Claiming The Cowboy Read online

Propped as she was, hands braced behind her, she was willing but not entirely unabashed.

  “Spread your knees, beautiful.”

  She did. Not nearly enough for what he had in mind. He coaxed them open the rest of the way with kisses. As he nudged higher, closer to the meticulously-trimmed strip of hair at her mound, she opened herself more and more, by painstaking degrees, until he bit the crotch of her panties further aside and reached her glistening inner folds, sodden with hot, delectable cream.

  As someone new to this level of exhibition, as someone who measured herself with a certain degree of perfectionism, as someone who could not relax unless she knew something was done well and right, Chase knew it important to extinguish all doubt, all worries. He had never tasted anything so unsullied, so addictively intoxicating, especially when blended with a trace of the whiskey that had made its way from her breasts.

  “You taste heavenly,” he said. “Tart and sugary, all at once.”

  The reassurance seemed to relax her even more.

  He removed her underwear. “Might want to hold on, chief.”

  “Why?”

  He gave her clit one robust flick of his tongue. She bounded from the counter, a half-cry, half-groan fresh from her parted lips. Her hands scrambled for purchase before the next unexpected wave and found it in the solid, foundational beams on either side of the island. He barely allowed her a hold before he licked her base to front, pulling one syrupy scoop of her juices past his ready and willing taste buds.

  She ground her hips, chasing his tongue, eager for everything he wanted to give her and more. He mined infinite pleasure from exploring every swollen summit, every soaked trench, greedy with lust to sample more, push further, drive her highs and lows, and play her nerve endings until she lost herself in this foreign sensation.

  Unable to lick her to the depths her body begged to be explored, he brought his fingers into the mix, parting the tight, wet flesh of her channel, her walls telegraphing pulsing waves of ecstasy through his skin, his hand, straight to his heart.

  Shards of pain shot though his left knee, the one a bull had used as stomping ground years earlier, and he was in serious danger of not respecting her wishes and releasing the hold his pants had on his steel shaft. But he forgot every distraction as her utterances came higher-pitched, faster-paced. She begged in both tone and words, and it was worth every tender torment to hear what near-euphoria sounded like on her.

  Turns out, it sounded a helluva lot like his name.

  And the word fuck.

  Which pleased Chase to the fucking ends of the earth.

  Gretchen cursed out a cry as her muscles clamped around his doubled fingers and transitioned to urgent waves. His tongue replaced his hand to drive her further beyond her edge. He pulled every single bit of her past his lips, the suction greedy and giving, all at once. She was in full throes of the ride he was giving her, and he had only begun.

  Her body tottered, threatening weakness. He stood and scooped her against him because he had once promised her he wouldn’t let her fall, and it was a promise he intended to keep for as long as she’d allow. Exhales rode her orgasm and burned a trail of desire from his neck, where her lips rested, to the tip of his cock, which was unyielding in force. Still, Chase gave her all the time she needed.

  “I had no…idea,” she managed between breaths.

  “Surprise,” he whispered below her earlobe.

  She pulled out of his embrace and straightened her spine, rod-straight, postured perfection, her breasts wide and proud and spread. Her gaze held his prisoner, recovered, again hungry, until she made one small request—"I want to see you”—before her eyes shifted focus down the planes of his chest to his bulge.

  Carefully, so fucking carefully, as if he were a confidential dossier to be dissected and combed over, centimeter by aching centimeter, she unfastened the top button of his fly. His dick had a mind of its own. Unbound by the constraints of boxers or briefs or any such barrier, every available drop of blood surged to feed the tissue, and his pecker strong-armed the zipper all the way to its base.

  She caught his length as it spilled out into her hand. Her touch was strong but tender; her eyes widened.

  “Do bull riders take any kind of…enhancement drugs?”

  The question was so unexpected, so goddamned flattering, he laughed and charged her with a savage kiss that had the tip of his penis lurching and straining toward the object of his affection. In an unceremonious shedding of too-tight jeans, in a path that meandered toward the other side of the cottage, they took time to celebrate each small victory with a kiss more heated than the last, and once, for her to sidle his belt around her neck again, and once for him to rummage in his wallet for his two-pack blister of condoms. His pulse kicked faster and faster with each diversion. In less than eight seconds—a victory in his mind—he was stark naked and hard and straight and as searing as a branding iron pulled from the fire.

  She kissed him hard, backing him up against the ladder—not a vertical one but angled with wider and wider footholds toward the bottom. He wedged his ass inside the most convenient step, a little like a shelf, and spread his thighs wide to accommodate her right where he wanted her, with little space to scale without first engaging in a dance of intimacy. The last thing he expected her to do was to drop and take him fully into her mouth, but that’s exactly what she did.

  Instead of on her knees, she squatted wide, her newfound boldness like a butterfly opening in beauty and confidence. The view drove him fast and hard, rivaled only by the absolute dedication she had to sucking him off. And just as her nails had driven him wild at his scalp, she gathered his scrotum with eggshell delicacy and clawed insanity-inducing paths that triggered hot currents of gooseflesh up the back of his thighs. His cock vibrated, pleading for the same. She took the hint. Her tongue and nails took turns driving shattering hits of need through his member, base to hypersensitive tip. When he thought he would combust with the delicacy of it all, she took him in hand and jacked him as if he was a well and she was dying of thirst.

  Chase nearly slithered to the floor. He tossed the condom wrapper into the loft and raised his arms above him to hold on to the ladder, sucking in breaths on the foulest string of curses Gretchen had likely ever heard. He couldn’t help it, but instead of turning her off, she giggled and went at him harder, more insistently, adding thrilling visual diversions like pleasuring herself with a combination of his big toe and her free fingers and sandwiching his bum knee with her heated breasts, his buckle tapping his thigh in time to her titty-fuck. She was playful and liberated in a way he never would have imagined, and he never wanted the real world to encroach on them again.

  He took both of her hands and stretched them to the ladder above his head. She grabbed hold, giving him a prime opportunity to restore attention to her breasts. The diversion cost him five minutes in time but absolutely nothing in the arousal department. He placed her bare foot on the step at his shoulder, inviting her to climb, nipping at her clit as she passed him. She let out a whimsical squeal and slowed her progress all the way to the loft so that he could come at her from below and eat her pussy senseless.

  She scrambled up the final few rungs, turned the switch on an old converted oil lamp so that the close, pitched space glowed gold like an Edison bulb, and motioned with one sexy wag of her finger to follow her lead.

  This time, when Chase drew near, fragility replaced frivolity, quiet replaced damned near every noise in the cottage, and devotion replaced all pretense of this tryst being casual. For as much thrill as they had brought to each other’s pleasure centers, it was also, unquestioningly, a meeting of hearts and a compromise between two vastly different worlds. He had never felt this strongly about anyone, dared to think that maybe there was something more to hang his future on than his dream of a distillery in his home town. He was the world champion risk-taker on the back of a fifteen-hundred-pound bucking animal, but when it came to risking everything for the kind of love that only Meie
rs seemed to find, he wasn’t sure he had it in him.

  He tugged her down on the bed beside him. Moving inside her became his priority, his everything.

  “Gretchen,” he whispered.

  She placed a fingertip to his lips to silence him. “I know.”

  He wanted to gift her the control she so desperately craved in all things. She kissed him onto his back and helped him unwrap and roll the condom into place. Atop his bed, earlier in the night, he had placed his smoke-gray cowboy hat—her cowboy hat—on the bed, brim side up, the way every ancestor who had settled the land had done. Now, he placed it on her.

  Her knee swung wide and she mounted him.

  In his hat and not a stitch of clothing more, she looked better than amazing. As he’d known she would. And from that vantage point, she looked like his. Taking his belt in hand, she recited everything he had taught her, mastery the first time because she was so goddamned smart.

  “Around the hand and wrist, back against the gloved palm, lock the fingers down, arm bent and relaxed.”

  Her way of accepting him fully. A surer sign there never was.

  His cock squirmed against her crease.

  She cradled his buckle in her palm, leaving the leather end loose. He chased it with his lips to bite it then gave it a tug to bring her close. When she leaned down, he kissed her slowly and lovingly, as if they had already had a lifetime together, looking back, just to try it on for size. She was as beautiful at seventy as she was at this moment.

  With calloused hands, he skimmed her body—shoulders, calves, the tender flesh beneath her breasts that absorbed their magnificent weight, cheekbones that needed no adornment, every bit of her flared sex pressing down on him. When his thumb skimmed her parted mouth, breath that had started to come again in short gasps breezed past before her tongue made an appearance to sample herself.

  At this innocent, inquisitive taste, she began to move, tiny rhythmic motions back and forth, her hips drawing small circles, her seam easing along the length of his erection. Her breasts mimed the motion in perfect tandem. The increasing friction on his cock and the gyration of those succulent pendulums were the strongest indications that she intended to go the distance, the time, the fullest ride he would permit.

  Bulls didn’t finger-fuck, but Chase reached between them and followed the nub of her clit, pressing repeatedly, in the motion they created together, on the cusp of recapturing her finest moment below. But there was no way she was enjoying that ride again without taking him with her.

  He grabbed her hips and sheathed himself inside her. Every parting inch was a broiling-hot inferno that awakened warning sizzles of need deep in his sac. Pulses of lust coiled and released, his cock the epicenter, everywhere she touched him the aftershocks. Instinctually, as if she was born to the motion, born to ride him, her rhythm quickened. Buck after buck, he packed her deeper and deeper until he was convinced he would split her in half. Instead, her silken pussy expanded and accommodated and launched an all-out assault. Awash in her cream, snagged on the most attention-grabbing sight of her taking her own breasts in hand and grinding his dick to oblivion, he clenched his teeth and steeled his determination to hold off his climax until she knew the kind he could deliver.

  The single best route to his full-length advantage was not this position.

  With great care, he slid her off him and requested that she back her exquisite ass to the side of the bed. He positioned her knees beneath her, planted wide. Her ass cheeks were round and firm and looked like a juicy peach, ready to be plucked. Unable to resist one last sweet treat before he entered her again, he dipped his mouth low and drizzled her cream onto his tongue.

  Between each flick of his tongue, he lavished praise on her. “Like fucking nectar…never enough.”

  At the trench of her cheeks, he settled his cock. He liked the look of it there, damned near purple through the rubber haze, veins swollen like blue roads on a country map that led only one place: her nirvana. He reached forward to part and rub and finger her clit before the tip of his shaft declared enough diversion, homed in on the rim of her channel, and charged in, no directions needed.

  With one deft glide, he filled her, spaces he hadn’t known when he was on his back, depths of erotic torture that overpowered him. The first two times he parted her flesh, he did so with painstaking slowness. He didn’t want to hurt her, knew he would split her deeper than ever, and the sight of her beautiful body swallowing him, inch by inch, drove him to near insanity.

  Gradually, ever-so-slightly, he drove faster.

  Barely-there words laced with homage to the curse gods, to Chase, and to the deity above, punctuated her breathless cries, rained louder than the tin roof within arm’s reach. She groveled for him to keep going, railed against her loss of control, which only drove him deeper and harder and faster.

  Fresh needles of pleasure buzzed through him, his need for release scrambling to higher and higher planes, toward that uncivilized place that unleashed everything within. She clawed at the bed covers and came at him in reverse, a collision of lust, both of them chasing the edge. He couldn’t hold off much longer, so he reached beneath her and seized her nipples with both hands, pinching and flicking and torturing her until the walls surrounding his dick seized like a vice.

  He counted…one…two…

  Her insides quaked and squeezed and tugged at him to follow her into orgasm.

  Three…four…five…

  He wanted to last the ride, give her as much as he could before he had no more left, before he ceased to exist for that span of time. Conditioned to go eight, he swelled. His body stiffened.

  Six…seven…

  His release boiled over.

  At eight, he came, long and monumentally hard. And in the moment his out-of-body darkness took hold, he spooned her back and hugged her, unable to turn her loose for fear he would be lost. He knew what he wanted. His future came as surely in that bliss-filled moment as any life decision he had made thus far. It all fell into place. Every bit. He could move from his past because he had a direction.

  And that direction was twisting in his arms, nudging him, kissing him, healing every broken thing inside him. He was a world champion risk-taker, and, thanks to her, he had it in him to risk everything for love.

  11

  The moment Chase pulled his truck onto Gretchen’s street at dawn, a sinkhole opened up in her stomach large enough to suck her town inside. Two Marin County Sheriff’s Department patrol cars sat in her driveway. Every light in the house blazed at the unnatural time of morning, something that hadn’t happened since…

  Oh, God.

  “Dad.”

  Neighbors in slippers and bathrobes clung to their morning papers and clustered together like gnats pulled toward the house’s glow.

  Gretchen barked out orders—“Hurry, hurry, oh please!”—something Chase did without question, even before her abrasive request. As soon as his truck slowed by the mailbox, she popped her door, dome light blinding, door chimes—bong-bong-bong—crowding her head, making it hard to breathe.

  Chase said something. Wait, maybe. But she was not prone to patience, and if there was bad news to topple the memories of the best night of her life, she needed to meet it head-on and break it before it broke her. The moment her feet hit chilled grass, she broke into a run, his voice still behind her, not registering.

  “Dad!”

  Oh, God. It was that morning all over again—men in brown uniforms, a swarm of onlookers who spouted vacant words that landed like shrapnel, everyone gaunt and pale, their eyes downcast, drawn. She charged past the porch her mother still haunted, through the front door. Somewhere, Lincoln’s collar tags clinked together, him coming to comfort her. Chase’s voice streaked behind her like a comet, sound and light but no meaning.

  In her living room: her father sat hunched over.

  Oh, God.

  He glanced up at her, face sheeted as if she were the ghost. Said her name as if he was in a place where he had
only just remembered it.

  “Gretchen! Oh, thank heavens.”

  Every meddler’s head that crowded them turned a glance toward her. Her father wobbled to his feet, as slow as ever, but this time it was through a curtain of unshed tears.

  Her chest felt like she’d run into a brick wall. Chase’s formidable body filled the space behind her. He would keep her from falling. She was sure of it now.

  “Dad?”

  “We thought…”

  Her father didn’t finish. More he implied something out of reach, out of comprehension. Eyes around the room tightened, harsh and judgmental.

  “You thought what?”

  A sheriff’s deputy with a military buzz and a thick neck—she knew his name, had made a point of it upon election, but her brain had not accompanied her inside—finished what her father didn’t.

  “Patrol found your car by the side of the road, hazards on, keys planted inside the wheel well. Residents who saw your car had called in, concerned. When your father didn’t know your whereabouts, couldn’t reach you on your cell, called everyone he knew and no one had seen you, we began a search of the vicinity.”

  Gretchen’s stomach shriveled painfully. Her lungs sagged in on themselves when air failed to fill them. She turned to Chase who had his eyes closed, finger and thumb pinching the bridge of his nose, an exaggerated exhale on his lips. Chase, who was supposed to call Nat or Wes. Chase, who had insisted she go with him, which then triggered a county-wide search for their elected mayor.

  Her father navigated the bodies, too many people, all taking up her air and judging. He pulled her into a desperate hug. “We’re glad you’re all right.”

  She shoved everything down deep inside and put on her big-girl mayor pants. “Thank you all for your efforts. My apologies for worrying you. It was nothing.”

  Not quite how she meant it to come out. Political evasiveness, nothing more. She glanced at Chase, who looked as if he had taken a direct hit of censure. The crowd mumbled and shuffled toward the door. One of the officers pressed his mouthpiece and told dispatch to call off the search. Gretchen wondered how many people had been up all night, impacted, while she lost herself in the most irresponsible way possible. This is what came of jumping off agenda, why surprises weren’t in her DNA. Nausea brewed in her gut.