All the King's Horses (21 page)

“I think I’ve had enough to drink recently,” she said with a shy smile. Just before my heart could drop into my feet, she added, “But I’m not sure I’m quite ready to call it a night.”

If my heart beat any faster, I was a dead man.

I swallowed. “Good. I…um… Neither am I.”

Her brow furrowed, and she cocked her head a little. “Something on your mind?”

You know exactly what’s on my mind, Amy.

I chewed the inside of my cheek and forced myself to keep looking her in the eye. “Just…what happened back there, I guess.”

Some color rushed into Amy’s face, and she dropped her gaze.

“You came here because you hadn’t felt anything for the horses in a long time,” I said softly.

Amy nodded. “Because I hadn’t felt anything in a long time.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s just say you’re not the only one who’s finally feeling something they haven’t in a long time.”

Her posture straightened. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Really.”

Her eyes flicked toward my lips. “So what is it you’re feeling that you haven’t felt in a long time?”

I gulped. I swept the tip of my tongue across my lower lip and took another step toward her, my own fearlessness sending my pulse skyward once again. With the narrowed distance between us, I was hyperaware of our height difference, of how much she had to look up to maintain this tenuous eye contact.

“Honestly?” I said. “Like I really don’t care right now that you work for me.”

“Oh?” She swallowed. “So what would you do if you weren’t my boss?”

“I…” The words stuck in my throat. Instead of trying to speak, I reached for her face, and Amy closed her eyes as the backs of my fingers met her cheek. The desperation in my own voice made me cringe as I said, “I’m not very good at this.”

She opened her eyes. “You’re doing just fine so far.”

I moistened my lips, and finally, I remembered how to speak.

“I know we shouldn’t do this,” I whispered. “There are so many reasons we shouldn’t, but I can’t help it, Amy. All I can think about is—”

All at once, she grabbed my shirt and kissed me, probably as much to shut me up as anything.

My hat hit the porch at our feet in the same instant our lips met, and my entire universe stopped on a dime. No, that wasn’t it. It started again, lurching back into motion for the first time since she’d shown up at my ranch. I wrapped my arms around her, and she sank against me. She let me part her lips and draw her tongue into my mouth, and her breath across my face made me shiver. Her kiss was desperate, hungry, her tongue both pleading and demanding. The hand on my neck held me to her, but her fingers twitched in my hair as if her firm grip was a futile effort to keep her hand from trembling. God only knows how long we kissed like that before we finally broke away.

I was hard, and she wanted me to be. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have moved her hips like that: to one side, then the other, then back, making my head spin a little faster every time she brushed past my erection.

With a simultaneous release of uneven breaths, we separated.

She touched my face, the soft warmth of her hand making me shiver.

“I don’t care why we shouldn’t do this,” she said. “I want to.” The hand on my face went into my hair, and she pulled me into another long, deep kiss. This time, it was slow, the closest thing to gentle we were capable of, but it wasn’t tenderness. It was restraint. This was as far as we could open the cage without letting the tiger free.

She pulled me toward her until her back hit the wall, and that cage door slid a little farther open. I broke the kiss, intending to insist we shouldn’t because…because…for some reason that must have made sense a moment ago, but when her hip pressed against my erection, my breath slipped silently through my lips. Her hand drifted down my side, and when she reached my belt, I knew exactly where she was going.

“Amy, what are…” I couldn’t remember how to speak, never mind what I wanted to say.

She slid her hand over the front of my jeans, and I closed my eyes, groaning as I let my head fall back. Squeezing me, stroking me with her fingers and palm, she teased me through my clothes until I was damn near out of my mind.

Her voice soft and unsteady, she said, “Do you want to stop?”

“God, no.” I kissed her hard and pressed my cock against her hand. I didn’t know where this bold, aggressive side of her came from, but I liked it. I
loved
it. “I want you too bad to stop.”

Amy whimpered, gripping the front of my shirt with one hand as her other squeezed me through my jeans. “We should go inside.”

I swept my tongue across my lips. “Your place or mine?”

“Whichever’s closest.”

Chapter Fifteen

Amy

We stumbled in through Dustin’s front door. My heart beat wildly, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so aroused. A dam in me had broken last night, and another was breaking now, and I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t want to stop it, and Dustin didn’t stop it. His kiss and his hands and the way he had as much trouble staying upright as I did made me want to just drag him down to the floor and finish this here and now.

He pinned me up against his bedroom door. I gripped his shirt, he gripped my hair, and we kissed like it didn’t matter why this might be a bad idea.

“Jesus Christ,” he growled, pressing his erection against me as he dipped his head to kiss my neck. “I want…
Fuck
, I want you so bad.”

Panting as his lips skated up and down the side of my throat, I managed to whisper, “Do you have condoms?”

Dustin froze. He turned his head, furrowing his brow at the bedside table. “You know, I’m not sure if I do or not.”

“Maybe we should check.” I swept my tongue across my lower lip. “Before we need them.”

“Good idea.” He kissed me again, even as he pulled his body away from mine, like he knew we needed to pry ourselves apart but he just couldn’t make himself go all the way.

“Dustin… check…”

Abruptly, he pulled away and started toward the bedside table, throwing a slurred, “Let me look” over his shoulder. I stayed up against the door because my knees shook too much to walk, and I was sure if I even moved, I’d wake up and this would be over.

Dustin pulled open the drawer. “I’ll be damned.” He reached in and pulled out the box. “I actually do.”

“Oh, thank God.” I started toward the bed, but then Dustin did a double take at the box in his hand, and the scowl that followed stopped me in my tracks. “What?”

He swore, dropped the box back in the drawer, and looked at me. “They’re expired.”

Our eyes met.

I couldn’t keep a snort of laughter from escaping and clapped my hand over my mouth.

Dustin laughed too. “Figures, doesn’t it?”

“Just our luck, right?”

He put his hands on my waist and leaned in to kiss me. “Yeah, just our luck.” He pressed his lips to mine, and our bodies melted together again. “I don’t suppose you have any?”

I shook my head. “Not a one.”

“Damn it,” he whispered but pulled me into a kiss anyway. Frustration tried to hold me back, but need drove me closer to him, and I returned his kiss as passionately as he gave it. We were against the door again, pressed together and pulling each other closer, and I couldn’t find my breath, but I found his, and that was good enough.

“God,” he growled, sliding his hands under the back of my shirt. “This has got to be the worst possible time to be out of condoms.”

“Maybe we should go get some, then.”

Dustin blinked. “You…do know the nearest place to buy them is forty-five minutes away, right?”

I pulled his hips against mine, pressing myself against his rock-hard cock until he closed his eyes and groaned.

“I’ll make it worth the drive,” I said.

“I’ll get my keys.” He kissed me once more, then broke away from me again.

“Is anything even open this time of night?”

“There’s a Walmart in town.”

I snickered.

He eyed me. “What?”

Shaking my head, I waved a hand but couldn’t keep myself from giggling. “Just that we’re stopping in the middle of this to drive an hour to Walmart…”

He laughed. Hooking a finger in one of my belt loops, he pulled me back to him. “Well, it’s either Walmart, or tonight’s not the night I get to find out what it feels like to fuck you.”

My knees turned to liquid. He wasn’t a man I’d expected to speak so bluntly, and it drove me wild. “Truck. Now.”

“That’s what I thought.” He kissed me, then let me go.

We stepped outside into the drizzly summer evening and climbed into Dustin’s truck. As the engine roared to life, my heart beat faster. There was plenty of time to change our minds between now and when we got back. I silently begged Dustin not to change his mind and secretly worried I’d be the one to pull the plug because this was…this…it was a stupid, reckless thing to do. Stupid, reckless and completely out of character for me, but “out of character” these days was anything that wasn’t being under an oppressive thumb and resenting a career I was supposed to love, so bring on reckless and stupid. To hell with how I’d feel tomorrow, because I needed this tonight.

We were five miles down the road when Dustin broke the silence. “You ever done something like this before?”

I might have thought he was just making conversation, but the way he rapidly tapped his fingers on the steering wheel gave away his nerves. Or maybe anticipation, but his left knee bounced a little too. Definitely nerves.

“Gone to Wamart in the middle of the night for condoms?” I shrugged. “Can’t say I have.”

He laughed, and it was undeniably a nervous sound. “You know what I mean.”

I chewed my lip. “It’s been a long time. A
really
long time. What about you? Have you done something like this before?”

“No.” He swallowed hard. “I’ve… No. I haven’t.”

I watched his fingers tapping on the wheel. “We can still turn around if you don’t—”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to.” He glanced at me, and apparently Dustin King was capable of something like a shy smile. “I just said I’ve never done it.” The smile faded a little, and he asked, “Do
you
want to go back?”

“Not without a few condoms.”

He drove on.

The miles crawled past. We made a few halfhearted attempts at conversation, but our minds couldn’t hold on to anything more than a few minutes of small talk here and there. Dustin’s fingers kept tapping. The speedometer needle crept toward a little too fast for the weather, but no farther, and we flew down the same road we’d been down and back once already tonight. Too bad the song on the dance floor had changed at just the wrong time tonight, or we probably would have stopped on the way home, and we’d have had three orgasms apiece by now.

I clasped my hands together in my lap and tried not to go crazy. I was afraid to touch him. I itched to just put a hand on his leg or find his hand in the darkness, but one touch and we were running off the road. Or pulling over and giving in as much as we could without condoms. And I couldn’t handle a delay, not a single delay, that would keep me from feeling him inside me, so torture or not, for now I kept my hands to myself.

I dug my teeth even harder into my lip and tried not to squirm in my seat. He hadn’t changed his mind. I hadn’t changed mine. We were long past succumbing to the heat of the moment and well into the realms of premeditated, and with every mile, I cared a little less.

Up ahead in the rain, one of the few stoplights in town came into view, and Dustin put on his right turn signal. As he made the turn, my heart beat faster because the blue and white Walmart sign glowed like a massive beacon. I tried not to remember we still had a forty-five minute drive back to the ranch, and as he pulled into a parking space, I wondered if I could talk him into one of the motels I
swore
I’d seen on the other side of town.

He put the truck in Park but left the engine running.

“So, um,” I said. “Do we both go in, or…”

He cleared his throat. “Well, I know the store pretty well.”

“And half this town probably knows you.”

Oh, yeah. Boy was nervous. If his fingers tapped any faster…

“I’ll go.” Dustin put his hand on my leg. “Like I said, I know the layout, so I’ll be in and out in—”

I snorted.

He rolled his eyes.

I laughed. “I’m sorry. I have the maturity of a twelve-year-old when I’m nervous.”

He tilted his head. “You’re nervous?”

“A little.”

He smiled. “Well, I don’t feel so bad, then.” He leaned across the seat and kissed me. Quickly, lightly, just enough to make me crazy, but he ended it before I could grab on and drag him down across the seats. As he pulled away, he paused like he was tempted to come in for another, but then drew back completely. He probably knew damn well one kiss wouldn’t get him into and out of the store any time soon. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here.”

“You’d better be.” He winked and then got out of the truck. He left the engine running and walked toward the doors under the brightly lit sign, his hands in his pockets and his steps fast and sure. Anyone who saw him like I did now probably wouldn’t think for a second he was as nervous as I was.