Two Cabins, One Lake: An Alaskan Romance (15 page)

We moved into escaping holds.  He pretended to be my
attacker, and grabbed my wrist.  “Now you could opt to pull some girly move,
and just twist your wrist around and out of it—” he showed me how to do that
“—or you could turn your body just a bit, and strike my forearm.  There’s a
pressure point in there that’ll make my arm go numb.”  He very helpfully
pointed right to it.

I struck his arm, and his hand fell away.  He laughed as he shook
it out.  “Yep, exactly like that.”

“Kick his ass, Helly!” Zack yelled from the roof.

“What are you guys up to?” a familiar voice asked.

Chapte
r Twelve

I
spun
around, and there he was, taking the last step up from the beach.  His green
eyes were on me, causing me to flush with awareness.

I’d been under him last night.  I’d been on top of him.  I’d
had him
inside
me.  And as I watched his body move, all of those muscles
in graceful concert, I wanted nothing more than to have him again.

Gary was also making me nervous as hell.  He’d been careful
not to tip my brothers off last night, but now, in the light of day?  Would he
expect to act like we were an item?  Were we?

“Teaching Helly how to fight,” J.D. said.  He bounced on the
balls of his feet, as always ready for more.

“We were working on getting out of holds,” I said, hoping
Gary wouldn’t notice how breathless I sounded, or that he’d attribute it to the
workout.

“We were gonna do a headlock next.  Wanna watch?” J.D.
asked.

The way Gary was looking at me made me shiver.  “Sure,” he
said.

J.D. moved in behind me and hooked an arm around my throat. 
He pulled back with authority, but not quite hard enough to cut off my air. 
Used to his manhandling, I stayed loose and waited for the lesson.

It was hard to keep my mind
on
the lesson, though,
with Gary standing a few feet away, watching me with all kinds of wickedness in
his eyes.  J.D. had started in on his spiel, but I couldn’t hear him past the
eye-lock Gary and I had going on.  I swear, he was fucking me with that look. 
I felt myself getting hot, just holding his gaze.

“Well?” J.D. said.  “Go.”

My face flamed.  “Uhm, could you say that again?”

He breathed a heavy sigh in my ear.  “So that’s how it is,
huh?  Would it help if I turned you the other way?”

I nodded vigorously, and he turned me so my view consisted
of a skeleton of a shed and two oblivious brothers.  Nothing interesting there.

Then we got down to it.  I wormed my way around, twisted my
head to get it out, and gained control of his arm.  In a variation, I was
encouraged to pound his balls before reaching a hand up over his back to drag
him down by clawing at his eyes.  I peeled out of his hold for the fifth time,
and knocked him to the ground with a “Ha!” of triumph.

“And what do you do when you get out of his hold?” Gary
asked.

“Either beat him up some more…or run,” I said grudgingly.

Gary stepped up to us, looking me over critically.  “What do
you weigh?  120?  130?”

I kept my mouth shut.  If he wanted to know my weight, he’d
have to drag it from my cold, dead…
shit
, I’d seen how well that worked
with the chainsaw.

He seemed unfazed by my reticence.  “And—” he gently pinched
my upper arm, where my bicep was supposed to be “—you don’t work out, do you?”

I shook my head.

“You guys are practicing for a bigger attacker, right?  A man? 
Who’d probably be a few inches taller than you, stronger, and at least fifty
pounds heavier?”

“I suppose…”

“Then, you run,” he said firmly.  “You get them down, you
find your opportunity, and you run.  You might be able to take them down that
first time, especially since you’ll have the element of surprise and they’ll
underestimate you, but after that…  Like Brett, they’re gonna be angry, and they’re
not gonna pull their punches.  So I know you wanna get in there and hurt
somebody, but the smart thing would be to get the hell out.”

J.D. nodded.  “He’s right.  Anybody at all trained will
quickly get the upper hand, and even if they’re not….  You should escape when
you get the chance.”

I huffed.  Here I’d been thinking I was doing well, that I
was such a badass.  And here
they
were telling me to run, because if I
didn’t, I’d get hurt.  It was ego-deflating.

“There’s one hold I think you could benefit from knowing how
to escape,” Gary said.  “May I?” he asked.  He directed the question at J.D.,
who waved him on while backing up a few steps.  Then Gary looked at me, and
raised a brow.

It felt like a challenge, and it made my pulse race.  “All
right,” I said.  I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but that’d never
stopped me before.

“Lie down on the ground, face up.”

I eyed him for a long moment, and then J.D.  My brother
shrugged, his mouth quirked in a little grin.

I lowered myself to sit, and finally I lay back in the
grass.  The sky overhead was brilliant blue—it had really cleared up from the overcast
morning.

“Bend your knees, feet flat on the ground.”

This was going to be awkward, I just knew it.  But I bent my
knees, and watched the man who’d smothered my orgasmic screams drop to his a
couple inches from my toes.

“I think it’s really useful,” he said, “for a woman to be
able to get out from under an attacker who’s trying to assault her.  So what
I’m going to do is move up between your legs, and hold you down, and talk you
through escaping me.”

His long pause drew my eyes to his.  “Spread your legs,” he
said.

Zing
went my nerve endings.  But my brain had
different ideas:
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, this is not happening. 
Not in front of my brothers
.

I looked to J.D., but he just looked entertained.

“I have it on good authority that lots of women have trouble
escaping a man between their legs, holding them down,” Gary said.  And of
course the bastard was talking about me, on this same damn patch of grass the
other day.  He wanted to recreate that, and this time he wanted me to get away.

“You’ll get to try to kick me,” he coaxed.

Aw, hell,
I was in.  I spread my knees apart, and he
wedged himself into the space between.  He didn’t keep a respectable distance. 
Oh no, not Gary.  Instead, he hooked his hands under my knees and pulled me
flush against his thighs in a proprietary move that made me burn.

Then he captured my wrists, and leaned over me, levering my
forearms up until he had them pressed to either side of my head.  He was
blocking my light, my thighs were hooked open over his, his mouth was directly
over my own, and I wanted so badly in that moment to misbehave.  But my
brothers were watching.

“This is a pretty common hold, or so I’ve heard,” he said,
obviously teasing me.

I squirmed a little bit, but quit when it just rubbed me
against him.

“Okay, so how do you get out?” he asked.

“I’d like to just get to the part where I’m kicking you.”

“That’s coming,” he said with a curve to his lips.  ‘Just
like you did’, said his eyes.  “Did your brother show you how to get out of a
wrist hold?”

I nodded, biting my lip as I watched his lips wrap around
his words.

“So you squirm your way out of my grip,” he said.  “But what
do you do with your legs?”

“Kick you?”

“Yes, but you need to give yourself some room to do that. 
So you need to dig in a heel, and push your butt back, curling to the side like
a shrimp.  Then do it with the other heel, to the other side.  From there, you
can get a foot on me to push me away, or if you get the room, kick the hell out
of me.”

He showed me what he meant by a ‘shrimp’, walking me through
the heel-push move.  “The key to this is explosive motion,” he said.  “You want
out of my hold, you throw yourself into the action.  Fully commit.  Fight fast
and furious, and you kick your way free,” he said.

Fast and furious, I thought I could handle.

“Ready?”

My heart-rate jumped as I stared up at him, my body
tensing.  I nodded.

“Go.”

I did just like he said.  I yanked and twisted at my arms to
free them, while simultaneously shoving backward across the grass.  He stayed
with me at first, but then I got ahead of him, got a foot on him, and wrenched
an arm free.  Then I jammed my other foot against his chest, and made him fly
back off me.

“Good!  But that was your opportunity to run,” he said,
jumping on me again.  “Fight dirty,” he said, panting as he struggled to hold
me down.  “If you get a hand free, gouge at your attacker’s eyes, try your best
to tear off their ear, scratch them, slap them, bite them, whatever it takes. 
Slam your heel into their crotch; that’ll disable them completely.”

We wrestled across the ground again, and I pulled my punches
at first, until I realized Gary seemed able to take—and deflect—just as much
abuse as J.D.  So we fought and rolled across the ground for real.

Did I try to gouge out those gorgeous peepers, or crush his
man-berries?  Hell no; I had plans for those.  But I put everything I had into
throwing him, pummeling him, and getting away from his fine ass.

Er,
trying
to get away.  It seemed like the
slipperier I got, the harder he tried.  He clung to me like a booger, hanging
on even when I’d writhed myself face-down and slammed my butt up into his
belly.  He just made an “Oof!” sound, and laughed breathlessly as he hung onto
me like I’d hung onto his fish.

I didn’t feel like laughing.  My skin was raw from Gary’s
handling, but it just seemed to add to a growing fire.  A tingling heat
permeated my blood, my muscles.  The adrenaline rushing through my veins
demanded action.  I felt like a volcano fit to erupt, the river of lust inside
me slamming up against the dam of my brothers’ observation.  I wanted to jump
my loud neighbor so bad, it wasn’t even funny.

I finally squirmed free, and the contact between my knee and
the side of Gary’s head was more accidental than anything else.  He fell
sideways, and I lunged to my feet, more than ready for this practice session to
end.  My skin felt chafed and tingly, my breasts full and aching, and my
panties were a mess.  Any more of this sensual torture, and I would not be held
responsible for my actions. 

Gary shook it off as he had done at least a half-dozen times
already, and climbed to his feet.

J.D. stepped forward to clap him on the back.  “Where’d you
learn to fight?” he asked.

Gary shrugged.  “Here and there,” he said.  Then, catching
me watching him, he admitted, “I was in the marines for nine years.”

“Oorah!” Rory called from the shed.

Gary waved at him and looked over at me.

I was watching him with lust still pounding through my
veins.  It was rushing through me with such force, I could hear it, and taste
it, and God, could I feel it.  The hot ache between my thighs was verging on
pain, and I didn’t think I could tolerate even one more touch from him.  Not
unless he was going to finish what he started.

The way he looked at me said he maybe had some understanding
of what I was going through.

I was mentally dragging Gary up to my loft when Zack yelled from
the shed.  Gary walked over, and tossed him up a tape measure that’d been left
next to the chop saw.  A few seconds later, Zack yelled down a request for a
2X4 cut a certain length.  Gary cut one, and passed it up to my brothers.  Then
he did it again.  Within a matter of minutes, someone had given him J.D.’s
hammer and belt, and suddenly my loud neighbor was pounding nails into the
frame of my shed.

I watched with bemusement as this happened, and then watched
him surreptitiously for the rest of the afternoon.  Gary seemed competent in
his work, and absorbed in it, which made observing him a little easier.

Around 3:30, at the height of a hot day, his shirt came off,
and I almost dropped the gallon jug of water I was holding.  He was just so…
eye-catching.  He had muscles that I now recognized as having been chiseled by the
military, highly functional without being overly bulky.  He had a nice
thickness to his shoulders.  And a tan.  And that happy trail…

Before that moment, I would have said there was nothing sexy
about construction.  But I guess I just hadn’t seen the right people doing it. 
I was unable to look away.

The way that scarred leather belt slung low across his hips. 
The way he handled his hammer; the commanding way he sank a nail in two solid
thumps.  The sweaty muscles of his arms and shoulders flexing.

The way his eyes sparked when he caught me looking.

Oh God
, that was the same look he’d had on his face
last night, when he’d been watching me cum.

“You might wanna close your mouth,” J.D. whispered to me as
he passed, “before you catch flies.”

I snapped it shut, and saw Gary’s mouth curl as he turned
away.

I was feeling overly warm by that point, but I managed to
resist the impulse to take off my own shirt.  And for the next couple hours, I
tried my best to aid my brothers with such male perfection on display.  More
like, I tried not to run into things and stumble over flat ground.

Yeah, I wasn’t very successful at either.  By six o’clock,
they were putting the last screws into the metal roof, and I was so hot and
bothered, I couldn’t see straight.  I pretty much fled into the cabin to make
the men dinner.

I wasn’t much for sexist bush roles bullshit, but when men
made me a shed, I made them dinner.  As I simmered red sauce and boiled water
for spaghetti, I longed for just five minutes alone with my vibrator.  But I
wasn’t going to get five minutes alone; not so long as my brothers were here. 
Through the window, I glimpsed the muscles of Gary’s back flexing, the amazing
way he filled out the seat of his jeans, and I groaned.

They finished up with the shed about the same time I had the
food ready to go.  I watched as they filed in, my greedy gaze absorbing the
sight of Gary all sweaty and streaked with dirt and sawdust.  Was it weird that
even in that state,
especially
in that state, I found myself wanting to
lick every square inch of him?

He used my bathroom to clean up and replace his shirt—which made
my eyes so very, very sad—and they all gathered around the counter where I’d
set up the buffet line.