Fallen Into You (14 page)

“I really am nervous…”

“There’s a helmet in the saddlebag,” he said, reaching back to show her. “I promise I’ll go slowly.”

In the end, she had to hike her skirt up to mid-thigh to settle behind him on the bike. It felt naughty and wrong, as though she was flashing the world, but he assured her the skirt didn’t go up too far. “It's not in my interest to have other men gaping at you.”

“Well, okay,” he conceded with a smirk, “maybe it is just a little bit."

When he started the bike, she yelped at the loud noise that came from underneath her. The vibrations seemed to shake her to her very bones. But the moment he put the bike into motion and the wind began to buffet her, her heart raced and her breath went short. She pressed her arms tight around his warm, solid body and laid her head against his back, watching the world go by.

“Faster,” she said, and then again, and soon she was shouting it to the world.

“Faster, Anders! Faster!”

Epilogue

Six months later…

Kara looked over the man behind the wheel. Anders was wearing a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, but she could still see the hair that was a little too long, and the eyes that were filled with mirth. His jaw was covered with stubble, just the way she liked it. She reached over and put her hand on his thigh, and was rewarded with a quick smile and his hand on top of hers.

“This will be a great weekend,” he said.

They were on their way to a small cabin in the mountains, about two hours away from their town, but it might as well have been on another planet. The winding road ascended through the trees, and the branches touched overhead, creating a canopy of green. The dappled sunlight brought forth treasures, such as the deer that they saw every few miles, as well as the bobcat that crossed leisurely in front of the truck, as though it had no fear of the big machine at all. The air was already crisper and cleaner, and Kara had rolled down the window to let it blow through her long hair.

The cabin had been owned by Anders’ father, one of the elder Wallace’s few indulgences. His business had been transformed by the advice Ander’s had got from the bank, advice that had come from none other than Kara herself. They were a great team. Anders knew the industry inside out, and Kara’s business smarts were all the company needed to start turning some serious profit. By the time they left, a bright, shiny new construction was starting to sprout up on a plot of land they’d bought on the main strip.

The bank, meanwhile, was doing fine. A few of the client’s left, no doubt helping to quench Scott’s appetite for revenge, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Alexander was as magnanimous as ever, sticking to his principles, and the bank was actually on more solid ground, not being so heavily reliant on the connections of a single group of people. It started gaining praise – and new business – for its homegrown flavor of corporate social responsibility.

“Has it really only been six months?” she asked him now as he slowed to let a flock of wild turkeys strut across the road.

“You’re tired of me already?” he asked, and she leaned over to kiss his cheek.

“Never,” she swore.

Sometimes she felt as though she had been with Anders forever. They fit so well in every way that it was sometimes hard to remember that they came from entirely different backgrounds. Over the course of just a few weeks, the questions of wealth and blue collars had fallen away, replaced by something much simpler: Two people enjoying the hell out of each other. And it had been that way ever since.

They’d been back to the fancy restaurant enough times now that any discomfort Anders felt was banished for good. In fact, the staff seemed to relish his arrival, turning up as he did in a sharp jacket, cowboy boots and three days’ stubble. The truck he took them in looked a little different now, though. Anders had insisted on sprucing it up rather than replacing it, giving it a flashy paint job, leather upholstery and acres upon acres of chrome.

“The old girl’s come up in the world,” Anders would say, patting the dash. “Not that she’ll ever forget where she came from.”

And of course there was no question of Kara not fitting in at McHaggerty’s. It became their favorite place to go whenever uptown was getting too stuffy for them. She was becoming something of a legend down there, setting the dance floor on fire on her regular visits.

Getting together had been a rocky road, but it had been worth it. With Anders she felt like a whole new person.

“How long until we get there?” she asked.

***

An hour later, Anders stood on the porch of the old cabin and looked into the woods. There were trees everywhere, brown and greens that were so thick they almost blocked out the clear blue sky. He remembered long weekends at this cabin when he was a boy, and it sure felt different now, to be here as a man with a woman by his side. He found himself wondering what it might be like ten years from now, if he might have his own kids running around – his and Kara’s. Now that was something to make her father proud. His own, too. Hell, it would make him proud.

But it had only been six months…and besides, she hadn’t said she loved him yet.

Anders knew he was in love with her. He was deeply, passionately in love with this woman, and had been for a while. But he wasn’t going to push things. Though the money difference between them had ceased to be an issue, he still had a need to keep things close to the vest when it came to how he really felt. He wasn’t sure why, but it mattered greatly to him that she be the one who said those words first.

She came out of the cabin, dressed only in his shirt causing his mouth to turn up at the corners of its own accord. Though she might not have said certain words yet, her body said them all the damn time. She had just said quite a bit in that old bed, the one that creaked each time they moved, announcing to all the wildlife in earshot what was going on in there.

“Ready to go see the waterfall?” he asked.

***

By the time they finally crawled into bed that night, both Anders and Kara were exhausted. They had climbed half the mountain to reach the top of the falls, which were magnificent indeed. Then they had to come back down, and that had definitely been interesting, considering that night was falling and so was a light drizzle, one that made the rocks slick and dangerous.

But halfway down, she had decided that since she was wet anyway, it was time to go all-out. That’s how they wound up at the bottom of the falls, in a little pool that formed out of the natural rocks on the mountainside, and they ducked each other under the water until they were shivering with the cold. By the time they got back to the cabin, they were ready to huddle around the open fire for warmth. Dinner was something hearty from a can, and now they fell into bed together without even the slightest thought of making love.

It was the first time since they had met that they spent a night together without having sex. They were both too exhausted to even consider the work it might take to get amorous. Kara chuckled in the moonlight as they were drifting off to sleep.

“We can sleep in the same bed and not have sex,” she mused.

Anders caught her amusement immediately. “I guess that means we’re a real couple now, huh?”

She laughed weakly and a moment after that, they were both dead to the world.

***

The sound of a cry awoke her. It was coming from far up the mountain, something she had never heard before, but she instinctively knew it was an animal. A big one, at that. The sound came again and a finger of fear tickled her spine.

“A mountain lion,” Anders murmured, already awake beside her.

“It sounds so…”

“Untamed?”

That was the perfect word. Kara sat up in bed, listening. There it came again, a long wail that sounded both plaintive and frightening. She looked down at Anders, who smiled up at her with a serenity that said he felt right at home, even with a big cat howling at his door.

“Good morning,” he whispered, and pulled her down for a kiss that began as a sweet and innocent peck. But soon his hand was wandering south. Kara lay back and spread her legs, her eyes closed, enjoying the feeling of his hand on her and his lips playing at her ear. He dipped a finger into her, then slowly pulled it out, gliding it across her.

“You’re already so wet,” he murmured into her ear.

“You can make me wetter,” she said.

He kept moving his finger in and out, just one, and after a moment that wasn’t enough. She lifted her hips and tried to get more, asking him silently with her body to use two fingers, or even three. He simply grinned and kissed her shoulder. He sucked there, gently at first and then harder, and when he was done she was sure he had left a mark behind.

He loved putting marks on her. It was his stamp of possession. She loved looking at them in the mirror.

“I want more,” she whispered.

“You don’t want us to take our sweet time?” he teased.

Kara began to beg. Then she began to plead. Pretty soon she was getting a little annoyed, crossing that line between sweet teasing and undeniable urgency. But just when she opened her mouth to say what she was thinking, Anders rose up on his knees. With his free hand, he pulled the pillow out from under her head. She gave him a lusty smile, aware of exactly what he was going to do.

He straddled her. Slowly, carefully. She watched as his hips moved, as his strong legs settled on either side of her face. She watched as the heavy hardness of him, already full with desire, swayed right above her. When he was settled right where he wanted to be, he gave her what she craved – two fingers this time, deep enough to make her lift her hips off the bed again and moan loudly at the invasion.

“Like that?” he asked, his voice muffled as he sank his mouth between her legs.

The swell of pleasure broke over her like a wave, the first of what she knew would be many before the final tide swept over her. She lay there for a moment, enjoying what he was doing, and then opened her eyes to look at him, pulsing right there in front of her.

She started with the tease, just like he had – kissing and licking around where he wanted her to touch, but never actually going there. She nuzzled against him, and let her tongue trail close to his most intimate parts, but she waited to give him what he wanted. Soon he was moving his hips around, trying to capture her elusive tongue. She giggled and nibbled at the inside of his thighs as he let out a frustrated sigh.

Two can play at that game
, she thought.

But before she could take her game much further, Anders chose some reverse psychology. Instead of teasing, he dove in deeper and began to give her a tongue-lashing that soon had her clinging to his thighs and begging him to never stop. He held her thighs hard in his hands, spreading her apart for his tongue, and even when it became a little too sensitive, he didn’t stop. Within minutes she was hollering his name at the top of her lungs, trembling all over as the final wave of pleasure spilled over her, taking her breath with it.

He moved away from her, and she took big gulps of air. When she was finally able to think somewhat clearly again, she gave him an exhausted smile. “That was an ambush!”

“That’s what you get for teasing me like that.”

“It was a fun tease!”

“And it paid off, didn’t it?” He nuzzled her neck and she giggled against his ear.

When the tingles of pleasure had worn down enough for her to move, she gave him a wicked grin and pushed him onto his back. “Your turn,” she said.

In the six months they had been together, she had learned many things about him, and one of those was just how much he loved it when she went down on him. It was something he would never ask for her to do, because he wasn’t the kind of man who would lightly receive anything without giving something in return – but it was something that always sent him to the moon and back, and she loved watching every moment as he slowly lost control.

She crawled between his legs and sat back, looking at him. He was hard as a rock and throbbing gently with every heartbeat. She leaned down and blew a stream of warm air over him, and watched as that throbbing sped up.

“You are so easy,” she said, teasing him through a smile.

“Easy?”

“I just blow on you and it revs you up.”

He laughed. “There mere sight of you revs me up. Don’t you know that by now?”

Indeed, she did. She leaned forward and ran her tongue all the way up the length of him. He held his breath when she did it, and let out his breath in a rush when she was through. She did it again, and then again, and finally he threw his head back and moaned.

“God, you’re so good at this,” he whispered. “Just knowing what you’re going to do to me is almost enough to make me come.”

“Hold back as long as you can,” she said as she sucked him into her mouth. He let out a groan that surely the mountain lion could have heard, and this made her even more intent on bringing him to the edge over and over, so many times that when he did come, the force of it would render him useless for the next hour. She smiled inwardly at the thought, and took him as deep as she could.