Blood & Rust (Lock & Key #4) (66 page)

He swept the coat off my shoulders, and it crumpled onto the floor. “Fucking hell,” he breathed, his eyes slowly taking me in from top to bottom.

I wore the corset. And nothing else.

“Get naked,” I said.

He did.

My eyes jumped at the sight of his hard length, and he noticed.

“You know how to make my Brando very, very happy and very hard.” Butler smoothed his hands down the sides of the silky fabric. “This isn’t coming off you just yet.”

He stared at me, raw and blatant hunger in his eyes, as he unsnapped the tiny pearl buttons of the panty. His fingers brushed against me, and I almost came right there and then.

He let out a small groan. “I want to fuck my gift package.”

“Please fucking do.”

He threw me over the arm of his couch and kicked my fantastically booted legs open wide.

He slammed into me.

“Yes!” My fingers dug into the sofa cushion, the throb pulsating through every part of me.

His arm wrapped around my middle and held me up as he plunged deeper inside me. I came quickly, collapsing into the cushions.

He bit my earlobe. “Not done with you yet, my queen.”

His slick erection against my flesh along with that husky, hoarse voice summoned my body forth like some sort of call to the animal in me.

“Oh goody,” I gasped.

He dragged me down to the floor and pressing my booted legs back against my chest, he pounded into me.

The glimmer in his eyes was unmistakable, the musk of his perspiration, the intensity of his desire making me desperate for more. The wave towered over me again. Never before in the history of Tania had this happened. Violent sensations coursed through me. I wasn’t sure where I began and ended.

But I knew who was at the heart of it.

“Markus…”

His eyes held mine, and I was pulled under in the deep blue of his ocean.

There was no going back to average, to routine, to indifference, to settling, to being alone.

No, not ever.

“I see you, Tania. I see you, baby, and you’re everything.”

“
WHAT KIND OF SURPRISE
?”

Butler pulled a strap on his saddlebag, fastening it. “Will you get on my bike, so I can get us there first?”

“Does this mean I have to ride on your bike with my eyes closed?”

He raised his eyes skyward and brought them back to me. “Tania, all I’m asking is that you let me take you somewhere special, and I promise you, all will be revealed.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He handed me my helmet, and we got on his Harley.

I held on to him, pressed into him, as he took us out of Meager, past the roadside creeks lined with purple and golden wildflowers. We headed east through farmland that lay between Meager and Pine Needle.

My heart beat faster, my breath sped up, and it wasn’t from the wind whipping over me or my man’s strong body shielding me, as it propelled us forward on his beloved hulk of roaring metal, like a bionic orgasm. No, I had a good idea where we were going, and I hadn’t been there in years.

The grasses rippling in the early morning wind stretched to infinity. The vast sky was dotted with soft white clumps of clouds that shed a dappling of darkness here and there over the rolling fields of pale green soy, the gold waves of wheat. I sat up in the saddle. This was dramatic take-your-breath-away splendidness.

And there, there they were, my and my dad’s favorite—the glorious sunflower fields. Sunflowers for as long and wide as the eye could see.

I squeezed his middle.

Butler was taking me home. Home to my family’s farm, to our sunflowers. Land that had been in my family for generations, Dakotan born and bred folk who tended their land with love and pride, and sweat and tears.

He slowed down his bike on the edge of the road and cut his engine.

I tugged on his jacket. “How do you know that this is the property?”

“I did my homework, baby. I wanted you to see it again with me, and I wanted you to show it to me.” He took the helmet from my hands. “You’ve talked about it, but something in your tone of voice always struck me as far away. I asked your mom, and she showed me the photos of you here on this land, at that farmhouse.” He gestured at my great-great-grandparents’ sprawling house. The house that I’d been brought to after birth and raised in, the house I’d left after my father’s death. The house I hadn’t stepped foot in for decades.

He ripped off his gloves and held a hand out to me. My heart chugged through molasses and wine, and I took hold of his warm hand. Together, we walked along the edge of the field.

The sunflowers were at their peak now in early September. The bees were working, and I closed my eyes and listened to their frantic buzzing, the rustling of the thick stalks in the warm breeze.

“I always thought sunflowers would smell more flowery out in the field,” he said. “But they smell of green, growing things, and the outdoors. Almost like a resin, isn’t it?”

“The petals and the leaves smell like that. The bees can smell the blossoms though. Sunflowers need the bees. We’d bring them in special to pollinate.”

“The flowers are huge. I always thought it was odd that they’re not harvested at their peak, that they have to be dried up first.”

“Most people don’t know that,” I said.

“I know. Hell of a lot of sunflower farms up north. Been around them for years, ridden through them, but I’ve never been so up close. Like now.” He brought our hands to his mouth, planting a kiss on mine.

“I always liked that a sunflower gets to live out its life naturally on the stalk,” I said. “Not cut down early or in its fantastic prime like any other flower. A sunflower gets to go full circle, from seed to strong green stalk, vibrant huge flower to brown, dry, and bowed over. That’s when the seeds are ready to harvest. People think the dried out sunflowers are ugly then, but to some of us, it’s beautiful.”

“I like that, too.”

I pressed my body against his. Yes, most people thought the dried sunflowers were spent, done, withered. Wasn’t that how Butler and I had seen ourselves on our journeys back to Meager? But we had proven ourselves wrong.

Butler swiped the pollen off his jacket. “Whoa.”

“Be careful. The flowers are sticky. If we keep walking through them, we’ll be covered in pollen before long. They’re difficult to navigate now anyhow.”

He squeezed my hand. “I’d rather be covered in you.” He threw his arm around me, tucking me into his side, and gently kissed me. He brushed back strands of hair from my face, his eyes soft, faraway.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I want to show you the Pacific,” he said. “I want to listen to the crash of the water with you. Swim together. Get you on a surfboard. I haven’t been back there in a long, long time.”

My eyes flooded and I smiled through it.

We had learned that it was okay to want things, to change things, to make things better.

“Would we go out there on your bike?” I asked.

“Hell yes. Only way to see all that beautiful country. Unless you—”

“Let’s do it.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. I’m sure Jill won’t mind running things on her own for a couple of weeks.”

Jill had become my partner in the gallery. My business loan from the bank hadn’t come through, but Jill and Boner had. They’d made a small but healthy investment in the Rusted Heart. Jill took care of most of the day-to-day tasks and sold her Firefly Wishes jewelry as part of the store’s contemporary collection. Her lower-priced faux baubles were extremely popular with ladies of all ages, and her pricier precious metal and stone line was starting to take off. Having someone I knew, loved, and trusted holding down the fort was beyond wonderful. More importantly, sharing that fort and my vision with someone who was just as enthusiastic and devoted as me was extremely satisfying.

Butler squeezed my hand. “Scarlett, I brought you here today to your family’s farm for a reason.”

“What? Not for sex in the sunflowers?”

He let out a laugh. “Not yet.”

“Oh, goody.”

He held my gaze, his spine straightened. He was serious.

“Marry me, Tania. I know the ink is still fresh on your divorce, but I want to be with you, in the biggest, most absolute—”

“Unequivocal?”

A grin split his face. “Most fucking unequivocal way possible. So, if that’s a piece of paper stamped by the county and the state, let’s get on it.”

“The paper doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that we’re together.” My eyes stung, and I swallowed hard.

“Am I sensing a but?”

I shifted my weight. “Does this mean you’re okay with me not telling you everything about Finger right now? I know it’s a lot to ask of you. From the beginning, it was a problem.”

“I still don’t like it. But, obviously, it’s real important to you, so I’m respecting that. I get there are reasons. Believe me. So, I’m taking that leap for you, Tania. For us. As long as you’re holding my hand and by my side. As long as you’re only mine, forever mine.”

“I am, forever and only.”

He squeezed my hands. “I believe you, baby.”

“I’m honored that you would do this for me. Take this leap of faith.”

“I haven’t had faith in anything for years now, Tania. You’ve asked me to do something so against every instinct, every—”

“I know.”

I knew. The discomfort, the struggle, had been written all over his face, his body, since we’d gotten together. It was not the best of situations, but in a weird way, we both needed this. He needed to trust, and I needed to be trusted.

I curled my fingers in his shirt. “I promise your faith is well placed. You do it for your brothers every day.”

“Yes, I do. Every day.” His teeth dragged along his bottom lip. His thumb stroked over my mouth.

“I have to have my mom with me. I can’t leave her.”

“I know. So, I guess I’m moving in.”

I rose up on my toes. “We could knock down the wall between my and my brother’s old rooms and add a bathroom. Ta-da—master suite. That is, if you don’t mind, if you—”

“You’ve been thinking about it, huh?”

“Yep.”

“I like it,” he said.

“And I was thinking that we could take our time with fixing up my great-grandmother’s big house in Pine Needle and eventually move there.”

“That idea, I really, really like. But first things first.”

From his pocket, he took out a small black velvet box and held it out to me. My breath jammed in my chest. “For you.”

I snapped open the tiny box. A white gold band with an emerald-shaped black stone glittered in the sun.

“This is why I brought you here, baby. I wanted to do it here.”

“It’s beautiful. It’s—”

“A black diamond on Black Hills gold for my vixen queen. I couldn’t give you Astrid’s crown, but I can give you this.”

I lunged at him, and he lifted me up in his arms on a groan.

The box went flying.

“Shit, the ring!”

“Oh no!”

“Damn it! It popped out of the box—”

We both fell to the ground and searched the dirt, scrambling over the patch of earth.

A dark glittering in a dusty ray of sunlight.

I grabbed it. “Here it is!”

His face tensed. “Are you putting it on or what?”

“Yes! Yes!” I put it in his hand. “You do it!”

He slid the ring of rings on my finger.

“I love it. I—” I caught his gaze.

Enthusiasm and satisfaction were in those brilliant blue eyes that matched the sky above us, a hint of vulnerability in the set of his jaw.

I threw my arms around him and held him close. “I love you, Butler, and I can’t wait to marry you.”

Right there, on our knees, in the dirt of my forefathers and mothers, with the bees buzzing, the hard sun breaking through the tall sunflowers, rustling in the hot air, waving over us, we claimed our happiness. Vagabonds, the two of us, yet we had brought each other back home; home to one of the most difficult spots on the planet, this beautiful patch of earth.

I held on tight to the man of my unexpected dreams, and he held me even tighter.

Who needed a man who gave you roses?

My man gave me the earth and the sun.

“Scarlett, we’ve got to get moving.”