Chapter 26

Avery

After Jack finishes the breakfast I made for him, he dips his mouth down to the plate to lick it clean.

I watch as he does it, my breath catching in my chest.

It’s not just that I’m flattered, even though, well, I am. I’ve never been complimented on much of anything beyond my beauty before—my beauty, and what a good girl I am. But being pretty never even felt like it was my own accomplishment.

The men in my family have always been powerful enough to win over the most beautiful women, and those beautiful women have passed down to me all of their beautiful woman tricks.

Dieting and genetics—that’s all anyone has ever liked about my looks. As for being a good girl…

My pussy clenches, and a shiver runs up my spine when I think of what I did with Jack last night. How he saved me—literally, in full mountain man fanfare, wrestling a bear to death with nothing but his hands and whisking me away with his steaming hot body from death’s icy cold clutches. And after…

Obviously I’m not a very good girl anymore.

Jack doesn’t seem like the kind of man to pay many compliments. Words don’t seem like his forte—no, he’s a man of action. When you come from an entire world of false words and empty compliments, it’s refreshing, honestly.

So when he dips his mouth down to the plate that my bacon and eggs occupied mere moments ago to lick it clean…well, let’s just say that there’s not really a higher compliment he could have paid me.

Jack likes my cooking.

I don’t even like my cooking

I beam down at him with pride.

But like a dog who’s been caught with its paws on the dinner table, lapping at the Christmas goose, Jack freezes as he notices my eyes on him—mouth open, tongue extended mid-lick.

“Boof!” woofs Buck, popping his paws up on the kitchen table himself. He gives Jack an offended look.

“Sorry,” Jack grunts, straightening and pushing the plate away. “Forgot myself.”

“I—I don’t mind,” I say, because in truth, the sight of his tongue is making me wet even as we speak. “You don’t need to put on any…airs or niceties or anything. I mean, it’s your house.”

But Jack is already shaking his head and wiping his lips with the checker-print cloth napkin I laid out for him to eat with. He even wipes his mouth off in a manly way. I guess it’s probably because he wants to make sure there’s no food stuck in his beard.

“Men ought to mind themselves around women,” Jack says with a rugged certainty. “I’m sure the men back home would do the same.”

Back home. The idea makes me want to roll my eyes.

“Men back home mind their manners above the dinner table,” I scoff, recalling the way Adam once pinched my thigh so hard it bruised when I used the wrong fork for the oysters. “It’s what they do beneath the table that’s not so nice.”

Jack looks at me for a long, hard minute, and I feel my cheeks slowly rise to a blush. I know this feeling well—the feeling that I’ve just said something stupid to the French ambassador’s wife and now everyone thinks I’m an idiot for not knowing how to pronounce guillotine.

But then he smiles and breathes a sharp, hard breath out of his nose. It’s the closest thing I think he has to a laugh.

“Ain’t that the truth,” he chuckles. “Come here. Let me get another look at that burn you gave yourself.”

Jack leads me to the sink by my fingertips, turning on the cold tap. I’m tentative to subject my skin to the cold again—especially after my little romp through the blizzard last night—but Jack’s gentle touch and assertive gaze convince me to cowgirl up.

I brace myself as the cold water splashes down on the burn. At first, I relive the pain of the burn all over again.

It stings, maybe even twice as much as it did when it first happened. But then the water soothes the pain, washes it away and down the drainpipe.

“Better?”

I look up at Jack, biting my lower lip, and nod.

“Good. Now, where the hell is that—”

Jack rummages through the cabinets, banging around and softly swearing until he returns to me with a little jar of salve.

“Cure-all Ouch Cream, my grandma used to call this.” Jack chuckles, unscrewing the top of the tiny mason jar. “Old family recipe—but this should help the skin heal. Keep it from scarring. You survived that car crash okay—I’d hate for a little kitchen accident to mar that pretty skin of yours.”

I wince as Jack applies the cream onto my wrist. It has the consistency of petroleum jelly, but it smells like coconut and olive oil, fragrant flowers that I don’t know the names of, and a hint of lavender.

I close my eyes, enjoying his touch. It feels like Jack is rubbing the pain right away. Greedily, I think about how I could get him to do the rest of me with it as well.

I want him to rub my whole body like he’s rubbing my wrist right now. Completely cover me in the stuff.

The moment ends just as quickly as it began. But before I can pout about it, Jack points to the countertop.

“Up you go then,” he grunts, and when I hesitate to ask him what he means, he just scoops me up and places me on the marble counter anyway. It’s a little cold beneath my bare ass, which is no longer covered by the flannel, but thankfully the rest of the kitchen is nice and warm.

So are Jack’s hands.

“Let’s get a look at you then,” he says, and I don’t miss the hooked little smile on his lips when his fingers reach for the top button of the flannel I’ve stolen from him.

“Gosh, Jack. It’s almost like you’re looking for a reason to undress me,” I say, leaning into his touch.

That makes him snort again. When our eyes meet, his dark irises are sparkling.

“Maybe I am,” Jack says, popping the shirt open with one rough tug from his fingers.

The flannel slumps away from my body and Jack takes it even further, pushing it away from my shoulders. What he uncovers is a world of purple-green bruises, scrapes, and shallow cuts—and beneath them, my body betraying my innermost desires with its pebbled nipples and sex-scented skin.

“Mmpf,” Jack grunts wordlessly, nodding as he takes me in. His fingers run down my shoulder like he’s testing something, though I can’t imagine what that something might be.

His resolve, maybe.

His ability to control himself now that he knows he can have me. Fuck me. Make me his. Anytime, anywhere.

“You’ll heal,” comes the verdict. And then, “Spread your legs, baby girl.”

I don’t have an Inner Goddess. I don’t even know what she would sound like if I did have one. But I do have a pussy—a wet, aching pussy still cum-soaked and sore from last night’s coupling.

And when Jack tells me to spread my legs, my pussy throbs so hard that my whole body rocks forward.

When he calls me baby girl? That’s just icing on the cunt-cake.

I don’t move quickly enough for Jack’s liking—it’s almost as if I never do—so when I hesitate, Jack spreads my legs for me. The healing balm on his fingertips smears across one knee as he parts it from the other, exposing my sex to him—my pussy, and the dripping wetness that his words have coaxed out of it.

“Christ, Avery,” Jack breathes. He crouches down to put himself at eye-level with my cunt, resting his forearms on my knees.

He closes his eyes to take a deep breath in. When he opens his eyes again, there’s a hunger in their darkness that only serves to make me wetter. “You fucking want it, don’t you?”

“Y-yes,” I whimper, biting my lip. If it had been any other man, I might have denied it. But not with Jack. Jack sees right through me.

When Jack looks at me with those dark, glinting eyes of his, he’s staring right past my skin and into my soul.

Jack could see how bad I want him in the fucking dark.

I breathe in, bracing myself for his kiss on my sensitive lower lips, but it doesn’t come.

“Too fucking bad,” he says, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s a trace of a cruel little smile coming out of that rugged, overgrown beard of his. “You’re sore, honey. I tore through you last night.” He runs his tongue across his lips, lowering his gaze with regret. “Should have been gentler. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t have been,” I say with certainty. “You warned me. Once we started…”

“Mmpf,” Jack grunts wordlessly in agreement. “I warned you. Not that it’s ever stopped you from doing exactly what you fucking wanted before.”

For a second, I’m afraid he’s mad at me. Pissed that I listen about as well as I cook bacon—I do it, but I still end up burning myself. But then I see the softness, the amused little sparkle in his eyes, and relief washes over me.

Whatever my pussy does to Jack, at least it’s soothed his big bad mountain man temper a little bit.

Jack dips into his Secret Family Recipe salve and, to my delight, rubs it between my legs. I can feel the part of me that’s raw and sore from last night when his fingers pass over it, but the thick, oily wetness of the healing cream takes the pain away from that just like it did for my burn.

“Avery,” Jack grunts suddenly, staring at my pussy with intense concentration.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Stop fucking grinding against me,” he says, his voice hoarse.

I look down, my mouth falling open into a soft little O as I watch my hips moving my cunt against his fingers wantonly.

When our eyes meet again, I look coyly embarrassed. Jack looks vindicated and smug.

“Please?” I ask him. “Just…just a little one.”

Jack snorts again, but I swear—somewhere beneath that scraggly beard of his, a smile forms.

“Fine,” he relents. “Can’t fucking say no to you.”

Jack rises, his fingers slipping upwards to my clit as he does. The combination of my wetness, his cum, the healing salve, and the throbbing of my clit makes it hard for him to pin it down. Instead, he traps it between two fingers, stroking it up and down like he’s petting me.

In return, I close my eyes, and I fucking purr.

“No,” Jack grunts, winding a fist in my hair and pulling me tight. He leans in close to me, his forehead resting against mine. “Fucking look. Look at me, Avery. You’re gonna fucking look at me when you come.”

I gasp. My hips thrash. This man—this rugged, gorgeous, terrible fucking bastard of a man—can make me come at will now, apparently.

My pussy clenches, throbs, and keeps clenching. My breaths each come rougher and more ragged than the last.

But I look at him while I do it. I look into those deep black eyes the entire time, and reflected in them, I see my own.

My voice rises to a shrill little shriek when the orgasm mounts to its highest point, and Jack traps the scream between our lips in a hard, tongue-locked kiss.

He leaves me panting, breathless, and trembling when he’s finished with me. I sit there on the counter, staring at him in ragged disbelief, and he stands back, sucking his cunt-soaked fingers into his mouth and looking proud of himself.

“Boof!” says Buck, trotting out of the kitchen and going in to sleep by the fire instead.

Poor guy. Probably couldn’t figure out why no one was paying any attention to him. I’ll have to go give him some apology belly rubs soon.

“Dishes?” he suggests, raising an eyebrow.

As he does it, I watch one of his bulging pectorals twitch with it.

“Yeah.” I laugh, winded and overwhelmed. “I think a little washing up might do me good.”