Tools of Engagement

He watched her hand move, a muscle popping in his cheek. “You reckon I should switch to something else?”

“No.” Bethany jacked him faster. “I didn’t say I didn’t like them.”

“Baby, baby, baby.” He caught her wrist, pushing through clenched teeth, “I’ve only got about ten seconds left of that.”

A pulse boomed in her ears. She was completely and utterly absorbed by this moment, the outside world and her usual insecurities be damned. Her makeup had been washed away by the rain, her hair was a catastrophe—and she didn’t even care. None of it mattered when she was being touched by this man. How was such a huge reversal possible? There might have been a trickle of nerves that she wasn’t going to live up to his prolonged expectations, but it was a whisper compared to what was usually a roar.

She eased her wrist free of Wes’s grip and worked his jeans down past his hips, leaving them gathered at his knees. Oh. Holy hell, the thighs. She’d never seen his thighs out in the open like this and they were rugged, muscular. They belonged on either side of a horse’s back or in one of those dusty Wrangler ads. Forget crushing a walnut between them, he could snap a log in half. There was enough hair on them to make her blush, to make her weak-kneed for the chance to feel the tickle of it on her cheeks. And with that wicked vision in her head, Bethany went down on her knees.

“Ah, Jesus, you’re really doing this,” Wes gritted out, wrapping the hem of his T-shirt in his fist to give her access to his straining manhood—why was that so hot? “I shouldn’t let this happen, but that mouth of yours, Bethany. That fucking mouth. I could draw it from memory. I’d die to watch it taste my cock.”

His words heaped coal into the already wild fire inside of Bethany, his admission stealing any remaining trepidation. How could she be self-conscious when he wanted her so badly, he looked like he was in pain?

Those thighs called to her and she took her time kissing the rough insides of them, grazing him with her teeth and soothing the sting with long, thorough licks. As she switched to the other leg, she fisted his erection in her hand and pulled him off loosely, needing him to savor the experience, the way she was doing.

Finally, she reached the top of her nibbling hike up his sinewy thighs, treating him to a moment of blistering eye contact before wrapping her tongue around the base of his shaft as far as it would go, dragging her mouth to his engorged head.

Wes fell back on the stack of bagged concrete, the fingers of his right hand burrowing into her hair. “Bethany. Sweet Christ. What are you doing to me with that pretty mouth?” She performed the move again and his abdomen plummeted and flexed. “Ahhh, fuck. Trying to hold on, baby, but I’m hurting.”

Talk about a power trip. Who knew it was possible to feel worshipped while on her own knees? But that’s exactly how it felt. Instead of doing him a favor, Wes was paying homage to her mouth. She’d only gotten started, too.

Bethany closed her grip around his hard sex and pumped her fist, trailing her tongue through his sensitive slit. When his hips shot up off the concrete bags, his strangled shout echoing through the empty house, Bethany sunk her mouth down as far as possible, until she could feel her throat rejecting his ample size, then sucked her way up to the tip—hard.

Wes rasped her name once, twice, his chest shuddering, and he lost himself in her mouth. Lord, it was the sexiest moment of her life, the way the heels of his boots scraped on the floor trying to find purchase, the fervor with which he clutched the strands of her hair, his straining thighs. If ever there was a moment to believe she could orgasm without touching herself, this was it. Wes was the orgasm.

“Oh my God,” he said in between heaved breaths. “Oh my God.” Bethany yelped when Wes hauled her up onto his lap sideways. “All this time, I’ve been so smug knowing I’m going to rock your world and then you just go ahead and rock mine. Not even a polite warning.”

A little butterfly danced around in her belly. “Are you waiting for an apology?”

“Hell no.” He brushed a hand over Bethany’s head and cupped her cheek, an unfamiliar light in those eyes that consumed her face. “I’m waiting to wake up.”

Intimacy, the kind where she looked into someone’s eyes and experienced unfiltered genuineness, was terrain she’d never walked before. It wasn’t a skill she’d mastered, so she started to flounder. “Well.” She straightened and laid a hard kiss on his cheek and then started to rise. “Don’t think you’re going to get special treatment at work tomorrow—”

Wes pulled her back down onto his lap. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m— Home,” she sputtered.

“Is that so?” he drawled.

“Hmmm.”

“No.”

“No?”

His palm coasted up her inner thigh, slowing when he reached her center, placing two fingers over the soaked seam of her jeans and rubbing. Firmly. Confidently. Every iota of oxygen in Bethany’s lungs whooshed out of her, lust turning the corner on two wheels and roaring down the avenue. She could only close her eyes and let Wes unzip her jeans, sliding his hands inside the denim, as well as her panties.

When his fingers made contact with her wetness, her hips hitched on a moan and heat flared in Wes’s expression. “Still want to leave?”

“No.”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t. You don’t want to leave my sight when you’re this revved up.” His middle and index finger parted her lips and teased her clit with a tight circle. “Not when I can make it so much better.”

Her neck blew a fuse, head falling back. Wes’s touch left her briefly to strip her jeans and panties off, and then she was naked from the waist down, draped across his lap, in the middle of their jobsite. Not that she could find the brain cells to care at that particular moment. The things he was doing to her with his fingers . . . it was as though Wes could actually read her reactions and interpret them in a way that afforded her more pleasure. Kind of like the object of sex, but this man actually did it, and his perceptiveness on top of her already monstrous attraction to him had Bethany so hot, her skin would surely singe if touched.

“Bethany . . . Jesus, look at you. How are you so fucking beautiful?”

Wes worked her swollen button of flesh between his knuckles, chuckling when her back arched. He cut off his own laughter by bending his head down and licking the tips of her breasts through her shirt—and then. Oh, then he bit down on a nipple and twisted his middle finger up inside of her. At the same time.

Deep.

“Wes, keep doing that,” she said hoarsely. “Keep d-doing that.”

“I’ll do any damn thing you need,” he groaned, adding a second finger and raking his teeth side to side over her sensitive nipple. “You want to fuck my fingers, darlin’? Move your hips. Move them around on my lap and feel how hard you’ve already made my dick again.”

Her body followed his instructions before her mind got the chance, her backside writhing on his lap and enjoying the plump ridge of his arousal. Easy. Decadent. Until it became urgent that his fingers stroke her deeper. With her pulse points going off like little alarms, Bethany worked her hips in time with his big fingers. They slid in and out of her, faster and faster until she almost couldn’t stand the oncoming pressure of imminent release. It built around her, the way an orchestra might during a piece of music’s crescendo.

“Wes,” she cried out, clutching at the front of his shirt. “I’m . . . yes. Yes.”

The climax rippled through her middle and squeezed her muscles, blew embers at her nerves until she swore she was on fire. Wes pressed the pad of his finger to a secret spot inside of her and rubbed there with quick, sure movements, brewing a scream in the back of her throat.

“Go on, do it. You fucking scream if I make you scream.”

She did and the freedom of it made her orgasm luminous and expansive, like she could dive through it and disappear. Maybe she did for a few moments, because when she opened her eyes again, there was only the smell of Wes’s neck, the feel of his arms around her, though she had no memory of him pulling her close.

“Okay, so . . .” he began, his voice scratchy. “We’ll take it slow starting now.”

Bethany laughed, a full, spontaneous sound that was nothing like her usual one. It wasn’t tempered or molded into what she thought a pretty laugh should sound like and as a result, it loosened something that had been unknowingly stuck inside of her. Wes’s face softened at the sound and she felt . . . lighter.

Without warning, Wes surged to his feet with Bethany still in his arms. “It’s your fault for being so irresistible,” he said—and promptly blew a raspberry into her neck. Bethany was still slack-jawed when he settled her onto her feet and gave her bare ass a playful smack. “You’ve convinced me to forgive you for falling off the roof.”

Bethany scrambled to get dressed and not ogle Wes’s rock-solid buns before they winked out of sight, back inside their household of denim. “So we should maybe, um . . . figure out some ground rules.”

“Nope.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”