Chapter Eighteen
Bethany spit rainwater out of her mouth and did her best to unfold the tarp blind. No matter how she positioned herself on the roof, the rain seemed to slant directly into her face, so she planted her feet shoulder-width apart and sarcastically thanked Mother Nature for this glorious piece of timing.
She was not too proud to admit she should be anywhere but a rain-slicked roof during a storm. In fact, she would even have given the job to Wes, if she hadn’t fired him in the bonehead move of the century. But she’d spent six hours on that roof this afternoon, her hands were torn to shit, her back was sore, and something felt broken inside of her. So she was going to salvage her hard work, dammit, and everything in the line of fire beneath the leaks while she was at it.
Her right boot slid a little bit, but she righted her stance in time to get the tarp open. Going down on her hands and knees, she spread the blue covering and stapled it into place as close to the roof’s edge as possible. The wind and needlelike raindrops made it almost impossible to see what she was doing, but surely the worst of it would be over any second? The forecast said overcast through tomorrow. They’d all been lied to! Who would be held accountable?
She was being dramatic, but whatever. She was soaking wet on a roof beneath a full moon and there’d been a rocky turbulence inside her since that afternoon. Even before the rain started, she’d been pacing in her living room, unable to sit still. This wasn’t right. She shouldn’t have this awful foreboding in her stomach because of a man.
It was never like this.
At worst, when she decided her association with a man had run its course, she felt mildly peeved when they didn’t try and get back in her good graces. Not that she ever let them. But the chance of Wes deciding she was too much trouble . . . it really truly scared her.
He’d hung in there through countless traded insults and arguments. He’d witnessed a near panic attack at Georgie’s wedding. He hadn’t even flinched at the ugly mark on her neck. Would the blow she’d dealt to his pride be the final straw?
She hadn’t wanted to fire him.
He was the Zellweger to her Cruise.
There were feelings. She had feelings.
Bethany adjusted the hood of her jacket so the rain would stop dripping in her eyes and set about laying out the second tarp. She secured one corner, then crawled slowly toward the opposite end of the roof as the blue tarp flapped in the wind. The coarse material of the shingles bit into her knees through her jeans, but she welcomed the distracting pain.
What was it that really scared her about Wes leaving this afternoon and not even looking back once? The slam of his truck door reverberated with such finality. It was the sum of her fears, wasn’t it? That a guy would finally know all the negative things about her and leave. Isn’t this what she’d been avoiding for so long?
The proof that she was imperfect.
Bethany swallowed hard and picked up the pace of her crawl. Making it across the roof, she applied the final staple. There. Done.
Still . . . maybe she should check for unsecured openings. She’d lost Wes today. She wasn’t going to sacrifice all the hard work they’d accomplished together on the house, too. The added blow would be unbearable. Just a few more minutes and it would be perfect—
“Goddammit, Bethany!”
Wes?
She twisted toward the sound of his voice, though she couldn’t be sure where it was coming from because the wind was so strong. As soon as her head turned, the rain lashed her in the face and she flinched, dropping the nail gun. She tried to snatch for it blindly, but missed and lost her balance.
Bethany slid on the part of the roof that hadn’t yet been tiled, a scream ripping from her throat. There was an unnerving moment of clarity where she realized death was imminent, right before her body went sailing over the edge. In a sudden burst of self-preservation, her fingers caught on the ancient rain gutter and clung, but just like everything else attached to the house, it was too old to be viable and a snapping sound was her only warning before it gave, leaving Bethany dangling from the edge of the broken gutter.
“Wes!”
“I’m here. I’ve got you, baby. Let go.”
“I can’t. Are you insane?”
“I won’t let you hit the ground, you know that.” His voice was stronger than the storm, tunneling inside her and putting down roots. “Come on. I’ve got you.”
It was the biggest leap of faith she’d ever taken. Perhaps she never would have realized that she did, in fact, trust Wes—maybe more than anyone—if she wasn’t dangling from the roof like a sodden monkey. But she wholeheartedly trusted that he would catch her and she let go with a squeak. His arms banded around her a split second later, her body colliding with his hard one, and Wes stumbled back a pace. He positioned her more securely against his chest and then he was moving.
Bethany’s view of Wes’s face was obscured by the hood of her rain jacket, but she saw his leg strike out and kick open the door to the house. He stomped them both inside and set her down carefully in the pitch black, leaving her to shiver and drip onto the floor. A moment later, one of the hanging lights came on across the room, illuminating Wes—and wow, he was pissed.
The masculine planes of his face were highlighted on one side, blanketed by the darkness on the other. His breaths were harsh and uneven, joining the pelting rain as the only two sounds in the room. Besides her heartbeat, that was. The sight of him was so welcome, her heart seemed to be beating even harder than it had been while suspended from the gutter. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing would come out. What could she say? This buildup inside of her was so unusual and it ached. She had no idea what kind of words it would produce.
Wes had no such problem finding something to say.
He took off his drenched hat and threw it across the room, where it slapped off one of the only finished walls in the house. “Goddammit, Bethany. Of all the stupid—” He pressed a fist to the center of his forehead, slowing his breathing. “I’m rehired. Simple as that. If only to keep you from killing yourself by being stubborn as shit. And it’s permanent. You can haul off and fire me as many times as you want, baby, but I’m going to show up every morning like it never happened. Deal with it.”
A warm cloak of relief landed on her shoulders, wrapping tight. The assurance that he would keep coming back, even if they fought, even if she freaked out and did something she regretted . . . God, she was already breathing easier. Like she’d had a sandbag on her lungs until now. Her knees started to shake, not from weakness, but with the need to go to Wes. She didn’t question the impulse; she didn’t have the willpower to quell it this time. Not after he’d shown up here, not after he’d caught her midair, not after she’d missed him so much.
Bethany walked straight into Wes’s bristling frame and wrapped her arms around his neck. She was grateful for the rain still decorating her face because it camouflaged the warm, salty tears that fell from her eyes.
His arms wrapped around her tightly and her knees stopped shaking.
“Why did you come?” she asked, laying her cheek on his right pec.
“To put tarp down, same as you,” he answered gruffly.
“Even though I fired you?”
He grunted and held her tighter. “You didn’t want to fire me.”
Bethany shook her head, a few more tears escaping. “No.”
“It’s behind us now,” he said, swaying her side to side. “And if you get pissed at me again in a couple of days and we argue or storm off to lick our wounds, we’ll put it behind us then, too.”
“How many times can you put something behind you . . . before all those incidents crowd you out the door?”
“We’re in construction, darlin’. We’ll just build an addition to make them fit.”
At that, Bethany teetered and fell messily into love with Wes. Not only because she believed what he said and the sentiment made her feel secure, possibly for the first time ever. But also because he’d said we.
We’re in construction.
Wes lifted her chin and was visibly gutted by the sight of her tears. “Aw, Bethany.” He brushed them away. “None of that, please. I can’t take it.”
“It’s just rain,” she said, unevenly.
“Sure, I’ll play along.” His fingers traced their way down to Bethany’s lips and hunger darkened his eyes. “We’re going to make a go of this, you and me.”
“Are you asking or telling me?”
Humor reshaped his mouth. “All right, I’m asking.”
Bethany hesitated in the face of the unknown. She’d never been in a relationship with someone for whom she’d felt this much. As much as she’d started trusting him, the problem was she didn’t know if she trusted herself. Her patterns with men had never been so obvious as when she employed them with Wes. Someone she . . . oh God, loved? If she messed this up—and the odds were, she would—it would feel like today had, but in perpetuity.
Worst of all, she risked hurting Wes. Right now, that seemed so much worse than acting as her own worst enemy.
Wes saw her hesitation and visibly regrouped. “We can take it slow, all right?” He nodded on her behalf and dropped his mouth, leaving it an inch above hers. “But you’re not going to avoid me. I’m not going to stay where you put me and wait for attention.”
“No?” she managed, wetting her lips for the kiss that would surely come any second now. She needed it so badly.
“Uh-uh. When I want attention, I’m going to let you know.”
“How?”
One of his hands had been slowly undoing the buttons of her rain jacket. He pushed the sides open now and yanked her dry body up against his soaked one, tilting his hips and breathing into her mouth at the same time. “How’s this?”
A barrage of arousal-tipped arrows hit their target beneath her belly button, piercing her with bliss and sexual frustration. God, she’d tried to ignore how much this man turned her on for so long. Now that she’d given herself permission to embrace what he did to her body, her need was even more potent than she realized. Bethany wiggled her hips against Wes’s distended fly, biting her lip over the way he groaned. “This is your way of showing me you’re willing to go slow?”
“I meant it,” he rasped, cradling her hips in desperate hands. “Bethany Castle, my dick has been hard for you since that first morning you climbed out of your Mercedes at that jobsite. All business, no time for anyone to step out of line, especially me.” He licked into her mouth, but didn’t kiss her, the smooth friction of his tongue causing a melting-butter sensation between her thighs. “Been wanting to prove you wrong ever since. You’ll love making time for the way I step out of line. But I’m smart enough to know waiting will be worth the payoff of finally having you naked with your thighs open underneath me.”
Oh, brother. On a surge of lust like she’d never known, she pressed up on her toes and kissed him. Her core clenched dramatically over the way he jerked her higher with one arm, shoving the jacket off her shoulders with his free hand before bringing it to her ass and kneading, kneading, his touch slow and possessive.
“How far can we take this and still go slow?” she gasped, letting her head fall back so he could suck and nibble on her neck.
“Long as you let me give this body what it needs, I can remember the boundaries tomorrow,” he muttered into her hair.
What if my body needs everything? Right now?
And it did. Her feminine flesh was throbbing and it was taking all her self-control not to wrap her legs around his hips and grind on him until she hit her peak. Unbelievably, though . . . she wanted to give him fulfillment even more. The way he’d done for her in his backyard, without taking anything in return. Knowing how long he’d spent wanting her from a distance made her desperate to give him relief. There might even have been a part of Bethany that wanted to apologize for scaring him while up on the roof. Whether that mentality was right or wrong, it stoked the flame already flickering wildly inside of her.
Before she could second-guess herself, Bethany took hold of the wet lapel of Wes’s button-down flannel and walked him backward. He broke their ravenous kiss, anticipation lighting his eyes. He couldn’t quite believe his luck and let her see his humble gratitude. His awe. His eagerness.
When they reached a stack of full cement bags, Bethany teased Wes’s mouth while unbuckling his belt and lowering his zipper. His fast breaths could be heard over the storm now and they filled her ears with a sexy soundtrack. She reached into his briefs and circled a hand around his thick erection, loving the choked sound he made while she stroked it hard, nipping at his stubbled jawline. “You’re too huge for these fitted cowboy jeans, Wes.”
He watched her hand move, a muscle popping in his cheek. “You reckon I should switch to something else?”
“No.” Bethany jacked him faster. “I didn’t say I didn’t like them.”
“Baby, baby, baby.” He caught her wrist, pushing through clenched teeth, “I’ve only got about ten seconds left of that.”
A pulse boomed in her ears. She was completely and utterly absorbed by this moment, the outside world and her usual insecurities be damned. Her makeup had been washed away by the rain, her hair was a catastrophe—and she didn’t even care. None of it mattered when she was being touched by this man. How was such a huge reversal possible? There might have been a trickle of nerves that she wasn’t going to live up to his prolonged expectations, but it was a whisper compared to what was usually a roar.
She eased her wrist free of Wes’s grip and worked his jeans down past his hips, leaving them gathered at his knees. Oh. Holy hell, the thighs. She’d never seen his thighs out in the open like this and they were rugged, muscular. They belonged on either side of a horse’s back or in one of those dusty Wrangler ads. Forget crushing a walnut between them, he could snap a log in half. There was enough hair on them to make her blush, to make her weak-kneed for the chance to feel the tickle of it on her cheeks. And with that wicked vision in her head, Bethany went down on her knees.
“Ah, Jesus, you’re really doing this,” Wes gritted out, wrapping the hem of his T-shirt in his fist to give her access to his straining manhood—why was that so hot? “I shouldn’t let this happen, but that mouth of yours, Bethany. That fucking mouth. I could draw it from memory. I’d die to watch it taste my cock.”
His words heaped coal into the already wild fire inside of Bethany, his admission stealing any remaining trepidation. How could she be self-conscious when he wanted her so badly, he looked like he was in pain?
Those thighs called to her and she took her time kissing the rough insides of them, grazing him with her teeth and soothing the sting with long, thorough licks. As she switched to the other leg, she fisted his erection in her hand and pulled him off loosely, needing him to savor the experience, the way she was doing.
Finally, she reached the top of her nibbling hike up his sinewy thighs, treating him to a moment of blistering eye contact before wrapping her tongue around the base of his shaft as far as it would go, dragging her mouth to his engorged head.
Wes fell back on the stack of bagged concrete, the fingers of his right hand burrowing into her hair. “Bethany. Sweet Christ. What are you doing to me with that pretty mouth?” She performed the move again and his abdomen plummeted and flexed. “Ahhh, fuck. Trying to hold on, baby, but I’m hurting.”
Talk about a power trip. Who knew it was possible to feel worshipped while on her own knees? But that’s exactly how it felt. Instead of doing him a favor, Wes was paying homage to her mouth. She’d only gotten started, too.
Bethany closed her grip around his hard sex and pumped her fist, trailing her tongue through his sensitive slit. When his hips shot up off the concrete bags, his strangled shout echoing through the empty house, Bethany sunk her mouth down as far as possible, until she could feel her throat rejecting his ample size, then sucked her way up to the tip—hard.
Wes rasped her name once, twice, his chest shuddering, and he lost himself in her mouth. Lord, it was the sexiest moment of her life, the way the heels of his boots scraped on the floor trying to find purchase, the fervor with which he clutched the strands of her hair, his straining thighs. If ever there was a moment to believe she could orgasm without touching herself, this was it. Wes was the orgasm.
“Oh my God,” he said in between heaved breaths. “Oh my God.” Bethany yelped when Wes hauled her up onto his lap sideways. “All this time, I’ve been so smug knowing I’m going to rock your world and then you just go ahead and rock mine. Not even a polite warning.”
A little butterfly danced around in her belly. “Are you waiting for an apology?”
“Hell no.” He brushed a hand over Bethany’s head and cupped her cheek, an unfamiliar light in those eyes that consumed her face. “I’m waiting to wake up.”
Intimacy, the kind where she looked into someone’s eyes and experienced unfiltered genuineness, was terrain she’d never walked before. It wasn’t a skill she’d mastered, so she started to flounder. “Well.” She straightened and laid a hard kiss on his cheek and then started to rise. “Don’t think you’re going to get special treatment at work tomorrow—”
Wes pulled her back down onto his lap. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m— Home,” she sputtered.
“Is that so?” he drawled.
“Hmmm.”
“No.”
“No?”
His palm coasted up her inner thigh, slowing when he reached her center, placing two fingers over the soaked seam of her jeans and rubbing. Firmly. Confidently. Every iota of oxygen in Bethany’s lungs whooshed out of her, lust turning the corner on two wheels and roaring down the avenue. She could only close her eyes and let Wes unzip her jeans, sliding his hands inside the denim, as well as her panties.
When his fingers made contact with her wetness, her hips hitched on a moan and heat flared in Wes’s expression. “Still want to leave?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t. You don’t want to leave my sight when you’re this revved up.” His middle and index finger parted her lips and teased her clit with a tight circle. “Not when I can make it so much better.”
Her neck blew a fuse, head falling back. Wes’s touch left her briefly to strip her jeans and panties off, and then she was naked from the waist down, draped across his lap, in the middle of their jobsite. Not that she could find the brain cells to care at that particular moment. The things he was doing to her with his fingers . . . it was as though Wes could actually read her reactions and interpret them in a way that afforded her more pleasure. Kind of like the object of sex, but this man actually did it, and his perceptiveness on top of her already monstrous attraction to him had Bethany so hot, her skin would surely singe if touched.
“Bethany . . . Jesus, look at you. How are you so fucking beautiful?”
Wes worked her swollen button of flesh between his knuckles, chuckling when her back arched. He cut off his own laughter by bending his head down and licking the tips of her breasts through her shirt—and then. Oh, then he bit down on a nipple and twisted his middle finger up inside of her. At the same time.
Deep.
“Wes, keep doing that,” she said hoarsely. “Keep d-doing that.”
“I’ll do any damn thing you need,” he groaned, adding a second finger and raking his teeth side to side over her sensitive nipple. “You want to fuck my fingers, darlin’? Move your hips. Move them around on my lap and feel how hard you’ve already made my dick again.”
Her body followed his instructions before her mind got the chance, her backside writhing on his lap and enjoying the plump ridge of his arousal. Easy. Decadent. Until it became urgent that his fingers stroke her deeper. With her pulse points going off like little alarms, Bethany worked her hips in time with his big fingers. They slid in and out of her, faster and faster until she almost couldn’t stand the oncoming pressure of imminent release. It built around her, the way an orchestra might during a piece of music’s crescendo.
“Wes,” she cried out, clutching at the front of his shirt. “I’m . . . yes. Yes.”
The climax rippled through her middle and squeezed her muscles, blew embers at her nerves until she swore she was on fire. Wes pressed the pad of his finger to a secret spot inside of her and rubbed there with quick, sure movements, brewing a scream in the back of her throat.
“Go on, do it. You fucking scream if I make you scream.”
She did and the freedom of it made her orgasm luminous and expansive, like she could dive through it and disappear. Maybe she did for a few moments, because when she opened her eyes again, there was only the smell of Wes’s neck, the feel of his arms around her, though she had no memory of him pulling her close.
“Okay, so . . .” he began, his voice scratchy. “We’ll take it slow starting now.”
Bethany laughed, a full, spontaneous sound that was nothing like her usual one. It wasn’t tempered or molded into what she thought a pretty laugh should sound like and as a result, it loosened something that had been unknowingly stuck inside of her. Wes’s face softened at the sound and she felt . . . lighter.
Without warning, Wes surged to his feet with Bethany still in his arms. “It’s your fault for being so irresistible,” he said—and promptly blew a raspberry into her neck. Bethany was still slack-jawed when he settled her onto her feet and gave her bare ass a playful smack. “You’ve convinced me to forgive you for falling off the roof.”
Bethany scrambled to get dressed and not ogle Wes’s rock-solid buns before they winked out of sight, back inside their household of denim. “So we should maybe, um . . . figure out some ground rules.”
“Nope.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“No ground rules. I’ll try not to maul you on the jobsite, but after hours . . .” He regarded her for a few seconds. “Just do what comes natural.”
“I have no idea what comes natural,” she whispered, her fingers tingling.
He came forward and kissed her softly on the mouth. “Figure it out with me.”