Taming Alaska (So Not Prince Charming Book 1) (17 page)

His hands cup both my butt cheeks while my legs clamp around his body so that I don’t fall. His erection rubs hard against my mound. Wow. Why can’t we be on a beach at this moment instead of this hellhole?

He kisses me with all the fury of a wild animal, his beard scratching my face, his lips rough and chapped against mine, his tongue thrusting into my mouth. My inner thighs quiver with lust, my excitement wetting my thong. His coarse and passionate kisses leave me breathless.

My arms wrap around his neck. No man has ever kissed me like he does, and he’s so not Prince Charming. Why couldn’t humans have raised him?

He lets me up for air, his green eyes penetrating me. “You should be kissed often by someone who knows what the hell he’s doing.” His gruff voice burrows into my neck, before his tongue reaches my lips and forces my mouth open.

I scoff while gulping in air, my sex throbbing with greedy desire. “And you think you’re the one.”

“I’m up to the challenge, Princess. Are you?”

I squirm while my body caves to his demanding mouth, his cock grinding against my sex that would love for us to be naked.

“Well…I…I.” I so want to drag him down onto the forest floor and make him fulfill that erotic offer, but why would I? He turned me down, but just maybe he could sate my needs.

“Good. This must mean you’ll be quiet for a while. I got something out of this besides a hard-on.” Shane unceremoniously lets go of me, leaving me panting and shaking, the tree holding me upright.

Jerk. Gets me all excited then leaves me hanging. He’s no different than the other guys I’ve dated, except they had money and manners.

Still trembling with need and from shock, I pick up my rod carelessly thrown to the ground by Shane where a fish tugs on the other end.

Shane pulls out his pole, the fishing one that is. Now I’ll never stop thinking about him and Mr. Sex on a rod. I reel in the fish and throw it up on shore. It keeps my mind off Red, Loki, and Julian hunting me but not Shane. The muscles on his shoulders and neck tense under his shell, but he shakes off his excitement while mine is still ramping up.

The old Shane suddenly returns, controlled and calm. “By the way, Princess, your fishing skills are good.”

“Thank you. That means so much to me,” I say sarcastically.

He chuckles. “I still can’t believe you’ve never had an orgasm.”

I close my eyes to erase my life. “You’re not helping matters.”

“No, I’m not.” A fish jumps out of the water at the end of his line. “I should be here with Niki, getting laid every night while you should be on your honeymoon…with your gay husband.” He laughs harder.

I drop my pole and pummel him with my fists. This is more for me than him. It’s like hitting the granite rocks my butt was sitting on. Shane’s laughter fills the small canyon created by the towering pines and rocky gorge.

“You have to admit it’s funny,” he says. “You girls are always looking for some fuck machine and to top it off women want to be spanked. Trust me, Princess. There have been many times I wanted to take you over my knees.”

Would I like that? “Do you read my romance novels?” He must.

“I’ve stolen a few, trying to figure out what the hell you want.” He’s still laughing at me. “I know in reality that guys don’t need to fantasize about the girl he’s with. We’re simple. Feed us and put us to bed. No man can live up to the standards of those novels. Those violent stalkers would be in jail and have multiple restraining orders. If you look at the photos of the world’s top billionaires, they aren’t built like Navy Seals. Most are old and have bad comb overs.”

“They’re just fiction,” I defend. When his legs brush against mine, hot wetness pools in my VS cheekinis. “So you expect women to wait on you?”

“No, but it’s nice when they do.”

I don’t know if I should ask him. “How come you never chased after me? Why Nikita?” She’s blonde.

He cocks his head, grinning. He licks his chapped lips. How can I possibly find that seductive, but I do? “That dress—the way your perky tits pressed against the sheer fabric. I had you naked and in my bed the moment I saw you…until you told me you were sixteen.”

“You turned me down.”

One of his massive paws rests on my knee. “Cyn, you know why I couldn’t.”

“Then you asked out the blonde boobs.” I sound petty.

“She told me she loved Alaska and wanted to go to school here. I believed her.”

It makes sense now. “She spent hours at the library researching wealthy men. She told me it was for a project.” I can feel myself digging a deeper hole. Shane doesn’t need to hear this.

When his scarred-rough hand cups my cheek, I lower my gaze.

“I like your smile,” he says.

Oh my God, that’s lame. “That’s it?”

“You have a really nice ass, Princess, long legs that could wrap around my neck, and nice firm tits. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Well, that’s better.” Can he not talk dirty to me? I’m about to have a sexually frustrated meltdown.

He shakes his head, finally reels in the fish he’s caught, and takes it off the line. “Honestly, Cyn, why didn’t you chase after me, like you did those guys driving their daddies’ Ferraris?”

“Because…” I can’t say it because my words sound superficial. It’s not that Shane isn’t fine to look at. I want a man who is refined and doesn’t work on his car, or in his case his motorcycle, instead of me. “I’ve always been physically attracted to you. It’s just…”

“You want a guy you can take to tea and who knows the difference between a salad and a dessert fork. Both my parents were born out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska and so was I.”

The disappointment shadowing his eyes reminds me of that day when he got my Porsche started. “It’s okay, Princess. I understand.”

I hang my head. “I’m sorry, Shane.” What can I say? I always dreamed of being married and having a family.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Silence grows between us like a chasm, but after we catch several more fish, I ask, “What are we going to do with the extra ones?”

I stare across the river where the grizzly watches us. It must’ve picked at the wolf and returned to its perch to observe us. It’s a massive bear. It nails a fish with one of its talon-like claws, gutting it open, and I gulp down what feels like a rock in my throat.

Shane places his large hand on my thigh, setting off a chain reaction of needy desire. His kiss weighs heavily on my mind. It was filled with immediate need and so erotically sensual.

“After we hike another seven or eight miles, we’ll eat some of the fish we caught later tonight,” he says while gutting and cleaning the fish.

On that note, my whole body sags. I don’t think I can walk another two feet. He tosses four of them into a pan for me to grill. I liked the onions and berries this morning, so I mimic Shane’s wild culinary prowess by limping toward the edge of the woods and collecting them.

When I hobble back to him, he studies me closely, his jaw tightening, and I try not to think about the pain in my feet and how masculine he looks in his tee shirt and loose pants hanging on those perfectly narrow hips and that trail of curls leading to his cock. My mind is full of nasty thoughts because I’d planned on doing them with Blake. I have to stop thinking about Shane and focus on reaching Tonakwa long before Red, Loki, and Julian.

I flip the fish over in the pan. “How did you talk Nikita into joining you out here?” I can’t imagine her lasting an hour without a day spa nearby.

“When I told her I was hunting in Alaska for three weeks, she asked to go.”

“And you explained to her that you were camping? The real kind of camping and not car-camping.”

He nods, a grimace creasing that rugged jaw covered with several days worth of growth. “I guess the money meant that much to her that she’d endure weeks of not bathing to please me. Now that I think about it. She wouldn’t have made it a few days out here, not like you.”

He thinks I can make it, which brings a smile to my face. “Speaking of which. I will be bathing soon.” My legs and armpits need shaved, and oil sheens my hair.

A grin replaces his grimace, and I breathe a sigh of relief because I need him. “I don’t have to tell you that the water is cold.”

I shoulder bump him, and his body stiffens. “I can last two minutes to get clean.”

Why does he look so serious? “Make sure you tell me when you’re going, so I can keep an eye out.”

I waggle my brows. “To see me naked?” I should stop referring to sex, but it’s on the forefront of my mind.

That usual roughish grin contours his cracked lips. “That and to keep an eye on the wolves and the bear.”

My gaze wanders to the woods, which appear dark and quiet. Too quiet. A slight tremor ripples across my shoulders.

As I fix us each a plate, Shane leans over and unlaces my boots. “You were limping earlier and then you distracted me. Lets take these off.”

My feet feel like someone set them on fire. “Always asking me to undress.”

He chuckles. “Only for your benefit.”

The camaraderie between us has been rekindled, and we’re back to being friends. “And yours.”

“I would never complain.” He helps me tug off my boots to observe my feet. Heat exchanges between us as he pulls off my thick socks. His breath catches, and mine picks up, my heart doing double time.

The boots have eaten the flesh off the outer sides of both of my big toes.

“You should’ve told me earlier?” Shane cradles one of my feet on his thigh, then he opens his pack to dig into it.

“Don’t be licking my toes,” I tease.

He laughs and gives me a genuine smile that shoots a lightening bolt into the foot he’s holding, even past the pain. “You don’t have to worry about that. Have you looked at your feet?”

We’re really back on good terms, so I let out a sigh of relief.

Laughing, he lifts my foot and nips my middle toe. When I squirm with wantonness, he abruptly stops laughing to stare hard at me while inhaling sharply. Wickedness briefly flashes in his green eyes. If only he’d take me here and now.

Shane seems to shake his feelings off and says, “I have moleskin for your blisters.” He daubs ointment on my toes then checks the rest of my feet for sores.

“Thank you.”

When those green eyes of his peer into mine, my body resonates with blistering fervor, humming from the touch of his fingers on my feet. He cuts the moleskin to fit my toes. “This will stop your boots from rubbing them.”

His hand slips along the inside of my foot, his breath quickens, and he licks his lips. “Your feet are soft, so the journey will take its toll on them.”

Shane slipping my socks onto my bare feet stops all rational thought.

“Leave your boots off until we go,” he says.

I nod, inhaling hasty breaths while my foot rests on his thigh. He stares down at it, deep in thought, before biting into his fish. He doesn’t remove my foot and neither do I. While it rests on his leg, my unsatisfied sex squeezes together and pulses.

We finish eating and clean up while I wiggle around to relieve the pressure in my sex. Shane packs the extra fish into a plastic bag. I tug on my boots, and to my surprise, the moleskin stops the constant rubbing.

As we thread our way along the bank of the river, the grizzly stops to observe us, and more shivers work their way into me. It doesn’t help that the temperature keeps dropping, and snow has started to fall again. Shane doesn’t help by working the cold out of my back with his strong, feverish hands.

“I’ll take care of you, Cyn.”

Why couldn’t this have been a normal vacation? With only cute little toucans and parrots, instead of wolves and a massive bear.

Though my feet ache from the second day of hiking, I push on. “Shane?”

“Yes.” He stops to help me over a fallen log covered in moss yellowed and dying from the dropping temperature.

“How did you end up in Austin?” If he was born and raised in Alaska, why Texas?

“My mother hated living in Alaska, so she and her closest friend left their husbands and moved to where it was warm and they had family. We had to visit, and eventually Dad sent us to schools in Austin.” He faces me. “You aren’t going to like this, but my first girlfriend Lindsey is Julian’s sister and their mother is my mother’s best friend. Julian and Lindsey used to come to Texas with us. She’s stayed at my condo several times when her mom goes out of town.”

“I bet Nikita liked that.”

There’s that warm smile again. “She didn’t.”

“That’s probably how Blake knew him.” They were probably lovers before we knew each other. Anger flares in my face, souring my lips. Blake is not the perfect man.

“Loki used to visit Julian. He got caught with drugs while in Texas.”

“That explains a lot.” I hadn’t realized that Shane came from a broken family. “Does your dad still live here?”

“Yes. In Tonakwa.”

The pieces are starting to fall together.

Snowflakes cake onto my lashes and settle on my wool hat. In the distance, low-hanging clouds hide the mountaintops.

Shane drops back while I stare up at them and puts an arm around my shoulder. “Come on.”

I want to lean into him and forget about my troubles. He smells like the forest, and that penetrating kiss still burns my lips. For a few more miles that’s all I can think about and it drives me forward.

Despite the moleskin protecting my feet, we hike until my feet feel like they’re going to fall off. My calves and thighs ache. Everything hurts, including my shoulders and back from lugging the pack. Just looking at the weight on Shane’s shoulders makes me cringe. He keeps readjusting his load from the wound on his shoulder. I’ll look at that tonight. Maybe there’s something I can do for him.

He shrugs off his pack in a small clearing where the peaks remain hidden in the clouds. As Shane throws up the tent, the sky dumps snow on us. I help him gather firewood in silence and then he builds a fire where he cooks prepackaged stew and the fish. We sit under some plastic tarp he pulls up from the tent.

I serve us each a bowl before forking a bite. The rich taste of beef and carrots settles on my tongue. “It’s good,” I say, surprised.