Seduction on the Sand (The Billionaires of Barefoot Bay #2) (12 page)

“You know,” he whispered with a sly smile. “We can’t let poor Dominic see this. He’ll go nuts.” Laughing, he pushed her up and brought them both to a stand, kissing her again and walking her away from the pens, around the trailer, to the shade of a massive oak tree.
 

Still joined at the mouth and hip and hands, he leaned her against the tree trunk and pushed his entire body against hers as they kissed. His fingers found the apron tie in the back, snapping the string so he could get one less layer of material between his body and hers.
 

But it was stuck around her neck. “Take this off,” he ordered.

“Becker...”

“Not everything, just the apron. I have a no-apron make-out policy.”

She put both hands on his shoulders and inched him back. “You have two buck bites on your arms, your face is bleeding, and my guess is this”—she gave a gentle squeeze to his ribs, making him grunt in pain—“hurts like a mother.”

Still cringing, he nodded. “But, so does”—he rocked his lower half into her, biting his lip to hold back a groan of pain and pleasure—“this.”

She searched his face, desire crashing with common sense in her golden-brown eyes. “I should take care of your other injuries...first.”

“First.” His smile tipped up. “That’s encouraging.”

“Becker, come on. I barely know you.”

He slid his hand up her arm, lingering over her shoulder, tempted to take it south and torture her by touching her breasts again, but he dragged his palm in the opposite direction to cup her jaw. “What better way to get to know me?”

“Oh, I can think of several. Talking. Exchanging information. Watching you to see what kind of man you are.”

“I’m a buck-saving, goat-toe-clipping, soap-naming, hay-baling assistant goatherd.”

She laughed. “Well, when you put it that way, what more could I want?”

“Exactly.” He smothered her neck with kisses again, licking her lightly until he got to her mouth, where he gave it full force. She stiffened and melted and moaned, meeting each sweet press of his lips with one of her own.

“Becker...” She gave his bruised ribs another squeeze. Hard.

“Yeow!”

“Let’s get you cleaned up and in a shower.” She reached up and kissed his cheek, stinging the spot where he knew a goose egg was growing under his eye. “A cold one.”

She should have said
freezing
, because fifteen minutes later, he was stuffed into a Hobbit-sized shower under biting cold spray. But after having Frankie’s tender hands all over him with antiseptics and wet cloths, he needed a cold dousing.
 

Facing the stream of water, he closed his eyes and ignored the sting on his cheek where he’d come in direct contact with a goat horn.
 

He breathed carefully, since every deep inhale hurt his ribs. But the pain wasn’t what shot fire through him. It was the memory of Frankie under him, the hunger in her kiss, the smell and taste and rawness of their connection, which was so real.

She might think he was a fake, but this attraction was genuine. He glanced down at his growing erection. Didn’t that prove it?

He leaned against the plastic wall, slightly out of the stream of water, automatically fisting himself and thinking about the way her breast had felt in his hand. The first stroke just made his stomach drop, so he let go, blinking water out of his eyes to find some soap.

Not seeing any, he took a steadying breath and put his face under the water, unable to resist the burning need to touch himself again. To imagine her slender, feminine hands stroking him just...like...that.

“You need soap?”

His eyes popped open at the sound of Frankie’s voice on the other side of a flimsy white shower curtain.
 

“Yeah.” His response came out gruff as he flattened his hands on the wall to keep them off his dick as the water picked up temperature. “Bet you have plenty of that, huh?”

“And none of it has a name yet.” Her hand reached in, holding one of her brown and yellow bars of goat’s milk soap. “I call this one...Morning Shower.”

Reaching for the soap, he captured her hand, too, giving it a slight tug. “Man, do you lack imagination.”

She laughed and slipped out of his grip. “That’s why I need you.”

He took the soap and sniffed. “Spicy,” he said.

“Yes! There’s sage in there.” She was so close, just one thin piece of plastic away. All he had to do was slide that curtain and...

Instead, he rolled the soap in his hand, foaming up. “Nice lather.”

“That’s not a very good name.”

Laughing, he gently soaped his ribs. “Shit, that hurts.”

“I’m afraid ‘shit that hurts’ won’t sell, either.” The curtain moved slightly, and he waited, not breathing, but she didn’t draw it back. “I was thinking about something a little more, you know...sexy. Got anything?”

Right here, sweetheart
. He stroked himself, once, quickly, closing his eyes as the suds intensified the pleasure against his insanely sensitive skin. “I might be able to come...up with something.”

He heard her throat catch with a laugh. “You know what I mean. Does that scent make you think of anything...evocative?”

Like her mouth when she opened it to his or the sweet curve of her ass when she bent over to pick up a milk bucket? That was
evocative
as hell.

With his palms covered with lather, he tried to wash his body, but his hands just went right back to the place where he wanted her fingers to be. Sliding up and down, fondling his tingling balls, rounding the tip with her—

 
“Got anything?” she asked.

Other than a raging boner? “Um...let’s see. I’m thinking about...”
Sliding
.
Into
. “You.”

She chuckled. “Very sweet, but ‘you’ isn’t going to sell soap. How about some words like...”

Like
that
. He squeezed himself, unable to fight the battle now.

He could have sworn she laughed. “Like...I don’t know. I’m not very good at this. Luscious? Can you work with that?”

Her lips were luscious. If they would just close over him right...there... “Yeah, that’s good, but...”

“I know, I know,” she agreed. “Not good enough.”

Not nearly, but he couldn’t stop now. He pumped a little harder, fighting to hold back any sounds of his self-pleasuring, silently rocking his hips and wishing like hell he was rocking into her.
 

“Succulent?” she suggested.

Yes. Please suck it.

“Sweet?”

That would be so damn sweet.

“Oooh, how about tantalizing?” She dragged out the word, low and sexy and just enough to put him right over the edge. “Sultry? Sensual? Steamy and...Elliott? Elliott, don’t you have any words for that fragrance?”

Yeah. Not anything that would go on a soap label. “Nothing terribly...soapy.”
 

“Try harder.”

“If you insist.” Giving in completely, he leaned against the wall, biting his lip to keep from grunting, pumping furiously now. “It just isn’t”—good enough—“real.”
 

She laughed again. “Is anything that has your hands all over it?”

He looked up at the curtain, certain she was watching, but it held firm to the wall. Fire danced up his back and down his thighs, his whole body hot and hard and...finished. Biting his lip until he could taste blood, he shot an achy, unsatisfying, completely inauthentic load against the wall, momentarily satisfied, but hollow as hell.
 

Easy, yeah, but not good enough.

“Elliott? Are you okay?”

No, he wasn’t okay. He was a shell of a man who wanted more than fake sex. Damn it! He wanted her, and he wanted it to be real. No matter how difficult it would be for a man who liked things easy.
 

“I said...” He cleared his throat and turned his hands under the stream, rinsing them. Finally, he inched the curtain back, but she wasn’t there. “Frankie?”

“Right here.”

He jerked around to see her at the other side of the shower, looking in. She raked him with a gaze that made him want to scream out in a wholly different kind of pain.
 

She gave him a hungry look, her gaze lingering on his partial erection. “Maybe we should call that one Party of One.”

He snapped the curtain closed and swore under his breath. “That name sucks.” And so did a self-inflicted handjob when he wanted the real thing.

He heard her laughing as she left the bathroom.
 

Chapter Nine

“Becker, is that woman biting you?” Nate slipped his sunglasses down his nose, just to get a better look at Elliott, but not far enough that anyone at the outdoor pavilion restaurant would recognize him.

Elliott brushed the mark on his arm, faded in the few days since Dominic had inflicted it. “Had a run-in with a buck.”

On the other side of the table, Zeke leaned in. “A buck? Like a bronco?”

“A buck is what you call a male goat, Einstein.”

Zeke and Nate shared a look, cracking up.

Elliott looked up at the deep blue sky and blew out an exasperated breath. He knew this lunch wouldn’t be easy. They weren’t going to like what he had to say, they weren’t going to let him off the hook, and he hadn’t really wanted to come to lunch at all. The days on the farm had slipped into a nice routine, next to Frankie from dawn to dusk, sneaking a few kisses whenever he could, laughing a lot, getting to know her. And, hell, he’d finally gotten promoted to the sofa at night.

Surely a move into the bedroom couldn’t be far away. It was inevitable, except...he couldn’t do it until he got out from under the only dark cloud in his otherwise blissful week. And that’s what he’d come to tell these guys, whether they liked it or not.
 

 
“What’s so funny?” he demanded, taking a sip of a spicy Bloody Mary.
 

 
“It’s just...” Zeke tried to keep a straight face but failed.
 

“It’s you,” Nate supplied. “Knowing about goats. If you don’t think that’s fucking hilarious, then you’re dead inside.”

But he wasn’t dead inside. And that was the problem. For the first time in recent memory—and that went back years—Elliott felt completely alive. He wanted a woman in a way he’d never imagined possible. And he couldn’t have her until his ill-conceived plan to screw her out of her land got killed.

“Goats happen to be very cool,” he said. “And there’s good money in goat’s milk and the products. They’re among the fastest-growing domestic animals in the world.”

Zeke had to bite his lip, nodding, mirth dampening his eyes. “I’m sorry, Becker, but...
goats
?”

Ire and defensiveness zipped up his spine as he thought of all Frankie had been teaching him about goats this week. “They aren’t just cute little weird animals, you know.
 
People like to visit them. Kids love to pet them, and women buy the goat’s milk products. And goat’s milk—”

Zeke held up two hands in surrender. “Sorry, you’re right.” He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face, though. “Really, that’s good. You’re right.”

“Damn right I’m right,” he said, reaching for his drink but choosing cold water instead. His throat was parched with the pressing need to say what he had to say, hear them piss and moan about the change in plans, and get back to Frankie.
 

Nate seemed less amused by the goats, though it was hard to tell with his shades firmly in place in his never-ending effort to hide in a crowd. He rarely appeared in public without sunglasses, knowing every iPhone in the joint would be taking pictures and videos, and the line for autographs would form at the right. Maybe not in a classy place like Junonia, the outdoor restaurant near the pool at Casa Blanca, but for the most part, fame and the Ivory family fortune haunted Nate.
 

“You know what I think?” Nate said, leaning down just enough so his hazel eyes peered over the rims of his Ray-Bans. “I think something doesn’t smell right, and it’s not just the goats.”

Nate might have been bad to the bone, spoiled rotten, and competitive to the point of death, but he was also surprisingly intuitive.

“What makes you say that?” Elliott asked, although he knew the answer, and he was grateful for the door his friend had opened for him.
 

“I think you’re getting a little too cozy with the goat girl, and you’re dreading the moment she finds out you screwed her in more ways than one.”

“Just one,” Elliott admitted. “I’ve only screwed her on paper.” So far.

Nate and Zeke shared a look that said they didn’t buy it. Well, too bad. It was the truth. He hadn’t slept with her, but...he wasn’t going to be able to hold off much longer. She’d made enough overtures and responded to enough kisses to know the feeling was more than mutual. The only thing stopping them now was the look on her face when she found out he’d slipped Ol’ Comb-Over a deal on the side and stolen her property.

A white hot splash of self-loathing rolled through his gut.