Full Throttle (Fast Track) (20 page)

“I don’t know. Nailing Dad?” They looked at each other and cracked up. “That was their Saturday afternoon thing, you know.”

“Oh, I know.” Nolan watched Mark throw his arms up in triumph. “And I wouldn’t call me old around your wife, you know. She and I were born the same year. You’ll have your ass handed to you on a platter if you’re not careful.”

“Good point. But come on, let’s go to the bar they’re at. You want to see Eve drunk, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen it. It’s highly entertaining.”

“I can’t say as I’ve seen Shawn drunk.”

Nolan glanced at his cell phone. “By now, they’re probably challenging each other to a drinking contest or who can deep throat the penis straw. You know how they are.”

“And you don’t want to see that? Because I do.” Rhett was hard just thinking about it. He loved the competitive side of Shawn. And deep throating a penis straw? He was in.

“You make a solid case.” Nolan finished his beer. “You okay with it if Shawn gets mad at you?”

“Yeah.” Rhett gave him a smug look. “I know how to handle her.”

“Oh, big words, little man. We’ll see.” Nolan clapped him on the back. “Hey, guys!” he called to the rest of the group. “Let’s roll!”

There was resistance from the others, who were envisioning very pissed off wives waiting for them, but in the end, since Rhett was the new groom, he made the decision.

Which is how he wound up walking into the Silver Buckle just in time to see his wife throw one leg over the mechanical bull and hoist her sexy ass up onto it.

His sisters were hooting and hollering, and Eve was standing on the edge of the pen, arms crossed.

“Uh-oh,” Nolan said, coming up beside him. “Eve has her psyche-out-the-opponent look on her face. Twenty bucks says the girls have a bet going already.”

“You want me to bet you that they’re in the middle of a bet? That’s stupid.” All Rhett wanted to do was grab a seat and watch the action unfold for a while, unnoticed by the women. “Hold back for a minute. Let’s not let them know we’re here yet.”

Considering there were six of them, it wasn’t going to be easy to stay incognito, but they could manage five minutes.

“I hope to God my wife isn’t planning on riding that bull,” Dave said. “I can see it now—she’ll throw out her back, and that will be the end of life as I know it for the next two weeks.” He shook his head, glum.

Rhett nudged him. “Come on. She’s not that stupid. She knows her limits. Unlike my wife.”

“Your wife is riding like she was born with a bull between her legs.”

“Excuse me?” Rhett glared at him before swiveling his gaze quickly to see Shawn, her slim thighs straddling the bull as it slowly reared up and then back down. Her posture was loose, her body fluid, moving in harmony with the mechanism. She looked relaxed and hot as hell.

“Sorry, that didn’t sound right.”

“No, it sure in the hell didn’t.” Rhett unzipped his athletic jacket and put his hands in his front pockets. “You can go get me a beer to make up for it.” He was too busy watching his wife to hit the bar himself.

The bar employee had turned up the bull, much to everyone’s delight, and Shawn was working harder now to stay on, her thighs clamping in a way that made his tongue thick, her breasts bouncing with a vigor that got his blood pumping.

“Fine,” Dave grumbled.

“Dawn. Straight ahead,” Nolan told him.

Their middle sister had spotted them, and she was picking her way through the crowd. “What the hell are you guys doing here?” She glared at her husband. “You guys can’t crash a bachelorette party!”

Rhett didn’t respond, mesmerized by Shawn as she held on but then lost control and sailed off the bull in a graceful dismount, landing on her perfect bottom. She bounced up immediately, and there seemed to be some haggling going on between her, Eve, and Charity.

“It’s a free country,” Nolan told her. “Hey, what are they doing, besides the obvious? Do they have a bet going on? Eve has her serious face on.”

“How can you tell the difference?” Rhett asked.

Nolan punched him in the arm.

“They have a bet to see who can stay on the bull longer. Best combined total time out of three runs.”

“Seriously? Leave it to them to not be satisfied with just a sudden-death one-shot ride.” Nolan grinned. “God, I love my wife.”

Rhett had to say he loved his as well.

He started. He loved her?

God, he did. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, maybe gradually, one laugh, one orgasm at a time, but over the last ten days, he had fallen hard for her. He admired her gumption, her strength, her sweetness. He took immense pleasure in giving her pleasure night after night, in making her more and more his.

“Shawn will win, I can guarantee it,” Rhett told his brother.

Nolan’s eyebrow shot up. “What makes you so certain? Eve is as stubborn as they come. If anyone can make a mechanical bull her bitch, it’s her.”

“Oh, good grief,” Dawn snapped. “You’re going to turn their competition into a secondary competition? You’re worse than my kids, I swear.”

Eve was up on the bull now, and she pulled an impressive ride, one that was arguably the same length, if not longer than Shawn’s. When she fell off, she leaned over and mimicked “Call me” to the bull with her thumb and pinky up to her ear.

Nolan let out a laugh. “That’s my girl.”

“This is Shawn’s last run,” Dawn said.

While Rhett’s cock grew harder and harder with each bounce and jolt of Shawn on the bull, her thighs clamped on like she was riding him the way he had instructed her to the night before, hands behind her back. Damn. He loved his sexy wife.

“You look feral,” Nolan told him. “Ease up, brother.”

“What? Shawn is hot, I can’t help it.”

She lost control and flew off the bull. There was haggling and an intense discussion to the side, with Sammy clearly the timekeeper. She raised Shawn’s arm, declaring her the winner, as Shawn whooped in triumph. Eve didn’t look pissed. She was grinning.

“Should we announce our illustrious presence?” Nolan asked him.

It appeared Dawn already had. She’d rejoined the girls, and there was finger-pointing in their direction. Eight sets of female eyes swung their way.

“We’re in for a world of hurt,” was Jared’s opinion.

“If this were a musical, this would signal the start of a dance number,” Rhett said, amused by the thought. “Angry girls sexy dance in unison around the bull pen. Men stride up and grab a partner to a choreographed tango.”

Nolan held his hand out. “Give me your man card. You have never sounded more like a girl than right now.”

“Screw you,” Rhett told him. “It’s a joke. It’s funny. Now you bitches can stand here quaking in your boots about what your women might do to you. I’m going to
get
my woman.”

He started to walk, moving toward his wife.

He heard Jared ask Nolan, “How does he get that caveman shit to work for him? I would get my balls ripped off and stuffed in my mouth if I pulled what he does.”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

Rhett smiled. He knew exactly how he got away with it.

Shawn knew he respected her above all things. Shawn trusted him.

And it was time to tell her that he had fallen in love with her and wanted their temporary marriage to become a very real one.

SHAWN
was glowing in the triumph of beating Eve by exactly two seconds. Eve was taking it well, joking that she had thrown it so that Shawn could win at her own bachelorette party.

“It was the only kind thing to do,” Eve told her. “And by the way, I have a feeling my thighs are going to be killing me tomorrow. Good thing it’s Sunday. I have a few days to recover.”

Shawn grinned at her. “Yeah, it’s harder than it looks, I’m not going to lie.”

“Look behind you,” Dawn said, pointing. “It looks like our party has been crashed. I swear, what were they thinking?”

Shawn and Eve turned and there were Rhett and Nolan and the other guys, watching them from across the room. “How long have they been here?” she asked, her heart starting to race. Just the sight of her husband got her blood pumping.

“Long enough that they caught both your final rides. Voyeurs.” She sounded disgusted.

Shawn wondered if she was a disgrace to wives that she actually wanted her husband to be there. And that it actually turned her on that he had seen her ride a bull. “I wonder whose idea it was to come here?”

“It had to be Rhett or Nolan. The other guys, one, know better. Two, they don’t really want to see us. Y’all are still in the honeymoon phase, but never fear, the need to see each other all the time will wear off.”

Somehow Shawn didn’t think she would be like that. Given that her adult relationships had never been particularly all-encompassing, romantic, or devotional, she found that with Rhett, it was totally different. She both loved and was terrified by her need, her want, to be with him.

“Maybe I don’t want it to wear off,” she murmured as Rhett started toward her, his stride confident, Nolan immediately falling in step behind him.

“It’s not practical,” Dawn stated.

Something about her tone had Shawn wondering if Dawn and her husband were not quite okay. But she wasn’t about to ask her here, not now.

“If Shawn doesn’t care that the guys are here, then I don’t suppose you should,” Eve told her. “It’s her bachelorette party.”

“I don’t mind,” Shawn said.

In fact, when Rhett came over and smiled at her, immediately pulling her into his arms, she didn’t want to do anything other than kiss the stuffing out of him. So she did.

“Mm. That was an awesome greeting,” he murmured in her ear, stroking his hands down her back. “Nice bull riding.”

“I have strong thighs.”

“Something I’ve always admired about you.”

“So what are you doing here?” she asked him.

“I was bored. I missed you. I thought if we’re already married, why shouldn’t we spend the night partying together, instead of separately?”

“Sound logic,” she told him. “Though you may have pissed your sisters off.”

But he just shrugged. “It’s not their night. It’s ours. And I found myself wanting to dance with my wife.”

Oh, damn, he was just so . . . much. It wasn’t charm, it wasn’t being smooth, it was something else. Something . . . more. He looked at her like that, and she melted. She gave in, she opened to him, she forgot who she was, and wanted nothing more than to be with him, to please him. It was exhilarating. Awful.

“Are you asking?” she said, to remind him that outside of their bedroom, she called the shots, so to speak. Not that she did, really. Rhett was by nature a dominating personality, and even when he was being polite and thoughtful and offering to cook dinner or change her oil or take her to the movies, he tended to initiate the order of their days. She didn’t mind, not really, because if she said no to anything, he would change gears without question. If she wanted pasta instead of steak, he would go to the grocery store and get pasta, so she didn’t care that he had a strong personality.

But she worried that she should.

“Yes. Will you dance with me, Shawn, my beautiful wife?”

“I would love to.” The ease with which he used the word
wife
made her feel warm inside. It made her wonder if he was wondering what she was wondering—that maybe they shouldn’t automatically dismiss their relationship as temporary, as fake. That maybe it could be, should be, something real.

As they swayed to the music with more feeling than any particular skill, Shawn smiled up at him. “Are we going to survive this party tomorrow?”

“It will be fun.”

“I’ve never seen you in a suit.”

“I’ve never seen you in a wedding dress. I’m not sure my blood pressure will be able to handle it.”

His hands were warm on her waist, and he was inching farther south than was really appropriate for a public place, but she let him for now. Once he reached her ass, she would stop him, but for now she was enjoying his touch. “I don’t think you’re that delicate. You’ll be fine.”

“There is delicate, then there is vulnerable. You have no idea how vulnerable I am with you,” he said, his voice low and near her ear.

Shawn shivered, the pulsing beat of the country ballad reverberating through her feet, her breasts, her inner thighs. Or maybe that was just him. But the room was warm, the lighting low, their bodies close and intimate, and she was barely aware that anyone else existed.

“I don’t see how I can make you vulnerable,” she whispered, inching her fingers up to stroke the back of his neck. He smelled like cologne and beer. He didn’t usually wear cologne and she found it appealing, like he had kicked his own manly scent up a notch. “I think it’s the other way around and sometimes it pisses me off.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

She hadn’t really meant to say that, or to get into a discussion about their relationship on the sticky dance floor, but her doubts were getting the best of her. She wanted so much to be with Rhett in a way that was real, yet at the same time it freaked her out. Shouldn’t she want to be independent? Shouldn’t she be ticked like his sisters that he had crashed her girl’s night?

“I don’t know,” was her cop-out response.

But Rhett shook his head. “Don’t pull that. You know you can trust me. Tell me what you’re feeling.”

Shit. How did she explain her jumbled thoughts and feelings?

“It’s just that . . . well, I think about you every day, Rhett. I want to please you, I want to be with you all the time . . . I feel like I’m being
absorbed
by you. It scares the shit out of me.”

Just hearing her own words had her heart rate increasing. It sounded crazy. She was crazy for him.

He didn’t look particularly alarmed. His nostrils flared and if anything, he looked aroused. “That’s funny, because I feel the same way, yet my understanding was that this is how falling in love works, Shawn.”

“Falling in love?” she asked dumbly. Was he saying he loved her?

“Yes. Falling in love. Which is what I’m doing.” He softly brushed her hair off her cheek. “Do you think that is what you’re doing?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe. Yes.” Way to commit. She mentally kicked herself. Then she took a deep breath and added, “Yes. I am falling in love with you.”

She’d never said those words to anyone. Not even to her high school boyfriend, who she had been sure she would spend the rest of her life with. She’d never told a man she loved him. While this was still one step away from that, it was pretty damn close. Her cheeks burned with the overwhelming realization of what was happening. This was it. This was major.

He smiled at her. “So what do we do now?”

Hell if she knew. “I guess we dance. And we live together. And tomorrow we have a wedding reception.”

Rhett’s thumb rubbed over her bottom lip. “So pragmatic. Where’s the romance, darlin’?”

That made her grin back at him, relieved that he knew her so well already that he was lightening the mood. That he was allowing her to steer this conversation. “Read a novel,” she told him. “You’re barking up the wrong tree if you want a gushy girl.”

“Oh, I think I can get you to gush a little . . . you get more romantic in bed than you realize.”

“I wasn’t aware that begging was romantic,” she said wryly.

But Rhett shook his head. “That’s not what I was referring to. I was thinking more about the way your eyes darken and your skin flushes and the way your fingers trace my face like you can’t quite believe I’m real.”

It was true. She did all that. And she blushed anew to realize that he was so aware of her and her reactions. “Sometimes I wonder if you are real,” she whispered. “Sometimes I think that I’m going to wake up with the clock rewound and find none of the last two weeks has happened.”

“How would that make you feel?”

“Heartbroken,” she told him truthfully.

“Me, too.” His green eyes were shiny with sincerity.

A tap on her arm made Shawn jump. She glanced over and saw Eve and Nolan watching them in amusement.

“You do know you’re slow dancing to nothing, don’t you? The music stopped sixty seconds ago.”

Oh, Lord, she was right. The dance floor was completely empty except for them.

“But the rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum,” Rhett said, deadpan.

Shawn lost it, laughter spilling out. That was such a Rhett comeback, and she loved it.

Nolan shook his head. “Bro, my hat is off to you. You managed to find the one woman in the world who doesn’t think you’re a freak.”

 • • • 

RHETT
opened the back door of Harley’s car for Shawn and eyed his wife’s backside as she climbed in.

“I saw that,” Eve told him, sliding past him to follow Shawn into the car.

“I don’t care,” he told her with an unrepentant grin. “And why aren’t you going with Nolan? Not that I don’t enjoy your presence thoroughly, but I would think you’d want to go home with your husband.”

“He has to drive Jared home. He’s shit-faced. I’m dead on my feet, so I’ll get back faster this way.”

“So Harley’s dropping you first, then us?”

“Yes. It’s on the way,” she said defensively.

It was a toss-up whether it was or not, but Rhett didn’t care to argue. He was damn happy. Happy as a dead pig in the sunshine. So he just smiled at her and got in the car. “Switch seats with me, Eve. I want to sit next to Shawn.”

“Kiss my butt,” was her reply. “You can fondle her later. I’m not climbing over the top of you so you can sit next to her. God, so high school.”

“You are tired,” he commented. That was a bit sharp even for Eve.

“I’m exhausted. I drank just enough to dance like a fool, but not enough to not feel the crash. So don’t piss me off or I’ll cream your corn.”

“I’m not afraid of you, big talker.” Rhett leaned around her to talk to Shawn, intentionally getting his elbow in Eve’s face. “Baby, I hope we don’t need to be anywhere first thing tomorrow because I’m not ready for sleeping yet. I’ve got at least two hours in me.”

“Gross,” was Charity’s opinion from the front passenger seat.

He just laughed. Shawn smiled at him, bundled up in her coat. Eve pinched his arm.

“Move it,” she said.

Settling back, he found himself feeling very conversational. “So Harley, you’re quiet up there. Did you have fun?”

“It was fine,” was Harley’s clipped reply from the front seat.

Charity snorted.

“Wrong question, hon,” Shawn told him in a warning voice.

Was it wrong that he was more interested in the fact that Shawn had called him “hon” than whatever was bothering Harley?

The thought guilted him into saying, “I’m sorry, Harley. Didn’t mean to poke a sore spot.”

“I didn’t know you were crushing on him,” Charity exploded at her sister. “If you would actually share something with me once in a while, I wouldn’t have kissed him. You know, it’s really very hurtful that you won’t let me in, Harley. I tell you
everything
.”

“Wait, so this is my fault?” Harley asked in shock, taking a turn a little hard and running them over the curb.

“Maybe I should drive,” Rhett suggested. “Were you drinking, Harley?”

“No. I cut myself off three hours ago because that’s what I do,” Harley said. “I am the driver and the wallflower while Charity gets drunk and dances half-naked with the guy she totally knew I was into!”

“I’m out,” Rhett said, turning to Eve. “I can’t do the girl-fight thing.”

“Don’t look at me,” Eve said, shrugging. “My suggestion to arm wrestle it out isn’t really practical at the moment.”

But Shawn had it under control. She was already leaning forward, murmuring to the twins, reassuring Harley that Charity had not known about the guy and suggesting to Charity that if she wanted her sister to confide in her, she should consider allowing her a word in edgewise on occasion.

Rhett leaned against the window and watched her sort the whole mess out in a matter of minutes. After they pulled into Eve’s apartment complex and Harley parked the car, there were tears and hugs and apologies, and then suddenly all was okay. It was, in his eyes, as miraculous as Moses parting the Nile.

“That’s why I leave this stuff to her,” Eve told him. “See you tomorrow with my happy face on.” She gave him a smile and got out of the car after he opened the door and stood up to let her pass.

“Thanks. Shawn is pretty amazing, isn’t she?”

“I’m glad to see you realize it,” she told him. Then with a wave to her girlfriends, Eve went into the apartment building she and Nolan had recently moved into after the sale of her condo, and Rhett waited to make sure the door firmly closed behind her.

“Eve’s in. We can roll.” And with his sister-in-law safely home, he could cuddle with his wife. His wife. That’s right.

She came willingly when he urged her to tuck in up against his side.

“I’m freezing still,” she said. “It must be thirty degrees out tonight. I know I can always count on you to warm me up.”

He moved his eyebrows up and down.

She laughed. “Well, yeah, there’s that, but what I really meant was that you radiate heat all the time. Your body temperature must be ten degrees higher than most people.”

“I think I would be dead if that were the case.”

Shawn rolled her eyes. “Smart-ass.”

He really enjoyed that Shawn was perfectly comfortable giving him shit. It was one of the things he loved about her.