Peppermint Creek Inn (4 page)

Ugly, raw-red chafing marks bit deeply into his tender flesh around the handcuffed wrist. The other wrist looked just as bad. A twinge of alarm slithered sickeningly throughout her stomach. Under no circumstances would a prisoner be shackled in such a horrid way. Something else was going on here.

When she touched his neck, his skin felt cool and slightly clammy. Shock. She needed to get him warm and fast. Unzipping the leather jacket, she discovered damp clothes beneath. Quickly she grabbed the heavy down quilt and hung it over the chair near the fireplace to warm.

Running her hands along his now shivering broad shoulders, she felt his corded muscles with the skill she’d learned in numerous first aid classes. She slid her fingers slowly along his broad chest, across his ribs and underneath his body along his spine, all the while checking for broken bones or blood and loving the feel of his hard masculine flesh against her fingertips.

She didn’t miss the large bulge between his legs as it pressed anxiously against his tight jeans.

Well! At least that part seemed in perfect working order.

Gosh, it sure was getting hot in here.
Struggling out of her ski jacket, she whipped it away and continued the search to his lower back.

Suddenly he groaned and that’s when she felt the warm stickiness.

Blood.

Oh, shit!

Struggling with the sleeves of his jacket, she managed to free it from his body and tossed it onto a nearby chair. Pulling up the damp black woolen sweater, the moist blue jean shirt and the once white T-shirt, she, as delicately as possible, rolled the unconscious man onto his side.

“Oh. My. God,” she whispered trying hard to ignore the horrible chills racing up her spine as she stared at the puncture wound in his lower back.

There was no doubt in her mind what had caused it.

A bullet.

—

An hour later with the storm still hammering away outside her home, Sara dropped the blood-soaked bullet into the fancy Niagara Falls plate she’d bought on her honeymoon.

After she’d wrangled the clothes from his bruised and battered body, she’d boiled water and quickly collected the things she’d need to remove the bullet. The injury hadn’t been too deep after all. Practically a flesh wound, the bullet having lodged itself in the fleshy part of his lower back. As far as she could tell, it had missed anything vital. However, he’d bled like a stuck pig and that accounted for his weakened condition.

Promptly she applied a poultice of her homemade peppermint antiseptic ointment to the bullet wound and bandaged it into place.

The dark-haired stranger stirred briefly as Sara tenderly touched the large bump on his temple. Someone had hit him. Hard. Too hard.

Sighing heavily, her weary gaze wandered to the knotty-pine bed in which the stranger lay. Her husband had built it and he’d done a pretty darn good job of it, if she said so herself.

Slowly, she reached out and lovingly ran her hot palm along the smoothness of the pine headboard. She’d enjoyed watching Jack’s powerful sawdust-covered arms plane the sweet-smelling wood. His arms had sailed back and forth until the knotty pines would burst forth glistening happily like newly polished gems. A gentle sheen of sweat had covered his brow and his muscles had bulged proudly in his arms.

Dried glue oozed from the corners where the joints of wood had been pressed tightly together. Even the great amount of sanding hadn’t dissolved the white substance shining through the stain in excess. All she had left of her husband was his handmade furniture and the memories. Memories of hard-working days dotted with a few carefree ones. Never thinking about tragedies that could befall them in the future. Never realizing just how little time they had had left together.

—

Through the entire night and the next day a fever raged through the unconscious stranger and Sara kept herself busy by dousing his shivering yet heated body with cool peppermint water and anxiously checking to see if the phone lines were working.

They weren’t.

But one good thing had come out of this man entering her life. She was horny. So damn hot and horny she’d forgotten what it had felt like to be a woman. Every time she tugged the sheets off his gorgeous, wounded body and touched his burning skin, she wanted to climb onto him and allow his semi-erect swollen shaft to slide deep into her.

She hadn’t felt this hot since…well, never. Not even with her husband. With him it had been a sweet kind of love, a caring partnership between two people who wanted kids and who wanted to grow old together.

Life with Jack had been…nice.

Just looking at this guy’s hard, toned body complete with bulging muscles in his arms and the biggest cock she’d ever had the pleasure of seeing made her feel…wild, lusty, utterly carnal. Made her want to touch him…
down there
.

Inhaling a deep breath, she dipped her fingers into the cool peppermint salve she was using to treat the abrasions on the stranger’s body. Most of the bruises and cuts were on his toned abdomen and chest, a magnificently wide chest doused with soft curly brown hair that she couldn’t help but run her fingers through.

She felt his heartbeat beneath her hands as she massaged the salve into his hard muscles. Felt the male nipples dance against her palms. Felt the untamed way her breathing quickened as she touched him.

From the corner of her eye she noted movement between his legs.

She inhaled an excited breath as his gorgeously huge cock responded. Riddled with large veins, his shaft pulsed enthusiastically and the purple giant mushroom-shaped cockhead emerged from its sheath. Just as it had done all the other times she’d smeared peppermint salve onto his chest while he’d been unconscious.

Something hot and wildly beautiful uncurled deep inside her lower belly as she stared at his growing erection. She hadn’t been with a man in so long. Hadn’t even wanted to be with one since that horrible stormy night over two years ago.

Even the thin vibrator she’d purchased several months ago hadn’t been able to break her out of her stagnant, non-existent sexual lifestyle. She’d used it a few times trying to bring back the gentle lust she’d felt with her husband. But she’d given up in frustration and had finally faced the fact she was sexually dysfunctional.

Well, obviously not anymore.

A heated flush zipped through her as she watched his balls swell, his cock grow hard, the dot of pre-come glimmer at the tiny slit.

Glancing at the stranger’s face, she noted his full lips were slightly open beneath his scruffy beard as he slept. His eyes were closed and his breathing appeared slow and deep.

Smoothing the salve against the ripples of hard muscles covering his chest, her fingers itched to touch the hard-looking cock. Itched to wrap around his flesh and feel the thick veins bulge against her hands. To shove his hard shaft inside the lonely length of her weeping vagina and feel the pulsing jets of his hot sperm fill her empty womb.

That’s what she missed the most about sex, the feel of a man’s cock spewing his life source into her, the hopes of getting pregnant, of having a baby, a family to love.

She lifted her salve-covered fingers from his chest and reached for the thick base of his long cock. It jerked madly against her fingers.

For a heart-stopping moment, she thought he would awaken and find her doing something she really shouldn’t be doing. But she just couldn’t help it. She’d never seen a penis this large.

Thankfully, he didn’t awaken.

Swallowing back her nervousness, she stroked her fingers against the satiny-hard chunk of his pulsing shaft. Touching him this intimately gave her a delirious rush of lusty pleasure and she found herself growing bolder.

Getting hornier.

Hot cream dripped onto her underwear as she stroked the swollen length. His shaft was much larger than Jack’s, and he was the only man she’d ever had sex with.

His cock grew harder, thicker, and her belly tightened with ferocious need. The frustrated heat coursing through her vagina made her whimper. Made her want to have sex with him.

Have sex with him while he slept?

As if sensing the way her desperate thoughts were heading, he groaned erotically and she quickly let go of his cock. It stood at full attention and her face flamed as she peered at his face expecting him to see how hard she’d made him.

He wasn’t watching her. He slept. Only this time there was the slightest smile on his now-closed lips. Her heart pounded in alarm and she wondered if maybe he’d somehow known she’d been playing with his cock.

Gosh, she hoped he wasn’t feigning sleep. She didn’t have a clue as to how she would explain why her fingers were wrapped around his big erection while he helplessly lay in her bed. Didn’t know how he’d react to such an intimate invasion. For all she knew, he would grab her and throw her down on the bed, and fuck her ruthlessly just so he could relieve what she’d done to him.

Not that she wouldn’t mind getting screwed at this point by her sexy stranger—anything to chase away the heated flush of arousal burning her.

Her gaze flew to the handcuff around his wrist and her arousal diminished somewhat. A guy wearing cuffs meant nothing but trouble. It meant he’d done something wrong and for all she knew, he could be a crazed rapist or murderer.

She needed to keep her hands off him. Needed to figure out what she was going to do with him if the phone lines didn’t get working soon.

Most of all, though, she needed to have a long session with her vibrator.

—

One day later, Sara took her first worry-free break. She felt like one of the walking dead as she edged past the gnarled tree branches of the dead romance tree that had crashed onto her veranda and front yard. At the end of the porch, she leaned wearily against the wooden railing and inhaled the mild late-evening air.

The stranger had kept her away from her vibrator, as his fever had gotten worse. She’d been terribly busy taking turns dousing him with cool peppermint water, listening to his fevered mumblings of cops trying to kill him and using her husband’s secret trick of unleashing his handcuffs. In the end his fever had come down, the handcuffs off, his wounds tended and try as she might to ignore them, Sara began believing the wild tales he muttered while he slept.

Whispers of drug deals, gunrunning rackets, and worst of all, bribing police officers. His feverish confessions raised many questions. Questions that wrapped themselves around her neck like a hangman’s noose, threatening to rip her brain apart.

Biting her lip, she pressed a finger to her aching temple. From his delirious ramblings, she’d figured he was definitely a criminal neck-deep in illegal activities.

She dug into her housecoat pocket and withdrew the wrinkled note she’d found in his leather jacket. Her name and the name of her inn were scribbled on the paper. Who would send him here? And why?

Nearest she could figure out, the man needed a criminal defense lawyer. Her father-in-law was one, but he lived in New York City now.

She shook her head with frustration and gazed at the swirling black water of Peppermint Creek as it roared down the middle of the meadow. The normally quiet creek had swelled to three times its normal size during the Spring thaw, writhing like an out of control serpent, swallowing everything that stood in its path.

Chunks of gray ice floated by, sometimes catching on the low banks, then being knocked loose by another hunk of ice or other debris. The unlucky ones tossed freely out of the swollen water and left to die on the shoreline, slowly melting away.

When she’d come home the other night she’d barely been able to get the truck across the quickly flooding kissing bridge a mile down the road—her only way in and out—would by now be inundated with rushing icy water. It happened every Spring. Hopefully in a couple more days, it might be safe to cross, but with or without the truck, it would be virtually suicidal to cross before then. Unless she could find some way to mount its rough wood planked walls, climb over the steep roof and down the other side. After that another one mile hike over the gently rolling roadway would lead her out to the highway where she’d be able to flag down someone to drive her into town for help.

But even if the stranger was well enough to be left alone, she was too tired to make the attempt. She was totally drained from the tips of her toes right up through to the top of her rip-roaring headache.

The sweet, gentle tug of warm Spring allowed her to become lost in the soothing sounds of the oncoming dusk. The faraway cry of a lonely loon. The distant hoot of a gray owl and to her utmost delight, the occasional shrieks and croaks of frogs from the swamps of the nearby lake as they awoke from a long winter’s nap.

In the dimming evening sky, an arrow of Canada geese whizzed past overhead, skimming the nearby treetops, busily chattering away as they headed north and tried to decide on an appropriate rest area to soothe their weary wings for the night.

The shadows grew deeper, casting a deserted misty glow over the charred remains of her ruined inn and the tiny cabins huddled in the nearby forest. Sara sighed and smiled wistfully as she remembered the first time she’d seen the desolate sprinkle of two dozen boarded-up wooden cottages among the towering pines. And the ghostly appearance of the huge deserted log house, as it sat proudly in the flower-rich meadow.

One look at Jack’s sullen face, her in-laws’ shocked expressions and finally at her sister Jo’s doubtful look, had spurred Sara to square her shoulders, roll up her sleeves and tell them there was lots of work to do and they’d better not waste any time in getting to it.

It had been a challenge getting everything done by the target date of one year. They’d erected a two-story, sixty-room pine log inn that summer with the help of local craftspeople using the giant logs from their own property. They’d outfitted the log house with a new sheet-metal roof and sturdy windows, repaired the ramshackle cottages during Fall and furnished everything during winter. The next year the doors were opened wide for business.