Seducing the Bachelor (The Bachelor Auction Returns Book 3) (19 page)

Talon had been right. He was the heir. And if he wanted, he could come home.

T
alon skidded to
a stop, a poof of dust danced around her feet as she looked up in the trunk of the tree to see Colt, arms wide, holding a window frame as he maneuvered it into position. Wow, he was beautiful. It still hit her like a punch how physically beautiful he was; it hurt her to look at him. He was infinitely precious, and she couldn’t quite believe she was so lucky that he was hers.

The whispered warning that it was only for a few weeks had been silent for several days now. Talon knew his leave would end, and he’d need to go back to Texas, but she didn’t think about it. And they hadn’t talked about the future. Oh, she’d wanted to, but she’d been too scared to bring it up. She didn’t want him to say “Thanks it’s been fun,” and then add that he’d never come back. Never. And before she’d gone to the cabin that glorious afternoon almost three weeks ago and taken off her shirt, she’d asked herself if she could do this, have a physical relationship without involving her heart? And she’d known the answer had been no, but she’d done it anyway, because at least now she would have the memories of being in a relationship. Doing normal things and extraordinary things. Cooking. Watching Parker play baseball. Walking around town. Grocery shopping.

And she’d kept telling herself to notice everything, cherish everything, because it was finite, but somewhere she’d started hoping that it wasn’t. Colt could fall in love with her and Parker. He could want to stay in his childhood home and build a life with her and not reenlist. Or he could reenlist and visit them when he was home again. Falling in love and staying did happen to people, she’d told herself fiercely. It could happen. Why not her?

Now Colt was nailing the window frame in and Talon noticed his movements didn’t seem as graceful and efficient as usual. They were choppier. And he hadn’t noticed her yet. Usually, he was so attuned to everything he heard the truck on the gravel drive and her footsteps as she hurried through the small oak savannah that separated the house from the start of the pastures. But not today.

She watched the flex of his tattoo across his broad shoulders. The twisted trunk of the juniper tree as it “grew” up from the low-slunk waistband of his pants. She remembered what he’d told her, the tree represented many lives and she loved to trace the lines in the trunk and the branches as they grew. Colt stopped work suddenly. Seemed to freeze and then square his shoulders before turning around.

Talon felt like she’d been forced to mainline ice water. Everything in her seized up and froze. His expression was shuttered. Dark. She had no idea how to read him like this, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She hadn’t seen him this far away since the first night she’d driven him here.

“Hi.” She wanted to smile, to recapture the happy mood from earlier when she’d dropped Parker off at school and Noah hadn’t needed her for a couple of hours so she’d raced home.

But even Talon, who’d spent most of her life pretending that things were fine when she was afraid they weren’t, couldn’t go there.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“Nothing.”

He looked so wary. Tears pricked her eyes, but she wouldn’t go there either.

“What happened?”

“I need to keep working,” he said breaking eye contact.

She nearly stamped her foot in frustration. He was shutting her out and the one thing she couldn’t bear from him was distance.

“This was supposed to be a fun after school project with Parker not a mission you have to complete in twenty-four hours like a contestant on
Amazing Race
or something.”

“There’s always been a deadline, Talon.”

And didn’t those words just hypothermia the parts of her that weren’t yet in deep freeze.

“I’m coming up,” she said, walking around the tree to the stairs that he had built with the help of one of the contractors who worked at Big Z’s as well as three of his other bachelor auction buddies. She knew Parker and Colt had told her not to visit the tree house until it was finished, but when he hadn’t met her at the cabin after she’d texted, she’d been worried. The cabin was their spot. Colt ate dinner at the main house with them, but that was it. He wouldn’t make love to her there.

“You’ll distract me.” He walked through the house, that didn’t yet have a door to the other expanded deck that was the first thing he’d completed.

“Good.”

She marched up the stairs determined to at least fight, to not just accept. “Spill it. What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing’s bothering me, Talon.”

“Insert swear word here,” she said. “Yes, something’s up. Stop playing hero. And stop using building a tree house as a shield.” She grabbed the sides of the Dutch door that he’d picked up as if he were going to frame it while she stood there, trying to get him to talk to her. She held on tightly, her eyes glaring into his cool ones through the dirty glass pane. She was pulling the door towards her with all her strength, which he matched, although he didn’t look as if he were making nearly the effort. Probably not any effort at all.

She narrowed her eyes at him. Suddenly he swung his leg out below the door, knocking her off balance, and even as he caught her in one-arm before she hit the deck, he used his other hand to easily prop the door against the outside wall of the house. Talon was looking down at the sanded planks of the deck while Colt leaned in close above her. He lifted her so she came in contact with the hard, long length of him that she was beginning to crave with the intensity of a long term addict. Her breath hitched.

With his free hand he pulled the band out of her hair so that it tumbled over her shoulders and in front of her face.

He hissed in a breath. She reached up and wrapped her fingers around his arm, not to push him away, but to hold on tight.

“I don’t want to talk.” His voice was a growl in her ear that hit her like a flamethrower and, when he turned her to face him, she was already slicing her fingers through his hair and slamming her mouth into his in a desperate kiss that burned through both. Something was wrong and she was terrified, but she continued to kiss him, even as her fingers unbuttoned his pants and started to tug them down his hips at the same time he pulled apart her shirt, western-style snaps popping. He unclipped her bra and tossed it aside with her shirt, his mouth fastening hot and hard on her breasts while his hand cupped her ass and ground her into him. She whimpered in pure pleasure.

“How do you do that?” His ragged voice demanded against her breast. “Get me so jacked up for you in an instant?”

There was no way Talon could answer because his fingers made short work of her button fly jeans and they were already pooled around her ankles and his thumb was parting her slick seam and she moaned against his mouth as he expertly pressed and flicked her clit.

“You’re so ready for me,” he said, satisfaction hard in his voice.

He lowered her to the wood floor and lifted her arms over her head so they brushed the branches that Colt had cut to be the railing of the platform deck.

“Hold on to this.” He commanded, his voice low and intense.

Talon was so excited she could barely breathe, and she watched him almost in a haze of need. Her fingers curved around the wood. He already had her boots off, socks, panties, and jeans and had tossed them over his shoulder where they landed in a scattered pile behind him. His hands circled her ankles and he pulled her legs wide, his burning gaze fastened on her glistening, swollen feminine core.

“Don’t let go.” He commanded as she did so she could sit up and reach for him.

“Why?” she asked breathlessly.

His eyes bored into hers with the same intensity he’d been watching her physical arousal build.

“Because then I’ll stop.” His fingers began a seductive dance at her core that had Talon arching off the wood deck. “And you’re not going to want me to stop.”

She thrashed trying to arch more fully into his hand. She wanted, no she needed him to… “Please, Colt, please.” She chanted as he brought her quickly to the brink and then he backed off, and then each time she let go of the railing he stopped and leaned back on his heels utterly out of reach.

“You’re so wet,” he whispered when her hands anchored to the railing again, and he watched her erratic breathing, the pulse beating in her throat, and the flush spreading over her face and neck and chest. He leaned forward, brushing her parted lips with a gentle kiss so sweet her eyes pricked with tears. “And I’m so, so thirsty.”

He scooped his hands under her thighs so her legs were over his broad, muscled shoulders, and she was completely exposed to him. “Don’t let go,” he said, his mouth an inch from her throbbing, weeping mound. “Promise.”

“Okay.” She could barely get the word out.

He inhaled her aroused scent and his eyes drifted shut sensuously before he opened them again and the fierce, commanding warrior was back. “You didn’t promise.”

“I promise,” she said quickly. “I won’t let go.”

Of you
.

And then he lowered his head and Talon was awash in waves of the most powerful pleasure that dragged her further out to a sea of roiling sensation. She had no idea how she kept holding on to the railing because she felt like she was drowning and Colt was the only safe port in sight. She thrashed under him as her first climax crested but he only renewed his sensual assault by sliding two fingers deep into her core and stoking the front of her vaginal wall, which he’d discovered one morning as her most intense erogenous zone while his tongue and teeth continued to work her clitoris.

She could hear herself screaming his name and her vision seemed to dim and narrow so the canopy of branches and leaves and ribbons of blue shy greyed and fuzzed for a moment as her second climax swamped her and seemed to continue to push her toward some unseen shore.

“Keep holding.” His voice seemed far away and his mouth left her for a moment as he dug a condom out of his pocket and barely had time to sheath himself before he rammed into her.

“Yes.” Talon bit out. “Yes, yes, yes.” He powerfully surged in and out of her.

“Push back into me.” He ordered. “With all of your strength.”

She used the branch as a springboard to try to push into each thrust that seemed to increase in strength and speed so she felt like she was just trying to hang on to her sanity so she could stay on this ride. A Six Flags roller coaster couldn’t be this thrilling.

He lifted her butt off the ground and angled her so, as he surged in and out of her, he was hitting her spot over and over again and all the tension coiled up like it was one of those retractable tape measures.

“Like that?”

“Yes, oh, God, yes.” And she had no idea what else she said, except everything seemed to start and end with Colt and she never ever wanted to stop calling out his name.

It was easy for her to read him now when he was about to come, but she needed him to hang on just a little longer, so she leveraged herself a little high and pushed back harder to match his thrusts and just as her climax hit, she could feel his and he collapsed on top of her and his heavy weight was the best thing she’d ever felt in her life.

Her fingers were numb and blistered from holding on to the railing and she pried them off so she could wrap her arms around him and hold him close, feel his heart slam into hers and his sweat mingle with hers. Like usual, Colt recovered first and too soon he rolled away from her and the separation pierced her heart. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky. Talon curled into him, but this time he didn’t slide his arm around her and pull her close.

“You were right.” She tried to find her voice and strive for a lighthearted approach after she felt like he’d reached in and touched her heart and soul with his intense, aggressive lovemaking. “That was definitely better than talking any day.”

“I got a call this morning, Talon,” he said after a long moment of tense silence. “I have to report to base tomorrow.”

Her breath caught. It was worse than she had imagined. Tomorrow. The word was like a stage four diagnosis to her fragile heart.

“I thought you had another week,” she whispered.

“Me, too.”

And then he threaded his fingers through her curls and pulled her into his body. She could feel him trembling and somehow that helped steady her so she wouldn’t cling or cry. He was feeling it, too, and she wouldn’t make it harder for him.

“Is it…” She paused and gathered her courage so she could understand because she would have to deal with this like an adult and be strong for herself and Parker. “Is it a long mission?”

For a moment, hope flared. Maybe it was just a meeting or a couple of days thing and then he could decide, or… her imagination spun out as it always did, possible scenarios where the bad news wasn’t so devastating.

“I don’t know, Talon. They won’t tell me anything on the phone and everything I do is classified.”

She nodded like she understood. She should understand, only she was feeling so cold and vulnerable and alone even though she was still pressed into his body.

“But I don’t work much in the states, Talon, except sometimes when I’m training.”

He was going. This was it. What she’d tried to steel herself against. What she’d told herself she could handle. And she would handle it. She had to.

“If this is your last day, do you want to do something special?”

“That was pretty special.”

She closed her eyes and breathed him in, and then let her palm skim over his body, wanting to memorize everything about him from the way he felt under her hands to the way he smelled and looked and talked and…“I meant you might want to meet your friends for dinner or beer and pool at the Wolf Den.”

“Yeah, exactly how I want to spend my last night before going back to work, with a bunch of guys from my past who talk too much trash when I could be having dinner with you and Parker.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped herself around him like she was a koala clinging to a bamboo branch. Still a few tears leaked out. And a few more.