One Night with her Bachelor (3 page)

Apparently his answer had taken too long because she rolled away, knocking her knee against the table leg and sucking in a pained breath. He winced and reached for her, but she was already on her feet and backing toward the door. “I’m sorry. I just… I thought… this would be easier.”

He stood slowly, not wanting to spook her. “What’s
this
?”

She waved her hand between them. “I thought, after the way we connected the other day…”

He racked his brain. “The other—?”

Horror hit her face and her hand flew up to cover her wide-open mouth. “Oh, my God. You don’t even remember. You don’t even… oh my God. Sorry. I’m going. Forget I was here.
Please
. You’re having a dream. I’m having a nightmare.”

She grabbed her backpack and tried to swing it over her shoulder, but he managed to block the door before she could escape. Holding out his hand to calm her, he said, “Take a breath. This isn’t a nightmare. You’re talking about the store. The milk and eggs.”

She nodded, her jaw clamped so tight he worried it might break in half.

“And they looked so sexy on my shoes that you decided to come up here and seduce me.”

The tight lines of her face softened bit by bit as his teasing sank in.

“Was it all that rubbing I did to get the egg off my boots? Back and forth, back and forth, getting a nice polish on the tip… of my boot? That kind of turned me on too.”

The corners of her lips twitched.

“Be honest—did the milk spraying onto the eggs make you as hot as it made me?”

She squeezed her eyes closed and shook her head, but her whole face smiled. When she finally looked at him again, she was less tense than he’d seen her since she’d arrived. “That’s gross.”

He reached over, lifted the strap of her backpack off her shoulder and lowered the heavy thing onto the floor. Growing more serious but keeping his voice gentle, he asked, “What are you looking for, Molly?”

She swallowed again, but at least she didn’t look away. “Orgasms. At least three.”

‡

G
abriel wielded silence
the way he’d wielded his ax—with a mesmerizing, methodical upswing before slicing through the air with a perfectly aimed sentence. The way he stared at her now, one hand still holding her backpack and the other relaxed at his side, made nerves do the hokey-pokey in her belly, waiting for that sentence to fall. She’d just been blunter than she ever had in her life. She’d never even said such a thing to Greg, and he’d been her husband for six years. Yet Gabriel met her bravery with silence.

And then, “Just three?”

Wham!
Her belly turned to liquid heat, and she swallowed every misgiving that told her he might be mocking her. “If you’re handing out more, I’ll take them.”

His jaw tightened, and his eyes narrowed in a way that made her feel as though he were peering at her through a microscope, seeing every single doubt and insecurity magnified by a million. “Molly, you’re a very n—”

She slapped her palm against his mouth, muffling the well-meant insult he was about to pay her. “Don’t say the n-word. Don’t.” She’d been called
nice
her entire life, and she was really stinkin’ sick of it.

His lips and stubble tickled her palm as he kissed it before gently clasping her wrist and moving her hand away so he could speak. “What’s wrong with the n-word?”

“It’s the worst four-letter word in the English language.”

An amused glint danced in his eyes. “You spend too much time around kindergartners if you think
nice
is the worst word there is.”

“That’s my problem, Gabriel. I spend so much time around kids that everyone associates me with them. They think of me as untouchable. Simple and sweet and pure. Yes, I’m the n-word, but people use it to mean something other than kind. They use it to mean asexual, and I’m not.”

At least, she didn’t feel as if she should be. She was twenty-nine, active, fun, and good with people. But she loved her son and had devoted herself to him since she was nineteen. And, for the past five years, she’d had to do it all on her own. Being Josh’s mom was exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. Some nights she laughed herself to sleep. Others, she fell face-first into her pillow, too wrung out to dream. Even her subconscious passed out cold. But one thing stayed the same—the pillow next to hers was always empty. She really enjoyed men’s company, but it had been a heck of a long time since she’d enjoyed that company in bed.

His forehead creased, and he dug his fingers into the corners of his eyes. “Why me?”

“I already told you—”

He dropped his hand long enough to give her a confused look before his face cleared. “Oh, right. The egg thing.”

Crumb. What an idiot she was. That moment at the store, the one she’d thought they’d shared, clearly hadn’t been anything more than a messy, but otherwise forgettable, errand for him.

Her cheeks heated, but she stood her ground. “I might’ve misinterpreted what happened at the store, but I have other reasons. I’ve known you a long time. I know you won’t blab about this around town. I just hiked out to the middle of the forest and propositioned a man in a cabin with no electricity. But because that man’s you, I don’t have to worry about being shoved into a wood chipper.”

He cringed. “Jesus, Molly.”

“
Fargo.
Good movie but not one to watch when you’re home alone.”

“Okay, so you know I’m not a murderer. Or maybe you’re saying my lack of electricity makes a wood chipper out of the question—it doesn’t, by the way. They have their own engines. Either way, it’s not really a selling point, is it? Why
me
? There must be dozens of men in town who’d eagerly take you out, show you a good time.”

“Actually, the single men in town are dropping like swatted flies. You’d be surprised. Something’s gotta be in the water, so you should check your water source if you don’t want to end up married and living happily ever after. But that’s beside the point. I’m too tired and too busy to have room for a relationship. And the kind of men I’m interested in think I’m too
nice
for anything but a relationship. It doesn’t leave me many options, Gabriel. All I know is one thing. If I don’t exercise my perfectly healthy hormones soon, I will
explode
.”

She knew one other thing, too. She desperately wanted to exercise those hormones with him. Partly, she was here for the reasons she’d given him, but also partly because he’d been the fuel for her fantasies since she was fifteen. Now she wanted a night of turning those fantasies into reality. Just one that was all she asked for.

And maybe one more in a few weeks, when the itch came back. But that was it. Anything more would be a commitment.

He sighed. “Let me get you some water. Sit down—carefully.”

She righted the chair and lowered herself gently until she was sure she was stable. He lifted the lid of a pot next to a wood-burning stove and poured water from it into a glass, giving her a chance to rake her gaze over the beauty of his half-naked body.

His sun-kissed skin showed evidence of hard living, with white scars marring his back and shoulders. One looked especially heinous. Was it from the helicopter crash? Or another rescue gone wrong?

Other than the puckered scars, his skin was smooth and his body lithe, running in masculine curves from his neck, to his broad shoulders and strong biceps, to his trim waist. Every movement seemed perfectly calibrated to waste no energy. He was a man who made his living rescuing people from desperation, and the more she watched him the more desperate she became.

Before he could turn around, she rose from the chair and covered the space between them in two steps. Her fingertips found the slope where neck turned into shoulder. He froze as she traced the lines of his body between his shoulder blades, down the bumps of his spine to the waistband of his camouflage pants. Her lips followed the same path. She was too short to reach his neck, but she pressed soft kisses all over his back as her hands moved forward to tease his front. He sucked in a breath, his whole body rigid under her explorations. She swirled the sensitive pads of her fingers around his nipples, then let them slide down the hard ridges of his abs. The thin trail of hair leading from his belly button down to heaven abraded her skin.

“Molly.” His voice was choked. All her fears that he would politely turn her down, making it clear he wasn’t attracted to her, disappeared in his hoarse moan.

“Just one night,” she whispered. “Back to reality tomorrow.”

Surely it wasn’t too much to ask.

She let her fingers flutter downward and brush against the erection straining the front of his camo pants.

At the first intimate contact, he sucked in a harsh breath and spun around. “Look. I’m trying to be a decent man here. You’re my best friend’s little sister. He would’ve killed me.”

They were both silent as the words brought reality back to them. Her brother couldn’t kill him. Her brother was dead.

She took a step back, her gaze dropping from his eyes to his strong chest and then away. Humiliation swirled with loneliness inside her. All she’d wanted was to spend time with him, giving in to a connection she’d thought they both felt. She’d wanted to touch him, reassure herself he was here and alive and okay.

And, selfishly, she’d wanted a chance to have the kind of fun other women got, the kind that came with no strings attached and no emotional entanglements. The kind she’d given up when she’d gotten engaged at seventeen and then pregnant on her wedding night.

Instead, she would be heading home alone to spend her weekend tidying up the Transformers that littered her house, with nothing but her fiercely blushing cheeks to warm her bed tonight. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here and put you in this position. It wasn’t fair of me. I’ll go now, and I’d appreciate it if you forgot I was ever here.”

She hoisted her backpack over her shoulders and maneuvered herself out of the cabin as quickly as she could. Her own footsteps echoed in her ears as she rushed across the porch and down the stairs. She’d only gotten a few steps farther, though, when he blocked her path. She slid to a halt on the loose dirt and tried to look at anything but him.

“Molly.” He steadied her with a hand on her arm. “Don’t go like this.”

She scoffed. “How should I go? With my chin held high, proud that at least I took a chance? Or maybe I should be cursing you for exercising your right to say no? Please, Gabriel. I’ve never done anything like this before, and it’s really embarrassing.”

Gabriel’s body went taut. Tension snapped in the pine-scented air between them. The only thing worse than being rejected was her body’s continued response to the closeness of his dirt-streaked, half-bare body. She pulsed in places that hadn’t pulsed in a long time.

“I need to varnish my porch and window frames.”

She blinked up at him. “Is…is that a euphemism?”

One corner of his lips quirked up. “If I want to talk about sex, I talk about sex. I don’t make shit up to pretend I’m talking about something else. And if I did, I’d be much more creative than that.”

Her brows drew together as her confusion grew worse. “So…you’re turning me down because you have a busy afternoon and can’t fit me in?”

The other corner quirked up and he was full-on smiling. “Hell no. And I’m not turning you down. Not yet, anyway. You shocked me, that’s all. I’ve never really thought of you that way, so I need time to figure out what I want to happen.” He leaned a bit closer, as if he were confiding in her. “I don’t want to humiliate myself, either. If we started going at each other and I got flashbacks of you as a five-year-old in pigtails, I’d end up as limp as overcooked spaghetti. I don’t think either of us wants that.”

She pressed her lips together to keep her smile at bay. “No. Definitely not. I want you, um…”

He cocked an eyebrow and waited.

“Hard as an axe handle?” she ventured, her blush deepening.

“Mmm, not bad but too thin. Hard as a pine tree. That works better.”

She rolled her eyes. “If you’re that big, it wouldn’t work at all.”

“Oh, it’d work. Trust me.” He gave her a wink that made longing sweep through her again. “Why don’t you stay and help me varnish my porch? Who knows—maybe we’ll start with the varnish and move on to the polishing later.”

She laughed and pushed at his shoulder. “For someone who doesn’t like euphemisms, you’re really good at them.”

“I’m good at lots of things, Molly. Stick around and I might show you.”

*