Southern Seduction (49 page)

Smiling big and tucking his fingers into my hair on both sides of my face, he told me, “It’s my old age. I believe older and wiser is how the saying goes.”

My lips curved up in answer to his, and I rolled up onto my tiptoes in order to press my lips to his. He still had to hunch over, but I made the effort. And he noticed.

That was all that mattered.

He wasted no time swinging me back up to my perch on his back without my having to ask, and took off in the direction of the lone, town-central corn field.

As he walked, I asked what I hoped were unexpected questions, eager to get to know him as fully as possible but not wanting to do it the same old way everyone else does.

“What’s your favorite word?” I inquired randomly, hoping he would just go with the flow instead of pointing out how weird I was.

Surprising me completely, he answered without hesitation, almost as if he had known what I was going to ask. “Love,” he said as he squeezed the underside of my thighs.

“Love, huh? What makes that your favorite word?” I murmured while resting my chin in the crook of his shoulder, my curiosity running on full tilt. My finger ran a mindless pattern along the muscle definition in his tricep, touching him in a way that was utterly familiar and abnormally natural.

My head moved back automatically, lifting off of his shoulder and making room for him as he turned partially in order to meet my eyes.

“What other word has that much power?” he queried seriously.

I took a minute to ponder what he meant, the thought line between my eyes creasing with my concentration.

“Think about it,” he pushed, prompting me to follow along as he laid out his explanation. “Using it is the main milestone of any relationship, it often transcends time and hardship, and it even manages to exist after death. I don’t know any other word that has that much meaning.”

“What do you mean it’s the main milestone of any relationship?”

“The first ‘I love you’ is one of the most recognized moments in a romantic relationship. People remember where, they remember when, and they remember how that special person first made it known that they were their world. Love, and the expression of it, is usually the backbone of familial relationships too. Hell, personalities are even shaped by the frequency with which your parents tell you they love you sometimes. That kind of power in a word is crazy.”

“You’re kind of philosophical. It’s kind of freaky coming from someone as good looking as you.”

“Sometimes beauty comes with brains,” he joked with a wink, his handsome grin extending through all of his features and bringing a light to his eyes despite the dark of the hour.

He was so expressive, open and welcoming, practically propping open the door to his soul and inviting you in to feel all of his emotions right along with him.

“But really, no other word brings that much pleasure when it’s shared between two people. That’s why I like it.”

My snark reared its head as I countered, “I can think of a couple of words that normally bring pleasure between two people. Harder, faster-”

“Which one of us is the guy again?”

“Hey, I just tell it like it is, Mill.”

“Good,” he praised, letting me feel it in the grip of his strong hands. “That’s one of my favorite qualities in a person.”

When you spend most of your life pushing people away, living the life of a loner and liking it, the urge---the complete want---to let someone in is such an obscure but powerful feeling it almost knocks you over.

I wanted Miller to know me and like me and seek out my company. I wanted to like him and hoped that the more details I found out about him the more positively I would view him.

It was the complete opposite of my normal, and it felt so good that I seriously started to question the way I had lived my life up until that point.

Could I have had this with more than just him? Did I miss out on friends and memories that I shut out out of habit?

I didn’t know. And I figured I never would. But I was here now, and so was Miller. I was determined to open myself up to any and all possibilities.

Miller

The warmth of her soft breath against my neck was still cool compared to the summer night air, and the feeling of her thighs wrapped around me catered to a physical closeness I wasn’t familiar with.

Not only was she wrapped around me literally, but she was also weaving her way into the contours and valleys of my mind, searching for the root of all things Miller. In turn, she was leading me inside of herself, shedding light on the metaphorical skeleton of Zoey---the values that supported her and the notions that made her
fundamentally
her.

And she was doing it in a totally wacky way.

I had never been asked such a meaningful set of random questions before. They weren’t the normal and they didn’t follow protocol, but they still told a story about each of us.

Zoey Kapernack.

I still couldn’t believe she was the one who had stumbled into my field, and that I was lucky enough to catch her. I hadn’t been kidding when I told her I’d thought of her some. I had wondered how life was treating her, if she was getting everything out of it she wanted, and if she had found peace with her destiny.

Basically, I focused on all of the things that plagued me, and then transferred them over to her, a kindred spirit.

We hadn’t been close, but it was one of those things I had always wondered about endlessly.

Why hadn’t we found each other more frequently in our younger days? What was it that kept our interactions to superficial pleasantries?

We had a rapport, and I always knew we had, even with the little amount of interaction we had logged.

It was never awkward or forced, and we had undeniably similar backgrounds. Single fathers. Only children. A jaded, sometimes antagonistic outlook on life’s plan.

But we walked on different planes, just waiting for them to intersect. At least, that’s what it seemed like.

“Where do you want to visit the most?” Zoey asked, her slight chin on my shoulder, her hands caressing my arms with a tenderness I had
never
experienced.

I already mentioned that my father wasn’t big on physical affection, and I had never spent time connecting with a woman. Carnally, yes, but nothing deeper than that.

“Out of anywhere in the world?” I responded, seeking clarification. The question was broad, and I had a lot of different answers I would have been happy with, but I wanted to pick the one she was looking for.

It was a classic douchecanoe move, but I wanted to impress her.

“Yep, anywhere. No limitations,” she said, folding her arms around my neck and, sadly, depriving me of her pleasurable petting.

I took a minute to ponder, and then laid it all out for her, eager to hear her opinion on my answer and knowing that honesty was the only way to go.

“I want to visit all of the places no one else wants to visit. The places long forgotten by most, lost in the monotony and expectation for speed and convenience. Everywhere has something to offer, especially small towns.” Her bright eyes held mine, searching, delving their way deep into my soul and pledging to stick around for awhile. Her face was serious though, so I couldn’t tell how she felt about my beloved forgotten towns. “I guess Jason Aldean would refer to them as “Fly Over States”,” I added with a chuckle, trying to bring some levity to the conversation, and maybe, if I was lucky, a smile to her face.

She still didn’t speak, the whiskey of her eyes sparkling just like the liquor they resembled as they moved minutely back and forth, diving deeper and deeper into the depths of my green ones.

Breaking the silence, trying to bring the conversation back around, I turned the question back to her. “What about you? Where do you want to go?”

“At this moment,” she started, a sweet smirk curving the right corner of her mouth upward, “I’m kind of liking being right here.”

Leaning towards me slowly, her plush lips grazed my cheek with a feminine finesse that solidified my knowledge that I was a straight man. My pants tightened noticeably, and I knew I would have to verbally chastise myself in order to get it under control. Either that, or put some distance between us.

And the latter wasn’t happening.

Fuck.

And then, tilting her nose just enough, she nuzzled it feather light against my cheek, and I heard her inhale, breathing in the scent of my skin. The left corner of her mouth lifted subtly to match her right, her subconscious pleasure sensors reacting positively to the musk of me.

“I like it here too, Zo. Better than anywhere I’ve been in a long time,” I murmured, hoping to give her the security of my emotions but leave her an out at the same time.

Unwrapping her legs from my waist, she hopped down, gave the cheek of my ass a quick swat, and then skimmed her body along mine as she maneuvered us to a position facing one another.

“The forgotten places sound pretty good too, especially with the right company,” she flirted before bestowing a sexy eyebrow waggle upon me.

She didn’t know her own sexiness, and I could tell. She wore her snark well, the practice of keeping people at a distance well oiled and functioning with ease. But this, this one on one interaction, the feeling of acceptance from someone, was completely foreign to Zoey. And she didn’t trust it.

She would though. I would make sure of it. Every woman deserves to be confident in her worth, and Zoey was worth her weight in gold. One day, she wouldn’t hesitate to flash it all around for everyone to see.

Delicately, I moved my lips to her ear, floating them across the skin of her throat as I went. I breathed a little harder, laboring my flow of air in time with her erratic heartbeat that I could see thrumming away in the column of her slender neck. Taking one last gulp of oxygen and giving the strip of flesh exposed at her waist a gentle squeeze with my fingertips, I exhaled, “Race ya,” directly into her ear before taking off in the direction of town.

It was hard work to extricate myself from the fleecy warmth of her supple body, but I managed, and I could tell she was completely thrown.

But time doesn’t stand still, no matter how much you may want it to, and we were on a schedule. One Last Night was timed, I knew from experience, and I wanted to get to the end of it so I could spend some prank-free time with Zoey.

Plus, I had completely abandoned my girls, cough, cows, in their time of need, dropping them instinctively when faced with a much prettier, biped, human female.

Don’t worry, they would survive until I fed them later, but they probably weren’t going to be happy.

Crickets chirped, frogs croaked, and the sound of Zoey’s smaller, booted feet pounding after me flooded my sense of hearing and pulled focus away from the beads of sweat forming on the hollow of my neck, just instants away from rolling gently across the swell of my collar bone and saturating the cotton of my t-shirt.

Zoey put forth a good effort, but I beat her with ease which played perfectly into my plans.

Sure, I could have let her win, been the gentlemen, but then I wouldn’t have been able to grab the next clue off of the one, tiny, pointless section of unattached fence.

“Hey!” Zoey shouted, exasperated and out of breath from the run. “That’s my clue, old man!”

I shook my head in the negative, tightened the grip of my fingers on the folded piece of paper, and then tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans for safe keeping.

“One thing at a time,” I placated. “We still have to do this prank, and it’s going to take a lot of doing. Why do you need to be distracted by the next one?”

She argued, “I like instant gratification,” almost immediately after the last word left my mouth, and I had to work to avoid swallowing my tongue.

So much innuendo packed into such a little statement. “Anticipation will sweeten the reward,” I whispered into the shell of her ear, tucking my body close and resting the palms of my hands on the cut of her hip bones. “Trust me.”

The jut of her lip that accompanied her pout could have won awards for its effectiveness, but somehow, I held onto my man card and didn’t succumb to her charms.

Instead, I stayed planted right where I was, leaned deep into her body, the subdued smell of apples lifting off of her skin and filtering into the receptors in my nose.

Her teeth dug into the flesh of her bottom lip moments before her eyes left mine, her chin tucked to her body, and her mouth curved into one of her most roguish grins. “I’m more of a proof is in the pudding type of girl.”

My control was fucked.