THE GROUND RULES
As always when Knox put his mouth on Alice’s, her brain derailed. She’d started the playful shenanigans to distract him, but now she was the one distracted by the way he pulled her into him, his hands in her hair, the way he tasted, the scent of his soap . . .
She had no idea what was happening between them, but it was like being on one of those roller coasters where you drop three hundred feet without warning and your stomach lands in your throat. She’d started this, which meant she was asking to get hurt.
At her hesitation, he lifted his head and studied her face. “You’ve changed your mind.”
“It’s been a long time,” she blurted out, feeling awkward. “I think my body’s forgotten what it’s supposed to do. I can’t remember any of my good moves.”
“Alice, you don’t need moves, not with me.” He smiled, eyes warm and sexy, and surprisingly affectionate. “I’ve got you, I promise.”
And there went the bones in her knees.
He kissed her softly, sweetly, an appetizer off the varied menu of Knox’s kisses. It wasn’t often she allowed herself the luxury of wanting something, much less someone. The few and far between times she’d allowed it to happen, she’d looked at it as quenching a thirst.
But deep down inside, where she allowed her hopes and dreams to live, she knew it wouldn’t be like that with Knox. If she slept with him, it’d be the equivalent of a bag of potato chips—she wouldn’t be able to eat just one, much less stop at the ridiculously small serving size recommendation.
He was leaning back against the Land Rover, with her pressed to his front. He was stealthily gorgeous and patient as ever as he waited for her to decide. Except she knew he couldn’t be quite as calm as he looked because she could feel him hard against her.
Everywhere.
But she knew he was trying not to influence her decision. He assumed she was an adult and, as such, capable of making up her own mind. Which meant she needed to be that adult. She took a glance over her shoulder at the barn door, which she’d closed behind her when she’d entered. Then she looked back at Knox and caught his unguarded expression—a longing that stole her breath. “What time is it?” she asked.
He seemed surprised at the question, but pulled his phone from his pocket. “Seven thirty.”
She tapped her chin, like she was thinking. Truth was, she’d given up thinking the moment he’d looked at her like she meant something to him, something precious. “Seven thirty p.m. to seven thirty a.m. would just about give us a full night,” she said.
He gave her a purely carnal smile. “Not nearly enough time, but I can work with that. This is your show, Tumbleweed. Tell me where to start.”
“Um . . .” So many choices, all of them good . . .
“How about here,” he suggested and kissed her lips. “Or maybe . . .” He brushed his mouth along her neck. “Here?” When she moaned, his hands slid to her waist, lifting her onto the hood. Then he bent his head to her breast through her tee. “Or here . . .”
Already panting, she gave him a push so she could sit up and take off her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She watched his eyes darken. “Start anywhere you like,” she said. “Just don’t stop.”
He boosted her higher onto the hood with an effortless strength so that she was spread out on the smooth surface of the car, then nudged her legs apart so he could stand between them. “You and this car belong on the cover of a magazine,” he murmured huskily. He leaned over her, but then hesitated, meeting her gaze. “I need you to know that it wasn’t my plan to lure you out here for this.”
“It wasn’t my plan either.” She slid her fingers into his hair and met his searing gaze. “But what others might call just a car, I call an aphrodisiac.”
Apparently not at all threatened that she might have found the car even sexier than him, he laughed low in his throat, and she realized that while the car was incredibly sexy, he was even more so. Especially as he looked at her, eyes dark with desire. He was a man who could deviate from a plan, and she appreciated that. Plus, the thought of what he was going to do to her right here on the Land Rover made her pulse race. “Knox?”
“Yeah?”
“Hurry.”
With a slow shake of his head, he said, “I’d do just about anything for you, Alice. Except that.” He was smiling when he kissed her, shifting to pull off her boots. They hit the floor with twin dull thuds as he turned his attention to her jeans. They were tight, and in fact had taken her five good long minutes to shoehorn herself into, so she understood him giving this some thought. She reached down to help him, but he wrapped his fingers around her wrists and set them at her sides, his eyes suddenly serious. Very serious. “I know you don’t want to think beyond this minute,” he said. “But I can’t help but do exactly that. You need to know, Alice, I still want more than tonight.”
She struggled to think beyond her pulsing, needy body. “You mean like tomorrow night too?”
“For starters.”
She stared at him for the longest beat, but she was tired of having her head and body at war. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to want to do this tomorrow night too.”
He smiled that smile of his, the one that was both very bad and very good, and kissed her, not pushing for more promises than that.
Because he understands you . . .
“I’m going to unwrap you like a present,” came his roughly uttered words, muffled a little because he had his mouth pressed to the soft skin of her belly, moving southward as he worked her jeans down her legs and off, not needing a shoehorn.
Then he stopped and she realized she’d not given a single thought to her undies that morning. “If you laugh, I’ll kick you,” she said, meaning it.
She could tell it took a lot to control himself, and for a moment she wished he hadn’t removed her boots yet, because then she could kick him.
“‘Kiss This,’” he read, his voice full of amusement and a whole bunch of other things as he ran a finger over the two words embroidered in red on the tiny scrap of black satin masquerading as panties. “It will be my pleasure,” he murmured and bent to do just that.
What could’ve been a minute or an hour later, she was still completely outside her own body when he raised his head from between her thighs. He smiled as he helped her climb into the roomy back of the open Land Rover. He came up with a moving blanket from somewhere to cushion the truck bed beneath them. She tugged his shirt until he pulled it over his head and tossed it behind him. His skin gleamed in the moonlight slanting in through the high windows as he stripped. He looked as beautiful and powerful as the vehicle beneath her when he entered her, and she was still outside her own body when she came again.
And then again.
In fact, her body didn’t reconnect with her soul until she felt his arms, still quivering slightly as he lifted his weight off her. She was still breathing heavy, her body nothing but Jell-O. She couldn’t have moved to save her life when her phone began to vibrate from her jeans, which were on the floor.
Knox pulled back. “You need to get that?”
“No.”
“You sure? Your phone doesn’t ring often, but when it does . . .”
Yeah. Shit. He was right. She fished the offending phone from her pocket, giving Knox quite the show to do it too, at least given his heartfelt groan. That’s when she saw Lauren’s name flashing on the screen. “You better be bleeding,” she answered. “Like an arterial bleed.”
“Did you find him? Are you guys doing it? Did you guys talk?”
Yeah, they’d talked. If words like oh God, and right there, and harder counted. She disconnected and Knox took her phone, setting it aside before leaning over her for a gentle kiss. “What did she want?”
“To know if we’d talked.”
“That would be nice,” he said, kissing the sweet spot behind her ear.
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“I can think of a bunch of things,” he said, lifting his head to look into her eyes.
“Like?”
“Like . . . what do you dream about? Do you want help fixing up Stella? What happened between you and Lauren all those years ago?”
She froze, but he didn’t. His mouth toured southbound along her throat, and her body was arching into his. Sliding her hands into his hair, she tightened her fingers and pulled his head up to hers. “Are you serious right now? I’m lying in the bed of the car that was infamously used in the opening sequence of every episode of Last Chance Racing, and you want to talk about my issues? I’m every red-blooded man’s fantasy right now.”
“Don’t I know it.” His voice was like rough gravel as he slowly took her in. “But it’s also my fantasy to lie here with you and hold you while you tell me what’s going on in that incredible brain of yours.”
As he was saying this, his hands never left her, caressing and reigniting . . . basically slowly driving her crazy. “If you want me to talk,” she said shakily, “you’re going to have to stop distracting me.”
“Oh, I’ve already learned that lesson,” he said, a smile in his voice. “If I stop distracting you, you won’t talk at all.” When he lifted his head, she almost whimpered at the loss of his mouth on her skin. “Knox . . .” She closed her eyes. “I can’t . . . I can’t talk about it.”
His voice was gentle. “Why?”
“Because I’ll violate Ground Rule number one.”
With a very male sound of empathy, he pulled her into him. “We’re not in the house. The rules don’t apply out here in the barn.”
After that, he didn’t say anything, just kept his hands on her, soothing, comforting, quiet and calm . . . patiently waiting for her. And maybe because of that, she found she could talk after all. “What do you already know?” she asked.
He held her gaze, letting her see that he wasn’t hiding a thing. “I know that when Lauren lost Will, she somehow also lost you.”
“And I lost her, but it was my doing.” She swallowed hard. “You know the story of Will’s accident. It . . . messed me up.” She dropped her forehead to his chest. “Even though officially, it wasn’t my fault. Knowing it and believing are two very different things.”
“No one forced him behind the wheel,” Knox said, leaving his hands on her. “An unnamed witness came forward and claimed Will was driving recklessly at high speeds, and that he often drove like that late at night.”
“Yeah.” And she blamed that unnamed witness for the in-depth investigation that had blown up her family. She closed her eyes. She could see her brother exactly how he’d looked that day: a tall string bean with a mop of curly brown hair that stuck up on his head like an explosion in a mattress factory. How when they’d finished working on the car, he’d slid out from beneath it and grinned up at her. “Tonight’s going to be epic,” he’d said.
And it had been epic. An epic nightmare. She drew a deep breath. “After I finished working on the car, he vanished for a while. When he got back, he was clearly upset, but he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, only that I couldn’t tell Dad or Lauren where he was going. He said he needed to blow off steam and think. He seemed so . . . I don’t know. Desperate,” she added softly. “I should’ve stopped him, but he was my big brother. He always looked out for me, and for the first time he was asking me to look out for him.” At the memory, she sighed. “He and my dad both always got that same look in their eyes when they were in a dangerous mood and needed to test the limits. I figured it wasn’t worth the fight to try and stop him. But it’d rained earlier. The first rain of the season. The roads were slick, and oil sat on top of the pooling water. I should’ve known what would happen.”
Knox cupped her face. “Just like you couldn’t control the fact that it rained that day, you couldn’t control what he was going to do. He should never have asked you to lie to the two closest people in your life. Is that what happened between you and Lauren? She got mad about you covering for him?”
“She says she’s mad that I left town, but yeah, I think it’s because when she called me looking for Will, right after he’d taken off, saying she needed to talk to him, I told her I hadn’t seen him.” She’d out-and-out lied to her best friend.
“And yet you still don’t work on cars, ever, even though it’s your passion.”
Used to be her passion. Big difference. But instead of even attempting to explain, she gave another shrug. It was all she had. She shifted away from him then, overwhelmed by the emotions she’d gone through in the past hour. First, the best car sex she’d ever had. Okay, maybe the best sex she’d ever had period. And now reliving the worst night of her life, and how the loss had created a huge hole in her heart that went far beyond Will.
And now Eleanor was gone too. If she thought about it too hard, how alone she really was, how alone she felt all the time, she’d definitely lose it. Not an option. Not in front of this man, one of the strongest men she’d ever known.
He tipped her head up to his. “These cars didn’t hurt you or disappoint you, Alice. People did.”
Suddenly, she didn’t want to do this, not with him. With him it was supposed to be just hot mindless sex and a few laughs. Nothing serious. Nothing that hurt.
And then there was the look in his eyes. Worry.
She refused to be anyone’s burden. So she slid out of the Land Rover and shut the tailgate before he could get out as well. She heard his muffled curse as she grabbed the rest of her clothes from the hood and barn floor, then strode toward the double barn doors.
He caught her before she got outside, turning her to face him. He’d slipped his jeans back on, though they weren’t fastened, and he was sans shirt and barefoot.
“I’m done talking,” she said, pulling on her jeans. This took an embarrassingly long time. Her shirt was easier, but she pulled it on inside out, swore, then decided to leave it. Finally, she met his gaze, and caught the emotions flickering over his face. Frustration. Concern. But also understanding. Drawing her in, he rested his face against her hair, taking a deep breath of her. Fair, as she’d done the same with him more than once. Letting herself get lost in the sensation of him for this last minute, she molded her body to the length of his.
“I understand you’re done talking,” he murmured. “But I’ve got something to say, if that’s okay.”
She nodded.
He nodded back, his expression soft, affectionate. “I’m sorry I pushed you to talk before you were ready. I shouldn’t have done that. I won’t do it again. But I hate to see you turn your back on something you love so much. I mean, look around you. You’re in your own personal car heaven, and most of these babies bear the stamp of your loving work.”
“You want me to deal with the cars for the good of the property.”
“No.” His voice was firm on that. “It’s not about the money it’d bring in. It’s about you, Alice. About giving yourself your life back. Will you at least think about it?”
She looked into his quietly serious face, utterly trained on her. She believed him that this had nothing to do with the inn and everything to do with her. Once again, she was struck by the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time someone had given a shit. She could feel the barn doors at her back, and the warm, hard Knox at her front, both the barn and man a lure she hadn’t felt in years, each equally hard to resist. “I’ll think about it,” she promised softly.
She’d never had anyone look at her the way he did, like he was proud of her. Another alien feeling. “If it’s okay with you,” she said quietly, “right now I’d rather think about something else.” She’d gone a long time without being intimate, truly intimate, with anyone, and now she couldn’t seem to get enough. So she slid her mouth up the side of his neck until her lips rested just beneath his ear. Slowly, she brushed them back and forth, smiling when he let out a rough groan. “I mean . . . unless you really want to use the rest of our night to talk some more . . .”
He lifted her up so she could wrap her legs around him, supporting her with his hands on her ass, his body pressing hers to the wood doors. “Sometimes,” he said roughly, “talking’s overrated . . .”