Cowboy Heat (15 page)

Though it might be, to him, because there’s a half smile teasing lips made shimmery from my arousal. He likes me this way, groaning and desperate.

And well, that’s convenient, because I am. Just like he said, I’m dying to be filled, and judging from the straining at his crotch and the way he absently rubs it, like assuaging an ache, he wants that, too.

He’s the most single-mindedly industrious man I’ve ever met, so it figures that he’d apply that same intensity to sex.
Here’s how we can more efficiently derive pleasure, with the swipe of my thumb on her clit. And look, when I lick her nipples, she shivers, yielding a higher touch per response ratio
.

“God,” I say. “
God
.”

He raises one eyebrow. “What is it you want, Alex? If you need something, what are you supposed to do?”

He wants to appear detached, I know, but the tension lines around his mouth prove otherwise. What do I want? To get fucked, by him, and quickly. What am I supposed to do? Here I draw a blank, but I come up with an idea that my lust-fevered brain thinks is brilliant in its simplicity.

Beg.

“Please, Sir. Please fuck me. I need your thick cock so badly. So deeply. I’ll squeeze you tight. I’ll make it good for you.”

He groans, loud and long, and it’s not a regular sort of male sound, but instead animalistic and kind of scary. But my body responds with a jolt of recognition. We’re not even people anymore, just sex animals, just conduits for feeling and fucking.

He flips me over, and I flail for a minute before latching my hands on to the other side of the worktable. I hear the small tear and slick sound of a condom being put on, and it freezes me for a second. He really
does
prepare for sex in all contingencies, even on a ranch with no other person for miles. Except me. And then the thought hits me. Did he
plan
for me to find him?

I’m distracted, though, when the wide, blunt head of his cock nudges into me from behind. It’s hard to think when his hands smooth around my sides and cup my breasts. I can only gasp when he pulls me back, hard, dragging me onto him while he pushes from behind. We’d burn up from the friction if it weren’t so wonderfully wet between us, sweat and sex coating our skin, turning our desperate scramble into a glide.

Despite the riotous sensations sparking through my body, I can’t quite forget my worry. What’s happening here, what does it mean? I gave him my heart before I’d even realized it was gone. And now my body’s his, too, owned by him before he’d fully claimed
it, surrendered before the demands were made. I had thought I had gotten stronger, but the clench in my heart feels painfully thin, like wet vellum held taut, and I want to ask him where we stand in the middle of a wild fucking—not good timing.

But he’d said to ask if I had a question, and he certainly hadn’t shied away from the tough subjects even when my breasts were bared and my pussy open.

I push out a word on each thrust. “Are you… Do you want me?”

He slows but doesn’t stop. I know the question sounds strange. His cock is thick and impossibly hard inside me right now. That’s not an accident, like he tripped and plunged inside me to the hilt. Somehow his fist is tangled in my hair, while the fingertips of his other hand are held in questioning stillness around my nipple. These aren’t the signs of a man disinterested.

So I hope he understands what I mean. There’s only this breathless shorthand during sex, but it’s an age-old question, really. Do you like me? Because I like you, love you, and if you don’t feel that way back, this is all going to hurt much worse than the lip of the worktable where it juts into my hip—but I’d rather feel it now than later.

“From the first day I saw you,” he says. “In every way, always.”

I had thought if I found a way inside, there’d be no more pain. But even now that he’s let me in, I feel the barbs that surround us. They sting and ache, sending chills along my skin. Even when he’s sweet and lovely, it’s a special kind of pain, heart hurt. It pricks at my eyes, and hot tears slide down my cheeks. But he doesn’t stop.

He’ll never stop, even when it hurts, because this is the price and the pleasure of loving a cowboy.

COWBOY ADONIS

Michael Bracken

N
ude, he rose from the stock pond like a cowboy Adonis, his thick, uncut phallus not perceptibly affected by the cold water. With my high-end digital camera, I snapped off half a dozen photographs of the cowboy’s wet, muscular body before he realized I was watching. He made no effort to turn away or cover himself but pushed dripping, shoulder-length black hair away from his face and said, “I thought I was alone out here.”

“So did I.”

I couldn’t look away. The few men in my life had been pudgy, sun-deprived city boys exuding pretentiousness but not masculinity, nothing at all like the naked cowboy before me.

He took a T-shirt from the pile of clothes he’d stripped off before diving into the stock pond and pulled it on. The white cotton clung to his broad shoulders, thick chest and six-pack abdomen like a second skin. Then he settled a white Shantung straw Stetson on his head before reaching for his boxer-briefs. He pulled them on, pulled a tight-fitting pair of well-worn
Wranglers on over them, and then sat on the ground to put on his socks and Justin ropers.

After he pushed himself to his feet and brushed Texas from the seat of his Wranglers, he gave me a once-over, taking in finger-length blonde hair plastered to my head with sweat, a slender figure disguised by a loose-fitting University of Texas sweatshirt that masked my braless state, jeans so new I might have forgotten to take off all the tags, and hiking boots I wore to keep from twisting my ankles as I hiked across the rough, uneven pasture.

“What are you doing on my property?”

I’d entered the Bar-B-Dahl Ranch by hopping a gate a mile or so south from where we stood. “You’re Mr. Dahl?”

“Mr. Dahl is my father,” he said. “I’m Jason.”

“I talked to your father, then,” I explained. I introduced myself and told Jason about the magazine assignment I had, a rare opportunity to leave my Austin studio to take photographs of how the landscape had changed with the end of the drought. “Your father said it was okay as long as I didn’t scare the cattle.”

“You should have come up to the house and checked in,” he said. “Someone needs to know you’re here in case something happens.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I have a cell phone.”

He smirked. “Try it, Andrea.”

I pulled out my iPhone and quickly realized I couldn’t get a signal. As I returned it to my pocket, I asked, “So what could happen to me out here?”

“Rattlesnakes, scorpions and wild hogs,” he said, listing just a few of the dangerous creatures I might encounter. Then he smiled and added, “And naked cowboys.”

“I think I can handle the naked cowboys,” I said, and the
thought of doing just that made my heat rise.

I must have blushed because Jason said, “You look like you’re about to have a heatstroke. We should get you up to the house where you can cool off.”

I glanced around. “How?”

A slight rise on the other side of the stock pond hid a battered, extended-cab dualie pickup truck, and soon we were inside the cab with the windows wide open because the truck lacked air-conditioning. The warm air assaulting us through the open windows quickly dried Jason’s hair as the truck bucked along a rutted path toward the ranch house and away from the stock pond and the car I’d parked near the gate I’d hopped over.

“You don’t get out of the city much, do you?” Jason asked over the sound of the engine.

“Why do you think that?”

“Designer jeans, pink hiking boots,” he said as he reached behind my seat and felt around, “and no hat.”

He tossed a sweat-stained gimme cap with the logo of a feed store embroidered on the front into my lap, and I put it on.

“Better?” I asked.

He took his eyes off the rutted path and looked me over. “It’ll do.”

The truck hit a bump that bounced me forward. I secured my camera with my right hand and braced myself against the truck’s dashboard with my left. I saw Jason examining my hand and I held it up so he could see that I wore no jewelry. “No rings,” I said, “if that’s what you’re looking for.”

He smiled. “Be a pity to find a stray on our property and see that she carried another man’s brand.”

I snorted. The thought of any of the city boys I’d dated ever tying me down seemed preposterous.

“We don’t get many women out here, Andrea, except for the
annual Cattlemen’s Ball,” Jason said, “and certainly none as pretty as you.”

“You rope in many women with a line like that?”

“You’d be the first.”

The truck hit another bump and I bounced across the seat toward Jason. He patted my knee and liquid fire shot through my entire body.

“You might want to fasten your seat belt before you get bucked out the window,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to lose you so soon.”

I slid back to my side of the truck and strapped in. “What about you?” I asked. “You have anyone trying to corral you?”

“No, ma’am. I’ve been free range for quite a while now.”

“Can’t be tied down?”

He glanced at me. “I’ve been waiting for the right woman to walk into my life.”

We crested a small rise and found the ranch house and outbuildings spread out before us. Jason brought the truck to a halt beside the house and led me inside.

A blast of air-conditioning hit me as I stepped through the door, sending an unexpected chill through my entire body that caused my nipples to dimple my sweatshirt. Being small-breasted and braless made my stiff nipples seem even more prominent as they pressed against the UT logo on my sweatshirt.

Jason noticed but said nothing as he led me into the living room of what was clearly a bachelor’s residence and told me he shared the place with his father. He added, “But he’s in Amarillo for the week.”

I removed the gimme cap and unslung the camera strap from around my neck. As I placed the camera and cap on the coffee table next to a stack of
The Cattleman
magazines, Jason disappeared into the kitchen. He returned almost immediately
with two cold bottles of Lone Star beer, both open.

He handed a bottle to me and downed much of his in one long pull. When he finished, Jason wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and regarded me thoughtfully. “You’re still flushed.”

“The heat,” I lied. The ride in his truck had dried Jason but it had made me wet, wet in a way that no man had made me during the three years since I had opened my own studio.

Because I had spent that time looking at the world through my camera lens and not looking at it with my own two eyes, I had developed an extensive client list and a respectable income, but had allowed my personal life to grind to a complete halt. There wasn’t a man in my life—not a lover, not a friend with benefits, not even a battery-operated substitute.

Now here I was, less than an arm’s length away from a cowboy Adonis I had already seen naked, and I wanted him to take me in his arms.

I wanted him to take me.

I wanted him to—

“Is there something wrong with the beer?”

Shaken from my reverie, I asked, “Huh?”

“Your beer,” Jason prompted. “You haven’t even tasted it.”

I took a quick swig. “It’s fine.”

“Your color is a little better.”

“So, your father’s in Amarillo,” I said, changing the subject. “Anyone else here?”

“It’s just us.”

“Just us,” I repeated as I stared into his eyes. I wet my lips with the tip of my tongue and wished I’d had the foresight to wear lipstick. “Alone. Just you and me.”

Somehow Jason understood the incoherent message I was sending him. He put his hands on my hips and pulled me close.
He stared deep into my eyes for a moment, as if waiting for me to stop him. Softly, almost in a whisper, he said, “You can use your cell phone now if you think you’ve encountered something dangerous.”

“Like a rattlesnake or a scorpion or a wild hog?”

He smiled. “Or a naked cowboy.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’re not naked yet.”

He removed his Stetson and placed it on my head. Then he pressed his lips against mine, and we kissed. The first kiss was slow with our mouths closed. The second was deeper, lasted longer. I could feel his cock stirring within his Wranglers and pressing against my pubic mound through the thick denim of our jeans.

His work-hardened hands slid up under my sweatshirt until the balls of his thumbs pressed against my erect nipples.

Without prompting, I lifted my arms and he pushed my UT sweatshirt up and off, revealing my small breasts and turgid nipples. He tossed the sweatshirt aside and dropped to his knees in front of me. After unfastening my jeans, he hooked his thumbs in the waistband of my panties and pulled my pants and underwear to my knees. They slid the rest of the way to my ankles as Jason’s warm breath tickled the triangular patch of blonde hair at the juncture of my thighs.

He grabbed my asscheeks, pulled my pubic mound tight against his face and covered my pussy with his mouth. He licked the length of my slick slit, tasting my desire before he parted my labia with his tongue and teased the swollen bud of my clit. His five o’clock shadow sandpapered the insides of my thighs as he tongued me, and before long I couldn’t restrain myself.