LoversFeud (6 page)

“That’s right. Let me see those beautiful muscles. I’d almost forgotten how hot you are.” She stayed on her knees before him, using her hands and her warm breath to coax him to full arousal. “You like me best when I’m on my knees, don’t you?”

Reaching down, he fisted her hair in both hands, raising her head as she was about to take him in her mouth. “Not now.” Bye wasn’t sure whether he wanted to toss her on the narrow bunk in the corner or…

He recalled their last scene together when he’d buried his face between her firm, smooth legs and lapped at her cunt and clit until he heard her scream that had come out muffled by another Dom’s cock. He’d been ambivalent about the role he’d been playing, so much so that he hadn’t come that night until he finally took charge and claimed her pussy the way he’d wanted to while she had been giving head to the other Dom.

He hadn’t come here for sex, and something told him that if they did this now, it would mean a hell of a lot more to him than the wildest club scene he’d ever experienced. “This isn’t what I need right now, baby.”

“What do you need, then?” When she looked up and met his gaze, she seemed confused.

“This.” Needing the understanding Karen didn’t serve up with the honeyed, meaningless words of sympathy he’d heard from too many well-meaning neighbors, Bye pulled her up and held her close. He savored the smoothness of her skin against the sun-baked roughness of his own and the silky brush of her hair against his chest. For a long time he just held her, his hands as still along her spine as her own were at his waist.

He appreciated the warmth from a small fire she’d started in the rock fireplace along one wall of the one-room shack, but even more, he was thankful she was here. She made him feel a little less alone.

“Karen?”

She tilted her head, met his gaze. “What, honey?”

“I need you to make the pain go away. God, I hurt so bad.”

Standing, she moved her hands to her sides and nuzzled his neck. “I don’t know how to make you feel better. Tell me.”

Bye scooped her up and deposited her on the narrow bunk. Instead of following her down he sat beside her and laced his fingers through her much smaller ones. “I need to cry, but I can’t.”

“Talk to me. Sometimes it hurts less if you share the pain.” Karen squeezed his hand then laid it on her knee.

Haltingly, he spoke to her, about his mom and how he’d miss her. About Four and the sometimes confrontational relationship they’d had for most of Bye’s life. “Not that I didn’t deserve a lot of what I got. Four had to bail me out of quite a few bad situations before I buckled down to work and earned myself a degree. Mom always stood by me. She always looked for the best in everybody.” He talked for nearly an hour as rain beat down on the tin roof of the line shack and tears rolled unashamedly down his cheeks.

“You probably think I’m some wimp of a mama’s boy,” he said, but he sensed she wasn’t going to judge him.

She leaned over and kissed him softly on the mouth. “No. I think you’re a good man. It’s no sin to let your feelings out once in a while. It lets me know you’re human, not just a sex god with a handsome face and a hot body.”

“Thanks.” Though he hadn’t come here for sex, Bye couldn’t help watching the slow up-and-down cadence of her breathing. God but she was beautiful, all ivory skin and firm, full breasts with pink, puckered nipples that invited his attention. The heat of arousal curled low in his belly as more blood rushed to his already throbbing cock.

When she raised both hands and clasped them together above her head, Bye laid his hand between her breasts and measured the excitement evident in her quick, shallow breathing. Jack had done that the night they’d played together and Bye recalled that he’d commented on her state of arousal. He glanced down at his own hand that was bigger and rougher looking than Duval’s. Karen’s nipples were responding now for Bye, as they had then for their playmate.

He didn’t need to feel this way now. His emotions were so conflicted, he didn’t know exactly what it was he was seeking, for her or for himself. “What say we leave off the games today? Just us. No voyeurs watching us in our heads, no threesomes, nothing but us—Karen and Bye—sharing each other the way vanilla lovers might.”

“I came out here in the rain today to give you whatever it is you need.” She dragged him down on top of her, cradling his head against her breasts. She spread her legs wide as though to let his cock between them. “Just you and me. What can we do that will make you feel good?”

Make me forget. Fuck me so long and hard and true so all I can think about is giving you pleasure.
“Anything. Everything. Let me drive out the memories of everybody else who’s pleasured you while you chase this awful sadness out of my mind and heart.”

She loved feeling Bye’s weight, the solidity of his muscular body above her, the heat and hardness of his long, thick cock pressing against her clit. As she stroked his cheek, enjoying the feel of his surprisingly heavy light-brown beard stubble on her fingertips, Karen had to keep reminding herself this couldn’t be forever.

They might as well be Romeo and Juliet or, more aptly, a Texas version of the Hatfields and McCoys.

They could play sex games, yes. But anything more was out of the question. Even walking hand in hand down the main street of the little town that bore Bye’s name would put them at risk of firing up the mostly dormant feud, not to mention alienating themselves from their respective relatives. For God’s sake, she’d felt like a thief in the night while she’d ventured tentatively onto the edge of Bar C land to meet him. She’d sensed imaginary eyes watching her at every turn, from the time she turned at Caden Fork until after she parked behind a grain silo nearly a quarter-mile away from this line shack, on the other side of the road.

Even now, as she lay in the cradle of Bye’s arms, she imagined her pop staggering in here with a shotgun, not to force a marriage but to blow Bye off the face of the earth. That thought made her shudder.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Bye lifted his head, looked her in the eye.

“Just—” She was about to voice the old cliché about ghosts walking over her grave but caught herself. “I was just imagining one of our fathers walking in here and catching us.”

Bye traced her lips with one finger, smiled. “Don’t worry about that. It’s not gonna happen.”

“I wish I were as sure of Slade Oakley as you seem to be of your father.” She smiled, but still… Karen had no clue what her crazy drunk of a father might take a notion to do. “I hope not. The last time he came onto the Bar C, around six years ago, he ended up spending thirty days in jail.” She didn’t know if Bye had heard that story, since he’d been off at college in San Antonio at the time. “Pop isn’t at all reasonable when it comes to you Cadens.”

Apparently sensing her discomfort, Bye rolled to his side and looked her in the eye. “Don’t you believe I could take care of your dad if I had to?”

“You’re almost fifty years younger than him and you probably outweigh him by nearly a hundred pounds of pure, solid muscle. I’m sure you could whip him or almost anybody in a fair fight.”
If only Pop played fair.
But “fair” wasn’t part of her father’s vocabulary. “But no, even as big and tough as you are, I don’t think you could beat up a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“Okay. I’ll grant you that.” He paused, as though deciding whether he should say more. “If he comes after me, he’ll be staring down the barrel of the loaded, high-powered rifle that’s stowed underneath this bunk.”

Touched that Bye apparently trusted her with the means to blow him away, all she could do was stare at him. She hated guns, primarily because her father rarely was sober and never left home without one. “Bye, I don’t know…”

“Take it easy, honey. Think. You’ve lived on a ranch all your life. We keep guns in our line shacks because every once in a while somebody stumbles onto rustlers or meets up with a varmint that needs killing and is too big to finish off with the .22 rifles most of the wranglers carry in their saddle holsters.” Though it obviously took some effort, he grinned. “Not even my old man would dare declare open season on Oakleys.”

“He might not, but I’m not at all sure my pop doesn’t consider all you Cadens fair game.” It was insane. Karen wished she could talk sense to Slade and Bye could do the same with his father. “Do you know why they hate each other so?” she asked, taking his hand and tracing the prominent veins on top.

“Besides the fact that something went down between our families over a hundred years ago and one of your ancestors shot one of mine, no. I’ve heard at least a dozen versions of how it started, all of which I’m sure have been embellished many times in the telling. I doubt anybody knows the real story.” As though Bye understood her worries, he turned his hand over and laced their fingers together again. “Think logically, pretty lady. It’s pouring down rain outside, and last time I looked, the wind was blowing across the plateau at around forty miles an hour. No sane person, drunk or sober, is going to come out in this weather for no better reason than to kill himself a Caden. Forget about the stupid feud. I’m anxious to get on with what we came here for.”

Bye had a point. Why court trouble when it was probably far away? “Okay. How about if you come back over here? You’re the one who said you needed some TLC.”

His smile almost erased the sadness from his sky-blue eyes as he donned a condom then rolled over and covered her once more. God but she loved the feel of his big, fit body. She’d missed playing with him at her cousin’s club during the couple of months he’d stayed close to home to be with his dying mother.

For a minute she wondered if the Hatfield-McCoy aspect of them being together bothered him as much as it did her—until she realized that right now the focus of his sadness most likely was for his mother, not for the impossibility of them ever having a lasting relationship. Determined to banish his pain, if only for a few minutes, she wrapped her legs around his hard-muscled buttocks, offering the warm, loving refuge he needed.

He wasn’t the only one who needed this very physical affirmation that their mutual lust transcended family feuds and long-held misconceptions. She felt it in his rapid heartbeat, in the way he held her as though he’d never let her go. In his hard, ready cock that throbbed at the threshold of her warm, wet cunt, and in the tremor she felt in his calloused hands as he held her for a deep, delicious kiss.

“I’ve needed you so long, it seems like forever.”
You. Not this.
Did he mean it? He spoke near her mouth, the warm, damp vibrations rushing along her nerves, straight to her needy pussy. “God help me, I don’t think I can hold back for long.”

“I’m ready, Bye. You don’t need to wait on my account.” When she shifted her hips beneath him, he braced his upper body on his elbows and thrust home.

His facial muscles taut, his sun-bleached light-brown hair still damp, he closed his eyes, as though he wanted to memorize the sensation of being inside her, part of her. “Oh shit, baby, you feel like heaven.”

She tightened her inner muscles on him when he began to move, slowly, as if time stood still and nothing mattered but the two of them. “I love being with you. You’re so big and hard.”
So mine.

For now.
She dared not wish for more. Pushing away the troubling thoughts, she concentrated on capturing sensations she might never experience again. Smells of old timbers and his woodsy aftershave, of mothballs lingering on the woolen blanket and of the pungent aroma of mesquite smoke from the small stone fireplace imprinted themselves in her memory.

Sounds of their bodies coming together, wet and warm and perfectly matched, yin and yang, punctuated a silence broken by nature’s fury. Thunder boomed. A bolt of lightning followed, barely visible through the cabin’s one small window. Bye must have sensed her alarm, because he sank deeper inside her, gathering her tighter in his arms as if to protect her from the storm in her mind, as much as the line shack’s sturdy tin roof was shielding them from the driving rain.

“It’ll be all right, honey.”

Damn it, she ought to be comforting him, offering him respite from the grief and pain he’d been enduring these past few months. “Love me, Bye.” Somehow “fuck” didn’t seem the right term for what they were doing now. It meant more, at least to her.

“I will. I do.” As though he was desperate for more than the sexual release that hung just out of reach, he sped up the pace and pounded into her. He ground the base of his cock into her swollen clit. This was no languid exploration anymore, just a hard, fast claiming. “Come with me now, baby. Please.”

Whether it was the desperate, tortured sound of his voice or something else that compelled her, she obeyed. Her vaginal muscles spasmed around him as he sank into her once more, shouting as he began to come, hard bursts of his semen barely masked by the condom that separated their flesh.

“How’s that for obedience, Bye Caden?” she asked much later as they lay in the semi-darkness of twilight, watching the rain come down more slowly now.

“Perfect.” He smiled, and now she saw more joy than sadness in his eyes. “Meet me here tomorrow, six o’clock?”

She was reluctant to venture back on Bar C land, but she knew that if there were any time Bye would need her, it would be after he’d buried his mom with all the pomp and ceremony local folks would expect to witness for the Caden matriarch. “I’ll be here by five thirty.”

Too soon, he had to go and she had to get home before Slade realized she wasn’t there and came out looking for her. Karen let Bye drive her the short distance to her car. As she watched the taillights on the Bar C pickup dim and fade in the distance, she realized she was in too deep.

She’d do best to cut her losses, go back to playing games of dominance and submission at the Neon Lasso. Nothing good could come of playing house with Bye for real when there was no way they could play for keeps.

* * * * *

“Where the hell have you been, girl?” Slade Oakley was sitting in his rocking chair on the front porch, surrounded by thunder and lightning, his florid cheeks a stark contrast with his thinning white hair.