All Shook Up (17 page)

He loved kissing her. Her lips were incredibly soft and tasted sweeter, fresher, than any other he’d ever
kissed. He’d always thought that one woman’s kisses were pretty much the same as another’s, but he’d obviously been kissing the wrong women all these years, because Dru’s lips were like no one else’s he’d ever tasted.

A tiny frisson of unease wormed its way into his consciousness, and he eased his mouth away from hers and slowly lowered her back to the floor.

She slid down his front until her toes were perched on top of his boots. She blinked up at him with a sort of slumberous confusion, and when he looked down into her heavy-lidded blue eyes and saw the swollen condition of her lips, the just-rolled-out-of-bed disarray of her brown hair, his reservations dissolved as quickly as they’d cropped up. He slid his palms down her back to the fullness of her bottom, where his fingers curled to sink into the lush curves and pull her closer. The material beneath his hands felt thin to the point of nonexistence.

“I’m surprised you didn’t start a riot tonight wearing this get-up,” he said huskily. “You always go out in public in your underwear?”

She laughed. “It’s a
dress
, Carver, not underwear!”

“Yeah? Where’d you get it—Miss Kittie’s Shop for Wayward Saloon Girls? All you need are fishnet stockings, a ribbon around your neck, and a pair of old-fashioned, high-buttoned shoes to look like one of those girls back in the Wild West.” He rubbed against her. “The ones all the cowboys wanted to take upstairs.”

She slanted him a glance that nearly sent him into cardiac arrest and turned his erection into a five-alarm
hard-on. “You strike me much more the city boy than cowboy type, “she said softly. “
Still
…” She stood on her tiptoes, pressed a kiss to the edge of his jaw, and whispered, “You want to take me upstairs, J.D.?”

Ah, man. He scooped her up in his arms and headed for the bedroom.

Butch had waited until he saw J.D. and the woman walk around to the front of the cabin before he risked climbing out of his car, which he’d parked down the lane. He eased the door closed behind him, then slipped down the dark road in their wake. After hearing the cabin door slam shut, he stood in the clearing to stare up at the dimly lighted cabin. Though barely able to see them through the front window, he saw enough to know they were making out. As he watched, J.D. picked the woman up and headed somewhere into the interior.

He’d sure like to know if this was J.D.’s place or the woman’s. Guess he was stuck hanging around until he saw who left and who stayed.

What he’d also like to know, in the meantime, was what the frigging
hell
was going on around here. First, there’d been that guy at the tavern who’d appeared to be with the stacked girl with the shiny brown hair, but who’d clearly been lusting after the blonde. Then the blonde had picked up J.D.
Then
, while Butch was waiting in the lot for J.D. to emerge, he’d seen the other guy come out of the tavern in the wake of the blonde and later drive off with her. Now here was J.D.
with the brunette, looking in a great big hotter hurry to get into her pants than Butch had ever seen him.

He’d always thought small towns were dead boring, but
this
one looked like a freaking hotbed of revolving bedmates. What did they do—toss their damn keys into a hat? He supposed when there was no ready-made entertainment to be found, the natives just created their own.

He never in a million years, however, would have expected straight-arrow J.D. to be a part of it.

J
.D. lowered Dru to the bed and followed her. His weight bearing her down into the mattress, he immediately picked up where they’d left off in the living room and kissed her with a ferocity that melted her into one large puddle of sensation.

Then his mouth was gone with a suddenness that left her blinking in confusion when he pushed up on one elbow. She watched, disoriented, as he reached for the lamp on the nightstand and switched it on. Propping himself back over her, he gazed down at her with his customary unsmiling intensity and trailed rough-skinned fingertips down her chest to the first button on her dress. “I don’t intend to miss seeing an inch of you,” he said, and for a man with such big hands, he was amazingly dexterous as his fingers slipped the first tiny button free of its loop and moved down to the next.

Oh, God, John David. I love you.

Heat exploded in her chest.
Are you crazy?
her alter ego demanded. How could she think anything so outrageous? She hardly even knew the man.

Except…

She knew he was patient with Tate and gave generously of his time whenever her son showed up on his doorstep. She knew he was quick to look out for those who lacked the power to look out for themselves. And that he talked tough, but often acted with contradicting gentleness.

She knew he made her feel like more of a woman than she’d ever felt in her life.

Well, there you go, then. You’re simply confusing the promise of hot sex with true love.

Relieved to explain it away so neatly, she grabbed his wrists when he began to separate the two halves of her dress that he’d unbuttoned clear to her waist. “You first,” she said, nodding at his T-shirt. “You’re way overdressed.”

Sitting up, he crossed his hands over his flat stomach and grabbed a double fistful of the white cotton. He pulled it from his waistband and up over his head in one economical move, muscles shifting smoothly beneath his skin.

She licked her lips as she stared up at him. His shoulders gleamed in the lamplight, his dark hair was tousled, and his eyes were heavy-lidded as he looked back at her. And Dru knew with sudden stunning clarity that there was much more than mere sex at work here.

Just who are you trying to fool, anyhow?

If sex was all she needed, why hadn’t she availed herself of other men over the years? She’d always liked sex with Tony—and God knew there’d been numerous opportunities since then: a host of male guests who’d made it clear they’d be more than happy to stand stud service for her.

Yet time after time, she’d passed. The couple of times she’d accepted an invitation had proved rather than disproved her point. She feared she was one of those depressing women for whom love and sex went hand in hand. Because the few times she’d managed to convince herself she didn’t need the former in order to be gratified by the latter, she’d been left feeling not only emotionally dissatisfied and incomplete, but also pretty darn sleazy.

Which was ridiculous—she
knew
it was ridiculous. Men certainly never felt this way about loveless sex. But that was the thing about feelings: they could be contrary and bullheaded and, right or wrong, they simply were what they were. Stern lectures to herself full of valid arguments had never talked her out of one yet.

But loveless sex wasn’t the problem in this instance. She almost wished it were—but her heart was fully, completely wrapped up in J.D.

She prayed to heaven he didn’t end up breaking it, but holding herself aloof to prevent being hurt wasn’t a real option. So she might as well enter into this wholeheartedly.

And let the devil take the hindmost.

She reached up to touch J.D.’s chest. She really liked his chest hair; it was straight and fine and grew in an wedge from his collarbone to his waist. There was
just something primordial and wholly masculine about soft hair covering all that hard muscle.

He sucked in an appreciative breath at her touch and closed his eyes for a second. Then they slid open again and he looked down at her. He touched a fingertip to the corner of her lip where it curled up in amusement. “What?”

“I was just thinking how very much I like this”—her hands stroked him from pectorals to waistband, pausing to explore the depth of his navel with a fingertip—“the way your body hair grows. And how glad I am that you’re not one of those men with hairy shoulders.”

His mouth crooked up on one side. “Yeah, it looks like
you’ve
got hairier shoulders than I do.” Then he gently scooped the fall of her hair away from her face to pool on the quilt beneath her. “Nope…wait…I guess it doesn’t grow there, after all.”

She laughed. He’d never teased her before and her heart gathered the moment like a treasure to be stored away.

His fingers brushed over her collarbone and down her chest to the unbuttoned halves of her bodice. He peeled them back. “I want to see you naked.” A hoarse laugh escaped him. “Big surprise. I’ve wanted to see you naked from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” Unhooking her demi-bra, he peeled that open, too. Then he tugged the gauzy dress down, and when it caught beneath Dru’s hips, he said, “Lift up.”

The next thing she knew, she was lying there in nothing but a pair of satin-and-lace undies and skimpy leather sandals that tied at her ankles.

For a moment, J.D. simply stared. “God,” he finally
breathed and traced the long crease where the outer slopes of her breasts rose away from her rib cage, brushed his fingertips down to the indentation of her waist, and then trailed them over the flare of her hips. Swinging a leg over her thighs to kneel astride her, he brought his hands up and touched all ten fingers to her chest with the sensitivity of a world-renowned violinist tuning his Stradivarius.

“You are”—he grazed his fingertips down her chest to the rise of her breasts—“so damn”—his hands tenderly spread wide to encompass the resilient globes—“magnificent.” He closed his fingers, trapping her nipples between his knuckles and pressing the fullness of her breasts together.

An electrical current of sensation rode an invisible conductor to that place deep between Dru’s thighs, and instinctively she raised her hips off the bed, but J.D.’s denim-clad thighs held her in a tight grip. A soft moan escaped her throat and he leaned down and kissed her, a full-throttle, pedal-to-the-metal kiss of hot, strong lips and cocksure tongue. And the whole time, those hard-skinned hands gently manipulated her breasts, pressing, shaping, massaging the fullness, trapping her nipples between his fingers and tugging.

Her hands slid restlessly over his chest, his shoulders, his stomach. Then she reached for his waistband.

J.D. groaned into her mouth but straightened and shifted farther down her legs to kneel out of reach. Dru opened her mouth to ask where he was going, but before she could utter a word he’d bent again and sucked her left nipple into his mouth. Another moan escaped her, this one even more heartfelt than the last,
and she forgot everything except the look of his lean cheeks hollowing as he drew on her and the itchy, restless commotion inside that made her hips instigate a tiny bump and grind between J.D.’s gripping knees. “Oh, please,” she whispered. “Please.”

Suddenly, he was spreading her legs and stretching out on top of her, linking their fingers and sweeping her arms high over her head. The position arched her back, thrusting her breasts up, and his hard chest with its soft fan of hair crushed them as his hips moved and the inflexible length of his erection rocked and rubbed and teased between her legs. With a needy sound deep in her throat, she drew her knees back in order to feel him more fully, but even as she did so he pulled away again and shoved back to crouch between her legs, staring down at her and breathing heavily.

“J.D.!” she protested breathlessly.

Her knees were still drawn up toward her chest, and before she could lower her feet to the spread he ran his hands along the backs of her thighs to cup the cheeks of her bottom. He looked down at her with heavy-lidded eyes. “You’ve got the greatest ass I’ve ever seen.”

A bark of laughter escaped her. “You liar. I’ve got a big butt.”

“It’s perfect—trust me on this. And
this
”—he smoothed his fingers over the satin-and-lace triangle that stretched between her legs—“God, this is sweet.” His forefinger drew a line from the uppermost curve of her mound down to her cheeks. “Wet,” he murmured and Dru followed his gaze to see the material rapidly dampening with each pass of his fingertip as it pressed ecru satin into the soft furrow between her legs.

Lightning rocketed through her, but self-consciousness spread heat across her face and down her chest, and she glanced up at him a little uncertainly. When his eyes met hers, though, she saw that they were hot and full of admiration, and her self-consciousness melted away.

Desire stamped its mark on his face as he watched his finger pressing the thin satin into feminine folds. “If that isn’t the prettiest sight,” he murmered; then his hand curled around the elastic band of her panties and pulled them down her legs. The next thing Dru knew, he had an unobstructed view of her most private parts. He licked his bottom lip and growled, “Ah, God. This is even prettier yet.”

He reached out to touch her, but she scooted out of range, sitting back against the headboard. Almost more sensation than she could bear flared deep between her thighs, and she squeezed them together. “Take off your jeans,” she demanded. “Things are a little unequal around here.”

He climbed to his feet and peeled off his boots and socks. Then he reached for the waist button on his jeans.

Rolling onto her knees, Dru hooked the fingers of both hands into his waistband and gripped the band with her thumbs. She gave a tug, pulling him to the edge of the bed.

“Let me,” she whispered and kneaded the backs of her fingers against his rigid abdomen. She unfastened the button and fumbled for the zipper tab, sliding it south. She watched as the teeth separated and slowly exposed a widening V of tanned skin that gradually
gave way to paler flesh. A dark stripe of hair trailed down the hard muscles of his stomach and disappeared into the deeper shadows cast by his clothing. “No underwear,” Dru said with a satisfied smile. “I
told
Char you probably didn’t wear any.”

He stared down at her. “You and Char discussed what kind of underwear I wear?”

“Sure.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know—the first day, I think.” She shrugged. “Maybe the second.”

“Damn. I thought only men did that sort of thing.”

She laughed. Then she eased his jeans down his hips, and her amusement over the uncharacteristically flustered look on his face abruptly disappeared. She swallowed dryly. “The Natural Wonder, I presume.”

“In the flesh, ma’am. And very happy to make your acquaintance.”

“I can see that.” She glanced up at his face, then back down. “Happy, and
then
some.”

His penis was long, thick, and dark-skinned as it rose from the thick thatch of hair at his groin. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of these in the adult form,” she admitted. “And this is certainly very adult.” She stroked a fingertip over its blunt head.

His penis jerked up against the hard wall of his stomach at the touch, then pointed straight out at her. She wrapped her hand around it and lightly squeezed, marveling at the contrast of its velvet-smooth surface to the rigidity beneath.

J.D. sucked for air. Holy Mary, Mother of—If he wanted to avoid a quick regression to caveman behav
ior, he’d better do something fast. She was destroying the last of his self-control.

He reached for the hand she’d wrapped around his dick, intending to peel her fingers away. Instead, he found himself wrapping his own hand over hers and directing it up and down his shaft for several strokes. Then, squeezing his eyes shut against the sensations, he did what he should have done right away and removed both their hands.

He had to slow the hell down before he went off like a teenager with his first woman.

He maneuvered them onto the bed and, lying on his side next to her, pushed up on one elbow to kiss her. Her mouth was so soft and sweet, and kissing it helped steady him. For several long moments he cradled her face between the thumb and fingers of his free hand and simply enjoyed the feel of her smooth skin, the taste and texture of her lips.

But both of them were much too far along to slow the pace for long. J.D. became aware of Dru’s legs shifting restlessly, of her hips executing small, seeking thrusts. He lifted his head and stared down at her. “Tell me what you want.”

“Love me?” she said. “Please, J.D.? I’m so…oh, God, I’m just so—” Her legs spread against the quilt. “I want you inside me.”

His heart banged up against the wall of his chest, and he fumbled open the drawer of the bedside stand. He grabbed out a condom and put it on. Then he rolled to prop himself above her.

“Are you hot, Drucilla?” he whispered hoarsely. He reached down to ease his fingers into the slick delta
between her legs and slide them up and down. The sight, the feel, of all that honeyed heat made him suck in a sharp breath. He expelled it with a gust. “Oh, yeah. You’re hot, all right. And, God…so…wet.”

She made a frantic noise in her throat and crooked her knees, letting them drop toward the bed and opening herself up to him. It broke J.D.’s control and he shifted over her, thumbing down his erection and lowering himself until he could rub its nerve-rich head up and down her slippery feminine cleft, once, twice, three times. It was like sliding against wet satin, and he couldn’t wait any longer. Lining himself up with her opening, he pushed.

His penis slid into her an inch or two and they both arched and froze, staring at each other. Then, “Oh, God,
yes
,” Dru said, and J.D. slowly pushed as deep inside her as a man could go. She closed tightly around him, and he had to grit his teeth against the urge to start banging away like a pile driver run amuck. Planting his hands on the mattress on either side of her shoulders, he stiff-armed himself away from her upper body and took slow, controlled breaths, pulling his hips back in increments, then thrusting them forward, pulling back and thrusting forward. Carefully, slowly.