Bursting With Love (5 page)

“Thanks, Savannah.” She looked at Elizabeth and grabbed that lock of hair and began fiddling with it again. “Elizabeth?” she asked tentatively.

Elizabeth turned to face her with a wide smile. “I’m all for sharing yourself with whoever you feel will bring you pleasure, until you find the one whose pleasure you could never live without. I get a feeling about these things, and I don’t think either of those two men are broken beyond repair.” She held Savannah’s gaze.

“Are you Jack’s personal dating consultant or something?” Savannah asked.

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I just see something between you guys. I don’t know why, but…” She shrugged. When the campsite came into view, Elizabeth grabbed their arms and stopped walking. She lifted her chin toward Jack and Aiden, sitting side by side. Lou and Pratt sat across from them by the fire, each manipulating a length of rope. It looked like Jack was teaching them how to tie a knot.

“Those do not look like broken men to me,” Elizabeth said.

Jack put his arm around Aiden and pulled him close. His deep voice boomed into the evening. “Great job! You’ll be a master survivalist soon.”

Aiden wrapped his arms around Jack’s waist and hugged him. Savannah wasn’t surprised to see Jack’s body stiffen. His arm hung in the air above the boy, as if the hug were a giant leap from his arm on the boy’s shoulder. He lowered it slowly toward Aiden’s back, as if he were almost afraid to hug him, and in the next moment, he pulled the little boy close. The sweetness of the moment in the dimming sunlight brought Savannah’s hand to her heart. Jack rested his head on the top of Aiden’s hair and caught all three women staring at him.

JACK HAD BEEN dreading the night since he’d woken up that morning. He knew that the minute he lay down he’d be barraged with memories of kissing Savannah, and those images would be chased by Linda’s trusting and disappointed face. He’d never cheated on her when she was alive—and now, two years after her death, he was nearly paralyzed with guilt over a single kiss. A kiss that had him thinking about plenty of other dirty things besides Savannah’s lips. He couldn’t push past the thought that he had carelessly crushed his wedding vows. Thinking of Linda brought his mind to Aiden and how good it felt to spend time with a child.

He sat on the boulder beside the camp with his knees pulled up, his hands steepled together in front of his mouth, and his chin resting on the pads of his thumbs. He wondered what he would be like if he had a normal life.
Normal
. Jack wasn’t sure he even knew what normal looked like anymore. Was normal two adults with dreadlocks and an awesome son? Or was it a single career woman hiding out in the woods to heal whatever ache she had at the moment? Or was normal two kids searching for answers? Maybe there was no normal.
Will I ever find my normal again—whatever that is—and have the family I always wanted?

Jack lay back on the rock and looked up at the stars, thinking of his brothers and sister. He was the eldest of six. Before Linda died, he’d seen his four younger brothers and his sister often. Now he was lucky to see them once a year. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Elizabeth and Lou singing to Aiden, and their voices silencing when, he was sure, Aiden had finally closed his eyes and fallen asleep. A few minutes later, the metallic scratch of the zipper on Pratt and Josie’s tent broke through the silence. Josie’s hushed giggles brought a smile to Jack’s lips despite his internal conflict. He wondered what it would be like to camp with a woman who truly enjoyed the outdoors. Linda never had, and now, as he lay beneath the stars, he wondered if Savannah ever would. He draped his arm over his eyes to block out the moonlight and wondered if he might fall asleep right there with the cold, hard rock at his back.

He didn’t hear her footsteps as she walked by, and he didn’t feel a brush of wind or hear the
swish-swish
of her pants legs. It was her scent that brought Jack’s arm away from his eyes and pushed him up onto his elbow. She stood with her back to him at the edge of the woods. He could barely make out her silhouette in the darkness, but he didn’t think he’d ever forget the alluring curves he’d seen earlier that morning. He didn’t want to be accused of spying again, but wasn’t he? No, he hadn’t been looking for her. She’d appeared unexpectedly.
Had she? Or was I waiting for her? Hoping she’d appear?
Or perhaps she’d been hoping he’d find her.

If he closed his eyes and acted like he was asleep, he couldn’t be accused of spying, but he’d be damned if he was going to allow her to go into the woods alone after what happened the previous night. Should he call her name? Pretend he was just walking around.
Damn it. When did taking students to the woods become so complicated?

He’d never considered himself a hider, but isn’t that just what he’d been doing for two years? Hiding from the world? Hiding from himself? Jack pushed himself off the rock.
What the hell. Here goes.

“Savannah?”

Savannah whipped her head around. “Jack?” She leaned forward, squinting into the darkness.

He closed the distance between them. “Are you going bobcat hunting?”
That was a lame-ass joke
.

“Ha-ha. I wanted to go to the bathroom, but then I remembered…”

“I’ll take you, but let’s not push our luck by going to the same place that bobcat was before. Come on.” He put his hand on her lower back, and just that slight graze of her body against him made his stomach feel funny, like he was going downhill on a roller coaster. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. It was safer that way.

Savannah stopped walking.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You confuse the hell out of me, that’s what,” Savannah said. They were standing about twenty feet from the edge of the camp. The little moonlight that had been visible by the boulder was now blocked by the taller trees.

Jack stepped closer to her, bringing her face into focus. “If it’s any consolation, you do the same to me.” If there was one thing Jack knew about himself, it was that between his height and his brawn, the inflection of his voice determined how people reacted to him. He knew how to come across stern and aggressive. Hell, it had become a way of life in recent years. And he used to know how to allow his sensual, flirtatious side to turn on with each breath. But that part of him had been hidden for so long, Jack wasn’t sure it still existed at all. Tonight, for the first time in forever, he wanted that harsh edge to slip away. The recognition of that desire alerted the guilt and self-loathing that he’d harbored for two years and had been trying to ignore for the past twenty-four hours.
I shouldn’t want her
.

“Great. Now that that’s established, why is it that every time I’m alone, you show up?” Savannah crossed her arms.

“Do you ever not think like an attorney?” She tweaked every nerve in his body, and in the three minutes they’d been standing there, his pulse had already kicked up to the point where he was breathing heavily.

“Do you ever talk nicely to women?”

He looked away and smiled. She was tough…and he liked it. “I’m not a very nice man,” he said.

Savannah arched a brow. “You know what I think?”

She took a step closer to him, and the stirring in Jack’s stomach traveled south, bringing rise to the heat that had erupted between them the night before.

She put her cheek a breath away from his and whispered, “I think you need to walk me into the woods.”

His sexual urges begged to be fed, and as he contemplated doing just that, she leaned in again and said, “I have to pee.”

SAVANNAH COULDN’T PINPOINT the exact moment when Jack went from being a surly ass to someone she wanted to figure out, but she was pretty sure it was when she’d seen him holding Aiden’s hand on the trail earlier that afternoon—and maybe the thought had been driven home when he’d put his arm around Aiden by the fire that evening. In those small actions, she’d seen his angry armor chipping away, exposing a taste of emotion that seemed to scare him as much as it seemed to soften him. And even though she was on the rebound from Connor, she couldn’t stop Elizabeth’s words from playing in her mind over the last few hours.
I’m all for sharing yourself with whoever you feel will bring you pleasure, until you find the one whose pleasure you could never live without.
The more she observed Jack, the more open she became. She thought of her older brother Rex and how he’d always been gruff around women—until he’d fallen in love with Jade Johnson, the daughter of her father’s nemesis—the man Hal Braden had been feuding with for the past forty years. The relationship between Rex and Jade had been contentious at first, and from what Rex had described, they’d both fought it every step of the way. She’d never seen Rex happier, more content, and less guarded than he’d been since falling in love with Jade.

Savannah smiled at the surprise in Jack’s eyes. She supposed it had been cruel to tease him the way she had, but as she’d seen with her brother, she thought perhaps there was a kinder, gentler man who lay beneath the anger. She wasn’t Jade Johnson, and there was no family feud to contend with. The only thing holding her back from wrapping her hands around his beautiful, hard body and kissing him until she cracked that armor away was the memory of what it felt like to be hurt by Connor. Savannah had to believe that just because Connor hurt her didn’t mean all men would.

Jack cleared his throat. “Right.” They crossed the campsite and entered the forest on the other side. Savannah was aware of every breath as she walked just behind Jack, a little embarrassed that she had to pee at all, much less that she needed a babysitter while she went.

“See that rock over there?” Jack pointed to a large boulder. “I’m going to scope it out. Stay put.”

“I’m not a dog, you know.” Why did he have to speak so rudely?

He took a step forward and stopped, then turned to face her. He opened his mouth to speak, then looked to the side, as if he’d changed his mind. “I’m sorry,” he said a little less grumpily. “Please wait here.”

Feeling vindicated, Savannah grinned. “Okay.” She watched as he disappeared around the boulder with one hand on the leather sheath hanging from his belt. Then he came around the other side and motioned her over.

“Need anything else?”

He was still so curt that her nerves tightened. She held up her biodegradable wet wipes and wiggled them before his eyes.

“I’ll wait over there.”

Savannah felt her cheeks flush.

After she was done, she found him with his back to her. In an effort to crack the walls he had constructed around himself, she tiptoed to him and wrapped her hands over his eyes.

“Guess who?” she teased. She didn’t feel his cheeks lift in a smile or his back jump with a stifled laugh. Instead, she felt the tiny muscles at the edge of his cheekbones contract as he clenched his jaw. Savannah dropped her hands, her hopes at levity deflated. “Sorry.”

He turned to face her again with the same irritated look he’d given her enough times since they’d arrived that it was already etched in her mind.

“Why are you doing this?” he growled, grabbing her wrists.

His eyes had gone almost black, and the word
danger
floated through Savannah’s mind again. She wondered if she had misjudged him after all. Maybe he didn’t have that softer side. Maybe she’d imagined it.

“Why, Savannah? I’m an angry bastard,” he said in a harsh whisper.

She could barely breathe. His eyes were still black as night, but as she looked closer, she realized she hadn’t misjudged him. It was restraint that she read in his clenching jaw, the muscles straining in his neck, but it was desire, thick and lustful, in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” she managed. Her legs weakened and her pulse sped up at the flames igniting between them. “Maybe…I…”

“I’m broken, Savannah. I may not be fixable. You’re better off going back to your high-rise cement city and using your goddamn sexy charms on one of the men there.” His nostrils flared with each heavy breath, and Savannah could tell that he was at his breaking point.

“I’m here now.” Savannah touched his ripped abs with her fingertips. She felt him shudder beneath her touch, and she looked at her hand in surprise. He released her wrists, and she placed her palm over his hammering heart and stepped closer. He smelled like the earth and sheer masculinity, and as he stared down at her, she reached up and touched his cheek. It felt just as she’d thought it might as she was lying in her tent earlier in the evening, remembering every line of his striking features. Her finger trailed the edge of his clenched jaw, lightly touching the muscles as they rose and eased repeatedly, and Savannah couldn’t keep herself from stepping on her tiptoes and planting a soft kiss on the center of his chin, then running her finger over the swell of his lower lip.

He growled a dangerous indiscernible warning that only further stimulated her desires before whispering, “Savannah.”

His plea landed in her ears as an invitation. Without any conscious thought, she lifted up on her toes again and ran her tongue along the lip she’d just touched.

“Jack,” she whispered, hoping he heard the invitation in her voice, too.

His eyes opened wide and then narrowed again, and in the next second, he grabbed her hips and pulled her close, taking her in the same deep, passionate kiss that he had the first time they’d kissed. His tongue moved forcefully through her mouth as he took a fistful of her hair and wrenched her neck back, opening her mouth wider to him. The pleasure and pain was so intense that Savannah moaned as his teeth found her neck, his hands slipped beneath the waist of her jeans, under which she was naked, and he brushed her bare skin. His eyes opened wide and he slid his hands around her hips and grabbed her ass.

“Jesus, Savannah.”

He pulled her to him and ground his hips into hers, feasting on her mouth like he’d been waiting for her his whole life. Savannah drew air from his lungs, clawing hastily at his shirt, pulling it from the confines of his jeans and grabbing the hot bare flesh of his scarred back. She lifted his shirt and bent to his chest, flicking his nipple with her tongue until it was peaked with arousal. Then she sucked, swirling circles around the pebbled skin with her tongue. He yanked her head back again and took her in another rough kiss. They both came away panting.

“We should stop,” he said.

He didn’t wait for a response. He lifted her sweatshirt up and groaned at the sight of her bare breasts before cupping them in his hands and running his tongue over the sensitive skin between. “You’re so beautiful.”

He took her right breast in his mouth, grazing her nipple with his teeth. Savannah gasped as he moved to the other breast. His hands were rough and sure against her as together they stumbled backward toward the boulder. He pressed her against the cold, hard rock. Every inch of his thick length ground into her hips as he lifted her sweatshirt over her head, then reached one arm over his back and pulled his own shirt over his head. The shock of cold air against her already heated body sent her hands reaching for him again. And—
oh God
—his chest was so dense and powerful as his hands gripped her ribs and kissed her neck. He touched the button of her jeans and drew back, piercing her with a hot stare—a fierce lion ready to take his lioness. She reached down and unbuttoned her jeans, then stepped from them, shivering with desire as much as from the cold. She’d never been that bold with a man before, but Jack was just that—all man—and she wanted every inch of him.

He trailed his eyes down her hairless body, swallowing hard, his Adam’s apple jumping in his thick neck. His eyes landed on the little skin-colored patch on her lower abdomen.

“Birth control patch,” she whispered quickly.

He kissed her again. “Thank you. I didn’t even think about protection. It’s been so long.”

Jack unbuttoned his jeans, then drew the zipper down slowly, holding her against the rock with nothing more than his hungry stare and a silent promise of animalistic sex. He stepped from his pants, and Savannah raked her eyes over his incredible body, feeling the swell between her thighs, the ache of need simmering to a boil, and knowing as his powerful hands clutched her rib cage that he was tortured with the same burning need. He lifted her to the boulder and forced his body between her legs. She leaned down and kissed him as his hand found her moist center and stroked her into a frenzy of lust. He pushed several fingers inside of her and probed her hard and fast while he devoured the curves of her mouth with his tongue. Savannah moaned against him. It wasn’t enough. She needed more of him. He made her feel so good, but she needed to feel more, to experience every pleasure she possibly could.

He drew back and looked down at his hand buried inside of her. “I have to taste you.” The command could not be heard as anything else.

She spread her legs wide. “Taste me.” Savannah closed her eyes as his tongue caressed her swollen sex. He withdrew his fingers and she groaned, surprised as the guttural sound vibrated through her throat. She gripped his shoulders with her fingernails as he dipped one finger inside her and then moved it lower, rubbed the sensitive pucker of skin she hadn’t ever let any man near.

“Yes, Jack,” she whispered, arching her hips up, opening to him even further.

He slid his finger in, penetrating her where she’d never been penetrated before. She gasped a breath at the titillating mix of pleasure and pain. He thrust his finger deeper inside her bottom as his tongue found her clit and lapped eagerly. Then his teeth took over, and a shock shot through her entire body.

“Jack,” she cried out, then covered her mouth as the sound drifted into the night and the most powerful orgasm she’d ever felt gripped her body. She bucked against his mouth, arching back, completely open to him in ways she’d never been to any other man. The sensations tore at every nerve, strumming them into a fever she couldn’t control as they pulsated hard and tight around him. Jack withdrew his finger and dragged his whole tongue over her now overly sensitive skin as her body shook with aftershocks. Savannah didn’t know or care why she’d allowed Jack Remington to touch her in that way, but she knew she needed more.

TOUCHING SAVANNAH WAS nothing like Jack had imagined it would be. He’d been with only a handful of women before marrying Linda, and their sex life had been fulfilling. He’d never felt like he was missing out on anything. But when he touched Savannah, the animal in him came out, and his desires went way past making love every Wednesday and Saturday night. The nagging guilt in the back of Jack’s head silenced the moment he’d put his lips to Savannah’s breast. And everything afterward was fueled by pure visceral need. He’d never have touched Linda in the way he’d just touched Savannah. He’d always thought it was too dirty. Wrong. But with Savannah, it was neither of those things, and as her body trembled in his grasp, he knew he wasn’t going to stop there. He was powerless against the desires she’d unleashed. In one quick move, he lifted her off the rock, clenched fistfuls of her hair, and took her in another deep kiss. Every part of her was delectable. The need to possess her was so strong that he didn’t realize how forceful he was being, and as her back hit the rock, she mewed.

He drew back, releasing her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m—”

Her eyes were at half-mast as a grin formed on her lips. “It was a good hurt,” she whispered.

“Jesu—” His mouth found hers again. His tongue thrust hard and fast, stroking the roof of her mouth before he pulled back again. He didn’t want to hurt her or take advantage of her. “I’m sorry I…” He dropped his eyes to keep from taking her luscious mouth again.

“I’m not.” Her words were like a sweet summons.

A groan came from deep in his chest as he spread her legs with his feet and pushed his hips to hers. His erection was hot and hard against her skin. He rested his forehead against hers.

“Savannah, I haven’t been with a woman for two years. I’m surprised I’ve made it this long. The minute I enter you, I—”

She held him close as he tried to pull away.
Goddamn it
. He wanted her. Hell, he needed her. He hadn’t been this hard in years, and it wasn’t from making out with just any woman. He could have dozens of women if he’d wanted them. It was because of Savannah. Smart, sexy, sensual Savannah Braden, the woman who challenged everything he believed about himself.

“It’s okay,” she said.

The need in her eyes rivaled his, and when she reached down and cupped his balls it took all of his focus not to come. She slid down his body and licked him from base to tip. He shuddered. His hands fisted as he fought the urge to take her right there and then. She lowered her mouth over the tip and swirled her tongue, then drew away, exposing his wet skin to the cool air and sending a fury of carnality raging through him. She came back up to her full height and wrapped her hand around the back of his neck, pulling his ear to her mouth. She took his lobe between her teeth then licked the tender spot and whispered, “I’ll turn around. Maybe you’ll last longer without my breasts against you.” She turned around, put her palms flat on the boulder, and spread her legs. Then she cast a look over her shoulder at him, her hair tumbling over her face, leaving only one eye to look at him with the most seductive gaze Jack had ever seen. He put his hand flat on her lower back to quell the nervous tremors that ran through him.

“Savannah,” he whispered. He rested his head on her back and wrapped his hands around her belly, feeling her racing heart against his cheek. He cupped her breasts, and the feel of her milky skin in his hands and her bare ass against his hips was almost too much for him to take. He gently turned her to face him and put his cheek to hers. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. He didn’t care if she thought it made him less of a man. Truth mattered to Jack, always had, and Savannah’s hazel eyes mirrored that truth.