Wild Irish (Book 1 of the Weldon Series) (6 page)

He pulled her panties to the side and his tongue took over. Any thought that this was moving too fast flew. Pleasure and heat from her yearning sex took control. All she wanted was to keep climbing higher, to hurdle headlong into the sensations driving her into a wild world she’d never even realized existed. Her muscles tensed, her breath caught, and she saw stars burst before her eyes as molten pleasure burned though her in a shuddering climax of pure ecstasy.

In a haze, she saw the sun dapple through the wet leaves of the oak tree above her as the rain disappeared and a perfect blue sky smiled down at her. The breeze brushed her nipples and spasms of pleasure continued to shoot through her. Jesse moved against her then, making her want more. “Jesse?”

“
Right here.” He grabbed her hips and slid her towards him. She gasped with surprise as he drove his erection into her and the pleasure shot all the way to her toes. The heat began to build again, but stronger because Jesse’s gaze was locked with hers and stayed locked as he went deep and slow then moved fast and quick until her hips pulsed to his every thrust.

“
I want to see you come,” he said, his voice ragged and strained and as desperate as the intense expression on his face. He was raw and so sexually seductive that she couldn’t look away, couldn’t do anything but respond, matching him thrust for thrust as she spiraled higher and higher until she thought she would die from the edge of madness gripping her.

“
Jesse!” she cried.

“
That’s it, Lexi. Go wild! Let yourself loose.” One of his hands cupped her breast, grasping her nipple between his fingers, and his other hand moved to the throbbing nub of her sex. Then he plucked both in rhythm to his movements until she screamed, her hips bucking uncontrollably.

Jesse drove into Alexi with a need that had never racked his body before. Her mouth lay softly open, just waiting for him. It was the devil’s own candy and he was determined to claim it. Watching her shudder with sexual need had him so freaking hard, so damn hot, that he’d never been this out of control. Her eyes, smoky with desire, had turned the deep green of a wild Irish glen.

“
Give me more, Lexi,” he shouted, shoving deep one last time.

She cried out as another shudder of pleasure claimed her and triggered his release. He felt the shock of their mutual orgasm all the way to his soggy boots, but it wasn’t enough, he needed to be closer to her. As if feeling the same, she reached for him and he leaned forward, matching his palms to hers, threading his fingers through hers as he pressed her back against the car. He felt the huge diamond on her finger then, but didn’t care about anything other than being deeper inside her. He thrust again, heightening the aftershocks of pleasure and still needed more. Planting his mouth on hers, he kissed her hard. It was as if the sexual energy thrumming between them needed this many points of contact to flow through or he’d explode. His knees were weak and a dizzy sensation spun around inside his head. He didn’t know exactly what in the hell had just happened to him, but he knew he felt mighty damn fine. More than fine and that wasn’t necessarily good.

Alexi stared into Jesse’s fiery blue gaze, matching the fervor of his kiss. An Oh-My-God-What-Have-I-Done shock trampled into the lingering mists of exquisite pleasure, but she couldn’t move from the heat and fullness of him inside of her, from the pressure of his body pinning her, or from the passionate demand of his kiss. She reveled in the feel of his strong hands holding hers captive against the car.

Clamping her legs around his hips, she pulled him closer to her. His eyes widened and he pressed himself deeper again, groaning. The kiss ended and still she stared at him, speechless. He stared back. The moment hung, seemingly endless as hundreds of thoughts raced through her head.

What came after mind-blowing sex with a man from her past after less than an hour together? She missed twelve years of this! Thank goodness she was on the pill. What in the world must he think of her?

Jesse suddenly tensed and raised his head. Only then did she hear the sound of a truck rambling on the dirt road.

“
Sounds like company. Maybe we better finish this at my place.” He lifted his chest from hers, releasing her hands.

“
Company! How can you be so calm! What if they’d come five minutes ago? I can’t believe this.” Heat blistering her cheeks, she pushed on him, scrambling to cover herself.

He laughed. “Relax. If they had come five minutes ago then we wouldn’t have
come
and that would have been the
real
shame.” In no time, he slid out, shed a condom she’d been too far-gone to think about, zipped up, and scooped her up.

Before the truck appeared, sporting a load of boisterous teenage boys, he’d dropped her inside the car and left to get her shoes and stockings. He waved at the boys in the passing truck like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like he hadn’t just had mind-blowing sex up against his car. She took one look in the rearview mirror and saw HOT SEX written in the scarlet flush of her face. He was as calm as the eye of a storm and she felt like the gale force winds whirling around him.

He’d even uprooted the past, sending many of the perceptions that had shaped her life into a tailspin. She’d always thought of her distant, stern father as a law abiding, just man. Yet, Jesse’s story cast a dark shadow of doubt on that belief. Had her father really gone as far as to frame Jesse for grand theft to erase him from her life? Up until today she would have sworn not. But then, up until today she would have also sworn her grandmother wouldn’t have made her granddaughter a sacrifice upon duty’s altar.

The thought that Jesse might be lying about being framed popped into her mind, fizzing questions like a shaken can of Coke. Would he have? And why would he? Why even bring up the past unless he had a reason to be resentful? She frowned at Jesse’s back through the fogging glass of the car window and watched the regal bearing in the breadth of his shoulders. She noted the confident cadence of his military stride, and remembered the searing blueness of the gaze he’d leveled on her when he’d told her about the past. No, she thought. There’d been many things in Jesse’s eyes, but deceit hadn’t been one.

His disgust that she’d so easily believed the worst about him stung. Was there any truth in his accusation? He’d done little to dispel his bad boy image years ago, and despite the haircut and the sports car he drove, he wasn’t doing much now.

Don’t make that mistake, Lexi. I’m no gentleman.

The still deliciously tingling nerves inside her popped goose bumps on her skin. No, he wasn’t a gentleman. What they’d done up against his car didn’t fit into a gentlemanly role. But then, maybe she needed to change her definition of a gentleman. Roger considered himself a gentleman. He sent flowers, opened doors, and was solicitous. He’d never seduced her on his car, yet look what he’d turned out to be.

She shuddered at how close she’d come to marrying Roger.

Jesse had whisked her away like a modern day Sir Lancelot. No, scratch that, like a crazed stunt driver. Savannah's society would be speechless--for about five seconds--then the tongues would wag like puppy tails at a breeding kennel.

She looked up as he slid into the driver’s seat and handed over her shoes and stockings. The cut by his brow had stopped bleeding, but he’d definitely have a black eye. She winced as something inside her cringed because she’d caused him pain. It was almost the same thing she felt for the ill children that she cared for at the hospital. It was a part of her, some inner need she had to make everything better. But Jesse was no child needing hurts kissed away. The look he zeroed in on her was all grown up male, and what he wanted made her shiver with desire. His walk to the creek hadn’t dimmed the I’m-going-to-devour-you gaze, a gaze that made her ask herself again.
What did a woman do after having mind-blowing sex with a man from her past?

Have more sex
; her senses clamored as she remembered the feel of him and the deep rumble of his voice.
Maybe we better finish this up at my place.

No, go home, her commonsense peeped. She barely heard it.

She had no desire to go back home and face the music of her aborted wedding march yet. The Jesse factor was still so strong that she couldn’t drum up the smallest tear over what Roger had done, and that felt really good. It seemed as if Jesse had carted her off to Oz, but unlike Dorothy, Alexi wasn’t searching for a way home. There was no Wicked Witch of the West to run from. Nope, there was only this Bad Boy from the South and she wasn’t running yet. One day, she thought. She’d give herself one day to go down Jesse’s yellow brick road of desire. She could play in Oz for a day. Everything else could wait.

Jesse started the car and headed down the dirt road. He didn’t say anything, only fiddled with the radio, jumping from station to station like a bee looking for nectar and nothing seemed to satisfy. It was as if he mirrored her state of mind—nothing but sex again would do.

No, no, no, no!
Her mind shouted loud enough to grab her attention.
Are you crazy?
What kind of woman even contemplated going with a man for no other reason than great sex? Was it just that, or was there more to it? Maybe suppressed feelings from the past?

After a few minutes, Alexi dampened her dry lips and drummed up the courage to speak. “We need to talk about what just happened and about what happened twelve years ago.”

Jesse grunted then shrugged. She thought that was his complete response and her temper sparked. Thankfully, she counted to ten and he spoke before she did.

“
It isn’t complicated, Lexi. We’re the only two people the past really affects. You either believe me, or you don’t, and I either believe you had nothing to do with it, or I don’t. ”

It irked her that he could reduce the situation to such simplistic terms. Yet, could she argue with his assessment? “You think my father is criminally responsible. That matters.”

“
Only to you. And before you go asking him questions, you might what to consider what you’re going to do if you get an answer you don’t like. Once the truth is brought into the open, or doubt is cast on your father’s word, it can’t be ignored. It will affect your relationship with your family. As for me, I’ve already told you. I’m looking to build a good image for the Weldon name and that won’t happen by dredging up the past. My life might have taken a different direction if I hadn’t gone to your bedroom that night, or it might have gone the same direction. I’d already been entertaining the idea of joining the armed forces. All in all, everything has worked out well. I lost some illusions, a chunk out of my pride, and my freedom to choose back then, but I’ve gained from it now.”

“
But—”

“
Believe me, Lexi. There isn’t anything else. But if you think of something let me know and we’ll talk. As for what just happened,” he grinned, “it’s called sex, coitus, fu-

She smacked his arm. “This is a serious conversation.”

“
Serious conversations fall into the realm of life or death decisions, everything else is small potatoes. And I am being seriously honest. The question remains, can you? Before we had sex and then after we did, what was the main thing on your mind when you looked at me?”

Alexi stared at the road disappearing beneath the front of the car unable to face him yet. Sex. Was it just that and nothing else? To categorize what they’d just shared in such basic terms seemed to make it less than what it had been. But how could it be more? She would have sworn this morning that she loved Roger in a comfortable kind of way, but now she shuddered with loathing at the very thought of him. She’d thought herself in love with Jesse when she’d been seventeen, but she barely knew him now. Yet making love to him had transcended anything that had come before. So, like Tina Turner so eloquently asked, “What’s love got to do with it?”

She’d always held sex within the boundaries of a committed, long-term relationship--an expression of feelings. She had never let herself outside of those strictures. But then, look where the strictures she’d lived by had landed her today.

Jesse leaned her way and spoke softly into her ear as he put his hand on her thigh over her dress. “Be honest, Lexi. When I touch you like this, when I whisper into your ear, what are you thinking? Aren’t you thinking sex? Aren’t you thinking about taking another step on the wild side?”

“
Yes,” she said, feeling as if he pulled the word from her mind. “Yes, I’m thinking about sex. You make me want sex.”

He slid his hand to rub her inner thigh then moved a little higher. Hot tingles of fire licked up her leg and centered exactly where she wanted Jesse to caress her next. He didn’t move higher, but kept his warm caress teasingly close. She bit her lip to keep from moaning and wondered how far his place was.

Even after having been with him, the physical wanting was stronger than ever. He wanted her, too. Why couldn’t she do something a little wild and a little crazy? Just this once, why shouldn’t she reach for what she wanted? He called it just sex and didn’t seem to feel the least bit shamed to do so. Why couldn’t she? She shut her eyes, enjoying his touch.