Braving the Storm (Crimson Ridge #2)

Chapter 18

I ’m squirming in place.

Would this mountainside and cabin kindly open up a giant sinkhole and swallow me alive because my uncle is holding my phone in his impossibly large hands, seeing on screen the pathetic evidence of my crush, my obsession, my whatever the fuck you want to call this kind of unhealthy behavior.

It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. Is he angry? Pissed off? Fed up with my crap and ready to march my ass out the door and turf me onto the curb outside a motel in town?

“Give it back.” I hold out a hand expectantly.

He gives me a raised eyebrow in return. Silently casting his eyes over my figure.

I valiantly ignore his roguish, disheveled hair and sexy goddamn nose ring.

“That’s private.” Embarrassment crawls all over my skin like spiders with hot coals strapped to their legs. As much as my stomach swoops whenever I’m around him, I’m still pissed off at his taunting from barely a minute ago, infuriated with him more to the point. This man is older than me by a mile, but gives me whiplash with how fast his mood can change.

He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, looking like sex and temptation and wrongdoing… and the asshole has probably had some other woman—ugh, who knows, multiple women, even—rubbing over him all night.

The part I hate the most about that awful scenario, is that’s all I want to do to him myself.

“Fine. Whatever. Keep the phone, the bed is all yours, I’ll take the couch from now on.” Rolling my eyes and letting out a huff, I spin on my heel to put some much-needed distance between us as I attempt to rapidly vacate the room.

He strikes faster than his bulky frame suggests might be possible for a man his size.

Before I can take a step toward the door, a powerful arm bands around my waist, leaving heat pouring through my body from that point of contact. It’s a much stronger sensation than I’d ever imagined a simple act like that could be, and I’m tossed unceremoniously face-first onto the bed. The mattress dips and bounces beneath me as I land, sprawled on my stomach, with a yelp.

“What the fuck?” I splutter, trying to push myself up, but it’s impossible. There is a mountain of a man behind me, and he straddles the backs of my thighs, pinning me to the bed with his weight. With one hand, he snatches both my wrists, and secures them in front of my face, seemingly effortlessly, inside his giant paw.

His rings, his cuff, his goddamn tattooed name that makes my blood sing with desire, all of it fills my line of vision.

“Don’t play the brat with me, Briar.”

Holy shit, the deep warning in that voice in my ear sends my pulse racing. I’ve never been handled like this. This is rougher than anything I’ve experienced before, yet I don’t feel unsafe.

In fact…

My eyes slam shut as the familiar ache and warmth spread through my core, my pussy, my breasts. Why does this man barely have to say two words to me and toss me around and I’m ready to throw all caution to the wind, to gleefully shred the last remaining vestiges of all sanity, and spread my legs.

What the fuck is wrong with me ?

Turning my face to the side, I dare allow my eyes to open a crack, feeling and seeing just how close his bulk is, hovering over my spine.

To add to my humiliation, I’m panting.

Panting .

For my uncle.

“What do you want from me?” My voice comes out breathy, sounding just as desperate as I really, truly am. Even though it’s so wrong, last night unlocked something inside me. He cruelly opened that door, the one that was supposed to remain padlocked and bolted shut, and now I’ve had a glimpse of what lies on the other side.

Even though it’s a darkened precipice that I shouldn’t want to venture toward, I’m so unraveled that temptation has taken the driver’s seat, steering straight toward the cliff barrier that’s supposed to safeguard me against the sorts of untrustworthy, horny decision making currently rampaging through my veins.

“I could ask you the same question, darlin’.” With his free hand, he slides my phone around on the bed, directly into my line of sight, and props it up on the pillow so we can both see precisely what is on screen.

Exactly who fills the screen.

“I asked first.” It comes out awfully close to sounding like a whimper. God his weight feels so good on top of me. I can already feel my eyes threatening to roll into the back of my head. My muscles feel as though they’ve melted into puddles. Bliss and a sense of freedom rushes through me like a warm breeze, because this is something I can give myself over to.

I’ll gladly give him this kind of power when it feels so good. So natural. So unbelievably right with him.

I hate our circumstances of what we are and the technicalities around that connection.

“Is that what you want, Briar?” He lowers down so that his mouth is at my ear, brushing heated and wet against me just as he did to me last night when he melted my brain. “Is that who you want?”

As he says the words, I feel it.

The snaking glide of his hand finds its way between my body and the mattress. He’s wrapped around me, just like those mornings I’ve woken up, with him blanketing my spine and one hand cupping my pussy.

The video on screen is silent; he’s muted the audio but leaves it on a looping clip of videos showing different rides across his career. I’ve watched this one several times before. It goes on for at least ten minutes. A compilation of slow-motion footage showcasing every single powerful and breathtaking detail of the cowboy at my back.

“Tell me, darlin’… is that what you’re wanting? The famous bull rider? The star St?rmand Lane to fuck you and be done with you like some nameless buckle bunny desperate for a chance to taste my cock?”

A gasp escapes me at the coarseness of his words, mixed with the tightness of his fingers pressed against my pussy, the heel of his palm cupping me in a possessive hold. It’s the perfect position to add pressure to my clit, but he’s teasing me with wicked words and refuses to move his hand.

“I—I don’t know.” My hips shift involuntarily, and another whimpering noise comes out of me.

“Watch that screen. I know you want to. Because you’re in here at night watching these videos… so you’d better tell me, are you getting yourself off imagining what it would be like?”

I grind harder against his fingers. On my phone screen he’s all strength and agility and fearlessness. Leaner, thanks to his youth and peak athleticism, but no less impressive. Behind me that same man, only older and more hardened by life, is even hotter, more desirable.

Pure temptation and forbidden fruit I so desperately wish could drip all over my tongue and run like nectar straight down my throat .

I feel like my brain and body are tearing apart, nothing more than a shredded piece of paper.

“We can’t—This can’t happen.” Biting down on my lip hardly suppresses the moan as I hump his fingers and seek out that coiled, spiral winding tighter inside me.

“You think I don’t fucking know that.” His lips brush my ear before his nose drags over that same spot. The heat of his palm grips both my wrists tighter, and his body shifts over the top of mine. I catch another glimpse of those rings, of his leather cuff up close, and my pussy ripples with being so near to the edge of that release I’ve been chasing.

Oh god. Our bodies line up perfectly, and we’re grinding, writhing together on the mattress, fully clothed.

“ Please .” My body is crying out, aching with the need for release. “I don’t want him.” I don’t want the man on the screen, or my date from earlier today. I want the gorgeous cowboy whose body drapes over mine from knees to hips, to strong arms holding me, to his mouth at my ear.

“Fuck, darlin’.” He grunts against my neck, and I let out an unholy noise. Did I just outright start pleading with him to slide my dress up and put us both out of our misery?

I try to turn my head away, to ignore the vision of him wrestling in an attempt to remain astride the massive bull on my phone screen until that buzzer sounds, but he won't allow it.

“Look at it darlin’. You want to watch? Then watch, while you grind that pretty little pussy on my hand and take what you need. Watch me ride that bull and imagine how it would feel for me to ride you.”

For how often I’ve imagined being at his mercy, it catches me entirely unprepared for the feel of this man actually being on top of me like this. The potent masculine scent, the heat, the rustle of sheets beneath us.

“Take what you need. Your sweet little cunt needs this, and fuck, I wish I could give you more, but you’re gonna have to be the one to take it. Use my fingers, and let me see how gorgeous you look when you come.”

The illicit fruit he dangles in front of me is too tempting, too ripe, and mouth-watering. The layers of material between us are so thin, it’s almost like I can feel every inch and vein of his hard cock. My fingers claw at the blankets beside my head, still pinned in his hold. Each needy, rapid roll of my hips draws in my climax. The roaring of blood in my ears and the rub of my hard nipples against the inside of my bra, it all combines and races up the climb to reach that perfect peak.

“Goddamn. This dress should be illegal.” He nips at my earlobe, teeth sharp and pinching, voice rough with arousal. “You want to know where I was tonight?”

A sobbing noise comes out of me, incoherent pleading and nodding against the blanket.

“I was trying to find every way I could to stop myself from tearing your clothes off you.”

He lowers his mouth closer still, pressing his heated lips and filling my senses with gritty, coarse words.

“Believe me, I wasn’t with anyone else, darlin’… so whether you want to imagine it’s me helping you get there, or if you need to pretend it’s that man you’ve been watching in those videos, I don’t fucking care, but you’re going to come for me right now.”

As he says those final words, he grinds his hips harshly against my ass, the soft fabric of his sweats and his rigid cock flatten me to the bed. Driving me onto his fingers, again and again, and that’s what tips me over the edge.

My orgasm floods my veins as my toes curl, and a low moan breaks out of me.

“Oh my god. Oh my god.” I’m chanting, and my entire body clenches, my channel left feeling empty and so desperate to be filled, because this liquid pleasure would be so much more intense, a thousand brilliant pinpricks of light brighter and more tantalizing with his thick length stretching me.

“Fuck. Goddamn it, Briar.” Above me, I hear the unmistakable grunt of intense frustration before a final savage thrust of his hips against my own. So forceful it knocks the air from my lungs.

I’m floating higher and out of my head, knowing that he nearly lost it with me because of that.

Because of what I do to him.

Is it better, or punishingly worse, knowing that he’s fighting this attraction that we absolutely cannot indulge and should never have allowed to spark between us?

We lie there together for a moment. My heart still thundering wildly, and like last night, I’m trying to be the version of Briar who can handle herself with dignity after engaging in something that shouldn’t have even happened in the first place… but I don’t know if I can go another night without being held after such an intense orgasm.

God, I’m so needy. So fucking clingy.

He eases up from covering me without a word.

I wince and decide I can’t face anything more humiliating than yet another man who willingly leaves me cold and alone in a bed. There are far too many memories I don’t want that threaten to burst through the dam I’ve erected inside my mind, so I give into the pathetic need to hide away and bundle myself under the blankets.

I know I said I would sleep on the couch, but if he’s already preparing to run off in order to get away and insert distance between us. After the intensity of what just happened, my limbs are heavy and droopy.

Except, as I try to curl on my side to tuck myself into a ball and try to figure out what the fuck I’m supposed to do about the fact I turn into a cat in heat, rubbing all over my uncle every time I’m near him, the mattress dips behind me.

Strong arms band around me.

“Come here. Sit up for me.”

I’m caught in a state of disbelief, so much so that I lose my ability to respond. All I can do is follow his guiding touch and brief instructions .

Reaching behind his neck, he tugs his t-shirt off in one smooth motion, leaving a whirl of ink and muscles filling every inch of space, filling my vision.

Wordlessly, he nudges my arms to raise up. As I do so, I dare glance at his face, and his expression is pinched, brows furrowed. His intense focus remains on the task at hand—sliding my dress up and over my shoulders and head.

The whole time, he keeps his eyes on a spot somewhere around the point of my shoulder. Not staring at my body, but keeping his attention on what he’s doing. Once my dress is removed, he quickly bunches up a t-shirt—the t-shirt he’s just been wearing—and settles it over my head, covering me in his warmth and scent. The same careful, attentive manner follows as he guides each one of my arms through to set it in place.

I’m entirely too stunned to speak.

After he’s done that, he reaches under the fabric, and that’s when I suck in a sharp breath, because his fingers graze the back of my ribs and my spine.

The cowboy-dream kneeling beside me on this mattress unclasps my bra, leaving me fighting the urge to shiver as his rough fingers brush lightly over bare skin. With more care and attentiveness than I could ever have imagined, he methodically works to pull each of the straps through the arm holes in order to help me take it off.

It’s a series of steps that could have so easily been sexualized. Especially considering where we had ended up only moments before.

Only, there is nothing but care and a sort of tenderness in the way he just helped me get undressed.

Still lingering in heavy silence, he holds the covers back, and gestures for me to settle myself beneath them. I curl onto my side, as I had been trying to do moments before.

Then he rustles around a little behind me.

The lamp on the bedside table flicks off, plunging us into darkness .

I’m not sure what to expect, anticipating that I’ll hear the telltale thud of retreating footsteps within the next few seconds.

However, I’m dragged back against a warm, bare chest.

His legs tangle with mine.

My heart flutters and gasps with excitement in a way that I should absolutely squash and stamp down because there is no way I can allow myself to become attached.

We don’t need to say anything. We both know there’s nothing that can be said, because last night in his truck, and tonight, both of those stolen, reckless moments have stepped far beyond the boundaries of what should separate us.

I guess I’ll have to deal with reality come morning—that the man I feel so comfortable wrapped up in, is the one man I absolutely cannot have.