COWBOY ROMANCE: Justin (Western Contemporary Alpha Male Bride Romance) (The Steele Brothers Book 1) (75 page)

Chapter 3

Marie’s kitchen was filled with cupcake tins, loaf pans, skillets, and mixing bowls, along with flour, sugar, a variety of spices, and just about every cold dairy ingredient you could imagine. She’d recently started running her own bakery business out of her home, and that’s why Amanda had traveled just two miles south of Pittsburgh to spend a few days with her.

Marie had just landed her biggest client yet, and she was much better at math than Amanda. She knew that she didn’t have the manpower to fulfill her orders alone in time, and she didn’t have a surplus of capital to invest in hiring helpers, so she reached out to her cousin Amanda to ask for a hand, and Amanda dropped everything she was doing to rush out to Washington.

“You can pay me in broken cookies and misfit cupcakes,” Amanda told Marie when she accepted her offer. Amanda could stand to drop whatever she was doing because she wasn’t doing much at the time, and the broken cookies and misfit cupcakes were a more appealing payout than anything else she’d received recently.

Like too many people her age, at 24, Amanda was a couple years out of college and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, but she had no steady income to pay it off and could barely support herself. She’d been an English major—of all things!—in college, and had taken on odd writing jobs since graduating. She’d done a bit of copywriting, some journalism, and some blogging, but it was all contract work, and it was all low-paying. Needless to say, it was nothing demanding or binding, and it didn’t prevent her from going off to help her cousin for a few days.

“Eat this,” Marie said, handing Amanda a plate as she eyed everything around her in the kitchen, looking for something ready to eat in a heap of utensils and ingredients. The small, thin dish had about five pieces of bacon on it, sitting alongside a muffin flecked with an abundance of fruit and nuts.

“Cranberry, apricot, and walnut,” Marie said as Amanda went straight for the bacon.

“Looks amazing,” Amanda said, chewing on the pork. As soon as she swallowed, she broke off a piece of the muffin and shoved it in her mouth. She was instantly pleased with the flavor, and, oddly enough, reminded of the sweet taste on her lips from the night before and earlier that morning.

“So you have no idea what this man from last night looks like,” Marie started, looking over her itinerary for the day as Amanda continued eating her breakfast, “but do you remember anything that happened with him?”

Amanda felt a chill move over her spine, and the moist muffin caught in her throat for a moment. “No,” she said, straining hard to swallow.

“Then how do you know nothing bad happened?” Marie asked. Of the two of them, Marie had always been the more sensible and grounded, and this morning was no exception. She thought her cousin was glossing over too many important details. “Maybe you should call the police or something.”

“And tell them
what
?” Amanda asked. “I can hear it now: ‘Hi officer, my name is Amanda Leonard, and I got really drunk last night. I hooked up with a guy and can’t remember what happened. I know he didn’t hurt me or do anything wrong, and I’m pretty sure I had a great time. But my silly old cousin is overreacting and thinks something is strange about it, so I’m calling you to file a report.’ Yeah, I can see
that
happening.”

“I’m not old,” Marie said, throwing a dish rag at Amanda, motioning for her to wipe up some crumbs that had accumulated on the counter. “And I’m not overreacting. You only have scattered memories of what happened last night, and that should concern you a little more.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” Amanda said, shoving more bacon into her mouth before wiping off the counter. She couldn’t quite explain it—to her cousin, or to herself—,but the fact that Amanda couldn’t remember much about the night before really didn’t bother her.

Her mind felt completely clear, and she had nothing that even faintly resembled a hangover. She knew that nothing bad had happened the night before—she could just feel it in her bones—and, if anything, she was sure that something
good
had actually happened. It didn’t matter to her that she couldn’t place her finger on what that good thing was because, whatever it was, it left her feeling so alive and reinvigorated that it really didn’t matter.

“Just forget about it,” Amanda said when she saw that Marie was still staring intently at her. “Please?”

“All right,” Marie said, shaking her head at Amanda. “But don’t let something like that happen again. You’re only here for a few more days, and you have a job to do. I don’t want you going out, drinking until you black out, and putting your life—and my business—in jeopardy.”

“I know,” Amanda replied. “I don’t plan on drinking again any time soon, so I promise. Nothing like that will happen again while I’m here.”

“It better not,” Marie said with a smile that was as sincere as it was playful. “I’ll be watching you.”

Something about the last sentence Marie said made Amanda feel ill at ease, and she was sure she’d recently heard someone else say it too…

Chapter 4

Amanda felt something swelling inside her, something ebbing and bowing against every inch of her flesh from the inside. It felt as if an octopus had crawled inside her and had extended its tentacles out in every possible direction, pushing and pulling Amanda to her limits and challenging her most tender boundaries.

She felt the sensation in her head, her arms, her legs, and, of course, her most sensitive regions, and it pulsed throughout her body to the most delicate yet steady rhythm. It was breathtaking and enchanting, and just as Amanda felt her body curling toward carnal completion, she woke up in a start, panting and sweating cold, sticky bullets.

Amanda looked around her and realized she was in the guest bedroom. She’d put in a hard day’s work helping Marie prepare for the upcoming event, and she filled up on plenty of tasty treats in the process. The hours had just flown by, and by the time nighttime came, Amanda more or less passed out as soon as her head hit her pillow. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but it was long enough that she felt rested.

What the hell was that?
Amanda wondered, still reeling from whatever it was that she just experienced. It had been such a primitive feeling, but it had been so ethereal, and, even if she—Amanda, the writer—tried to explain it, she’d have been hard-pressed to find the words.

But whatever that feeling was, Amanda wanted to feel more of it, and since she knew there was no way to feel
it
again, at least not that she knew of, she decided to make herself feel the only thing she’d ever felt before that came close to that feeling. Though it was in second place by a considerable difference, Amanda ran one hand over her firm breasts and slid the other down into her panties. She closed her eyes and called to mind the only memories she had from the night before—of the unidentifiable stranger sitting with her at a table.

Amanda tried to recall his features and strained to see him in her mind’s eye, but all she could make out was the shape of his face—which, put simply, was perfect—and the way his features were set along it in perfect balance. She struggled to focus on his lips, to see them and hear what he was saying. She eventually heard words come at her from the darkness, but they came at her randomly, in no specific order, and her mystery man’s mouth never moved once when he said them.

It frustrated Amanda to no end that she couldn’t recall more, and that frustration only fueled her fervor. Her fingers were moving furiously below her moist panties, and she began feeling a fraction of what she’d felt earlier while she was sleeping.

The closer she came to her sweet release, the clearer things became in Amanda’s mind. The perfectly shaped face with perfect features became more visible to her, and as she registered her mystery man’s pale, ashen skin, jet black hair, and steely gray eyes, Amanda felt a cool sensation web out across her body, like icicles crystallizing then abruptly shattering. Her back arched upward and her toes splayed out like talons, but right before she could reach the peak of her orgasm, something derailed Amanda’s momentum.

Outside, the car alarm on her 1992 Chevy Cavalier had gone off, and the old beast was wailing something fierce into the quiet night air.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Amanda shouted aloud as she ran over to the window and looked out into the driveway. Her car looked fine, and there didn’t appear to be anyone or anything near it. But, nonetheless, the experience shook Amanda a little.

It had been the second time in only a few minutes that Amanda was interrupted before she could reach any type of “climax,” and she didn’t like being iced so late in the final countdown. But even more disturbing than that—it had been the first time in over a year that the car alarm actually went off. It died a few months before the gas gauge did, and Amanda was pretty sure that it was shot for good.

But there it was going off in the middle of the outskirts outside of Washington, PA, and there was no rhyme or reason about it. All Amanda knew was that it had gone off at exactly the wrong moment and that she needed to shut it off ASAP. She was sure it had already awoken her cousin, and she was starting to worry that, if she allowed it to keep going, the echo would travel a few miles down the road and catch the nearest neighbor’s attention.

Amanda grabbed her car keys from her purse and ran outside, still wearing nothing more than a pair of short shorts and a T-shirt. Those were her normal sleeping clothes, not the panties and camisole she woke up in that morning.

“Really, Amanda?” Marie asked, when she opened up her door and saw her cousin running past her. “Shut that thing off already!”

“I’m trying,” Amanda called back, pressing the button on her keychain. It was supposed to disable the alarm, but apparently it wasn’t working. The damn security system wasn’t even a part of the original car package and was something that some previous owner had added on at a later point—and, Amanda wanted to slap whoever that person was because she’d never had any use for the system, and now all it was doing was causing her trouble.

Amanda kept pressing the button over and over again, trying to make a difference, and, at one point, she actually did. The moment she stepped out onto Marie’s porch, the alarm was effectively disabled. Amanda breathed a sigh of relief and, without so much as a second thought, she turned and went back into the house.

No sooner than the door shut behind her, Amanda felt herself falling forward. It wasn’t a hard, abrupt fall, however, but more of a gentle, slow descent into something soft and inviting. She felt her body keep lowering as waves of something indescribable passed over her, like the ocean’s tide gently lapping against the shore.

Pleasure. Pure, uninterrupted, and unchained pleasure. Amanda felt every cell in her body contract and tighten before ripples of bliss rolled beneath her skin and erupted. This was the culmination of her delayed orgasms—the cleaving together of the joys she’d felt in both her sleep and waking hours—and it hit her like a Mack truck from out of nowhere… or perhaps like a bright light shining in her eyes, traveling toward her.

Chapter 5

“Amanda?” Marie said firmly, shaking Amanda by the shoulders. “Are you alright? Talk to me… Amanda?”

Amanda looked up to find her cousin standing above her. Marie looked very concerned, and Amanda instantly felt embarrassed. She’d just experienced the most intense orgasm in her life—if you could even call it an orgasm—and she was sure she must have looked like a complete nympho or a total fool, grunting, groaning, and writhing on the floor in front of her cousin.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda said, shaking her head as she tried to sit up. She immediately felt dizzy and had to lean back a little.

“For what?” Marie asked. “I came in here and found you passed out on the floor. You scared the hell out of me, but there’s nothing to be
sorry
about. I’m just glad you’re okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”

“I think so,” Amanda said, trying to wrap her head around the situation. “You say you just came in here, and I was passed out on the floor? I wasn’t talking or moving?”

“You just looked perfectly still,” Marie explained. “I checked to make sure you were breathing, and then I tried to shake n’ wake you. I didn’t know what happened but figured you’d fainted.”

In addition to not being able to handle her booze, Amanda was also known to faint from time to time. For as long as she could remember, since she was a child, if she ever got really overworked, there was a slight chance that she could work herself into a fainting spell, and she’d long ago tried to master the art of refocusing and regulating her breathing to stop those spells. She’d been highly effective for the most part, but obviously not completely.

But whatever Amanda had just experienced, it certainly wasn’t a fainting spell—though she wasn’t about to tell Marie that. She’d let Marie go on and believe whatever she wanted to believe, so that she didn’t have to explain otherwise. There was no way she could even begin to explain to her cousin what had just happened—and, even if she could, there was no way her cousin would believe it, or wouldn’t think she was crazy for spontaneously having an orgasm. The less questions Marie had the better, and the more time it gave Amanda to figure out the answers for herself.

Amanda knew that there was something uncanny going on with, to, and around her, and she wanted very much to understand what that was, but her eagerness to understand was not overzealous. Somewhere, deep inside of her, she knew that she would get the answers she wanted in time and that trying to force things wouldn’t expedite the process.
In time
, she told herself, though it didn’t sound like her voice when she said it.

“Thanks, Marie,” Amanda say, steadying herself a little more so that she could sit straight and upright. “I guess the car alarm really threw me for a loop, and I didn’t have time to catch my breath.”

“It’s okay,” Marie said, reaching her hand down to help Amanda rise to her feet. “Just try to take better care of yourself. I really worry about you, you know—and, not to sound dorky, but I love you.”

Maybe it did sound a little dorky when Marie said it, but the words “I love you” were still music to Amanda’s ears. It had been a long time since she’d heard anyone say that phrase and actually mean it—probably not since her mother died, during her senior year of college, just over two years ago. Her ex, Tommy, had said it to her plenty of times over the years after that, but it turned out he also said it to a few other girls at the same time, as he was banging them behind Amanda’s back. They broke up not even six months ago, and the sting of his betrayal still burned het.

Sure enough, it really had been a long time since Amanda had heard someone say “I love you,” and it had been just as long since she actually felt loved. But, right then, as she stood up and regained her footing in Marie’s doorway, she felt nothing but love around her. She felt her cousin’s caring, compassion, and concern, and she felt something else too. There was something else comforting her, and it was all around her. She breathed it in and let it flow down her throat. A sweet aftertaste crept over her lips, cool and crisp, and she shuddered in delight.

“I think I should go back to bed now,” Amanda said, a little delirious but attentive enough not to make her cousin question her decision. She calmly turned and walked back toward the guest room, while Marie headed off to the kitchen.

“It’s nearly sunrise,” Marie said, calling back to her. “So I’m just gonna get my day started. Rest up and join me whenever you’re ready.”

Amanda didn’t bother to reply, but, instead, she smiled a smile that Marie couldn’t see and kept walking toward her room. As soon as she entered, she walked to the bed, crawled under the covers, and closed her eyes. She was overcome almost immediately with a deep sleep and didn’t wake again for several hours.