re just being nasty because you don’t know how to deal with your emotions properly. Well, I don’t want to be your punching bag and if this is what a relationship with you is like then I won’t have any part of it! No wonder your ex-wife left.”

Lucy knew she should have closed her mouth before she even started. It wasn’t like her to get nasty, but Mack hurt her feelings and she wanted him to take his hands off her. She thought bringing up his hated ex was the way to do it. Boy, was she wrong. Her words had the opposite effect. He stiffened for a few seconds and then he went onto a frenzy of action, attacking her with stinging kisses that were so angrily forceful she could barely keep from screaming out loud. She was sure they were going to leave marks on her pale flesh wherever his lips and teeth touched.

She moaned in pain and arousal, wondering how something meant to hurt her could also turn her on. Then he was lifting her right over the console and on top of his body, stretching her knees around his hips. She cried out in protest, but he ignored her, reaching between them he yanked her skirt completely up and pulled her panties to the side. Just the forceful actions, the truck, his smell, even the darkness surrounding them all served to turn her on, lubricating her for the first touch of a man’s finger to her vagina. Thank goodness, because he was not gentle!

Mack pushed a thick finger right up inside her tight passage forcing a strangled scream from Lucy. She bucked against him, her legs coming up in reaction and her knees banging into the sides of his jean-clad thighs. The steering wheel at her back kept her in place for him.

“Mack!” she cried out.

“So fucking tight,” he snarled, bringing his head up to stare down at her, his blue eyes piercing, pinning her almost as effectively as the finger inside her.

She opened her mouth to beg him to stop, to demand he take his hand away from the place only she had ever touched. She was so frightened and so new to the sensations he was forcing on her that she wasn’t even sure if she liked what he was doing. Part of her wanted to reach for him and beg him to continue, but the rest of her knew he was being too rough for her first time. It was that saner, safer part that was winning out.

Maybe he sensed her trepidation, sensed the rising fear, because he took her lips, forcing the words back down her throat before she could speak them. He wedged a knee between her legs and pushed them open wider. He used the pad of his thumb to coax the tiny bud of her clit out from the hood causing her to jump and arch. Her eyes flew open and rolled back while she moaned into his mouth.

“That’s it, baby,” he breathed into her open mouth, licking her lips. “Give it to me.”

“Ahhhh,” she moaned, clutching his leather coat in one hand and a fistful of his hair in the other. She was mindless now, caught between her own raging hormones and the snippets of thought that flew through her brain alternately telling her she needed to stop him and urging her to let him continue.

He rubbed her clit in slow delicious circles urging her body toward that blissful peak she’d only ever reached on her own. She writhed underneath him, her entire body heating from that point outwards, tiny flames licking along her skin in a cascade of delicious fire that she never wanted to douse. She clawed at him, coaxing him on, begging that stupid voice of reason in her brain to stop screaming at her.

“Mack!” she moaned against him, arching her neck so he could lick and kiss a path down the front of her blouse toward her breasts. She wished she’d worn a lower cut top that morning. What had she been thinking?

Apparently, Mack was thinking though.

“We need this off,” he growled, nipping at her neckline.

She gasped as he pulled his finger from her body and then she moaned a denial at the loss. She reached for his hand, but he chuckled and pulled away from her, reaching instead for her shirt and unbuttoning it down the front.

“Need to see you, baby.”

“Okay,” she whispered eagerly as he parted her shirt, revealing her pretty white bra with blue-ribbon trim.

He groaned when he saw the hook in the front. “Fucking perfect.”

She giggled. “I’m glad you like it.”

“Wasn’t talking about the bra,” he said and parted the delicate fabric with his big, surprisingly deft fingers, revealing her breasts. She held her breath, wondering what he saw. He was the first man to see her naked breasts. They weren’t big, but they weren’t small. She thought they fit her tall, curvy form well enough, so she wasn’t going to complain.

“Fucking perfect,” he said again.

She beamed at him and was about to thank him when he touched her, brushing his knuckle over the peak of her nipple. Her words melted away as sensation flooded through her, starting at the point of her nipple and flaring out.

“Ooooh… wow,” she breathed, staring down at his hand in awe.

“Good?” he asked.

“Yes!” she exclaimed.

He flashed her a grin and increased the pressure until she was moaning in the darkness of the cab and rocking forward into his touch, mindlessly, voicelessly begging for more. Her entire life centered on this moment. If Lucy had known making out felt this good, she’d have been hot and heavy a lot earlier in life. She totally got it now! Sex felt good. It felt amazing! If it felt anything like this, then what she didn’t understand was why there weren’t a heck of a lot more babies in the community and the rest of the world.

“You ever do anything like this before?” Mack asked, an edge of dark demand to his voice.

“Uh uh,” Lucy groaned, pushing her chest into his big hands as he continued to manipulate her breasts. She arched her back, trying to control him so he would touch her in just the way she was quickly learning to like it.

He gave her nipple a little pinch and a twist that had her gasping and trying to pull away. “Ah, no you don’t, baby,” he growled, snaking an arm around her back and pulling her against him. He held her still while he continued to manipulate her breasts, alternating between light punishment and soothing promise until she was whimpering and pleading. “You’ll learn to love everything I give you. Just got to trust me.”

He maneuvered her around in the tight space until she was sitting on his lap with her back to his chest and then splayed her legs over top of his. He slipped a hand between her thighs and pushed a finger back inside her snug passage. This time he met with less resistance and more wet enticement. She moaned, long and low in her throat, filling the cab with sexy sounds that were almost foreign to her ears.

“See, baby?” he held his fingers up to her face so she could see that they were glistening with fluid. Slowly, so she had time to turn her face away if she wanted, he brought his hand to her lips. “Lick,” he demanded.

Lucy hesitated for only a second before she opened her mouth and darted her tongue out to lick his fingers. She sucked on them like they were a popsicle, cleaning her own juices from his flesh. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the experience of tasting herself and smelling him at the same time. She knew as a virgin she should probably be shocked, but she wasn’t. She was desperately turned on. She rocked her hips forward, swiveling them in his lap, grinding her ass against him. She could feel a big, hard ridge against her backside. It could only be his erection, straining against the zipper of his jeans.

The arm he held around her tightened painfully and a new vibration seemed to run through him. Something dark and dangerous. Something precariously on the edge of a freefall, held back by only the barest of control.

He reached between them, under her hips and shoved her panties down until they were around her knees. Then he reached under her ass and began fumbling with his zipper. Alarm bells went off in her head and Lucy began to crawl off his lap, back over the console.

“Stay,” he growled into her hair, pulling her back against him.

“No, Mack,” she said forcefully. “I’m not doing this.”

“You want it,” he snapped. “You can’t deny it. You were grinding on my lap a second ago, begging for more. Your words, baby. I’m only giving you what you want.”

“Not like this!” Lucy exclaimed in disgust. She twisted around and thumped him on the chest. “I’m a virgin and you know it! I’m not about to have my first time in the front seat of your truck, Mack. It’s not right and you know it. And I shouldn’t have to be the one to point it out. I’m the twenty-one-year old virgin, not the thirty-six-year old guy with experience.”

Mack pushed her away so quickly Lucy nearly fell against the opposite window. She caught herself and sat up. She quickly managed to pull her panties back up, re-latch her bra and straighten her clothes. She turned and glared at him as he yanked his zipper up and turned the truck back on.

“I’m not a flowers and restaurants kind of guy, Lucy,” he snapped, cracking his knuckles, frustration clear in his face. “I’m a fuck em’ rough and leave em’ wet kind of guy. I tried to be something else with you, but it’s not working. I don’t like the things you make me feel. Half the time I want to try to be the man you think I’m capable of being and the rest of the time I want to fuck you blind and leave you in the shadows with the rest of the faceless, nameless women I’ve fucked over the years. Because I know that’s how this is going to end anyway. So what’s the point in trying? Why put in the effort when I can take what I want and end it when I decide?”

Hurt punched a hole in her chest and this time she couldn’t even try to look past the pain his words caused. She wouldn’t. “You know what, Mack? I thought you were worth my limited time in this city, worth getting to know. Guess I was wrong.”

“Guess you were,” he snarled, threw the truck into drive and hit the gas so hard that Lucy would have been thrown into the dashboard if he hadn’t caught her in time. “Put your fucking seatbelt on. And don’t say another fucking word or I’ll pull this truck over and finish what we started. Your mouth might say no, but your body wants something else, Lucy. And one of these days, I’m going to take you up on that offer.”