Seeing is Believing (Cuttersville #3)(45)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“I’m sure it was cool. I was never in Scouts.” Piper nicked at the bark of the branch she was on. “So I have a sleeping bag in my truck bed, you know.”

Instant erection. That’s what he had. Like instant oatmeal. Done in sixty seconds, hot and ready to serve. “And exactly why would I need to know that piece of information?” he asked teasingly, moving his fingers higher up on her leg.

“Because I believe you had a teen fantasy about the back of a truck bed. I’m offering to help you out.”

Her boldness towards sex with him had surprised him initially, but now it just served to turn him on. There was no point in dissecting it. He’d leave that to the shrinks that neither one of them would ever go to. Therapy wasn’t a Cuttersville kind of thing. If people in this town had a problem, they usually just tried to drink it away.

But he was off track. Focus, Stritmeyer. A beautiful woman was offering to get it on in her truck in an apple orchard. With him. He glanced up. Under the stars. Check.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he told her. “Get on down here.”

Putting her apple in her teeth, she came down off the branch and lightly dropped down next to him.

Brady smiled at her, feeling sort of strange inside. “Hi,” he said.

She removed the apple from her mouth. “Hi,” she said shyly.

He wasn’t sure how she did that, navigating so easily between bold and demure, but it appealed to him in a way he didn’t really understand. “So how long do you think we have before Danny comes looking for you?”

She shrugged. “He’ll probably text me before he comes looking for me. Don’t let that worry you.”

“Okay.” Because he didn’t want to worry about anything. He just wanted to get naked in the moonlight with Piper.

He tossed his apple to the ground and reached for her. It was meant to be a slow seduction, a teasing lean that brought their lips together in a soft, enticing kiss.

But there was no slow because Piper more than met him halfway. In fact, she got to him first, her arms sliding around his neck, her teeth nipping at his bottom lip. Did she seriously just bite him? Brady almost fell off the truck from lack of oxygen in his brain.

“What was that for?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her and yanking her up against his chest. He wanted to feel her soft body against his hardness. He wanted to bite her back. He wanted to eat her.

“You bit mine, so I bit yours.”

Oh, really? Brady kissed her ferociously, with an urgency he hadn’t felt in God only knew how long. “That was an apple. I don’t think it’s the same thing. I think you’re just a dirty girl who likes to bite.”

She pulled back, panting, her eyes enormous as they floated above the pale skin of her face in the dark, her lips so tantalizingly close and moist. “I don’t know if I am or not. I never have before. It just felt right . . . like I had to bite you.”

“Do whatever feels right,” he told her, cupping her cheeks with his hands, suddenly aware that he was in by far the deepest shit he had ever fallen into. There were no waders high enough to navigate this without getting dirty.

If it was at all possible for a thirty-one-year-old cynic to fall head over ass for an unsophisticated woman altogether too young for him, Brady was fairly certain it had just happened. If anyone had told him this would occur in whole or in part, he would have snorted in derision at the ridiculousness of the possibility.

But here he was, making out with a fervor he hadn’t felt since he’d been sixteen, his fingers making inroads into her inner thigh like his very life depended on getting inside those panties. He wanted her and nothing else right now.

* * *

PIPER WASN’T EVEN SURE WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO her. She felt insane, like someone else had stepped inside her skin and was directing her actions. After carelessly dropping her apple into the dirt, she groped, she clawed, she nipped at Brady like he was the only thing standing between her and satisfaction, which she supposed, in a way, he was. She didn’t act like this—she didn’t. She was coming at him like she would die if she didn’t have sex in the next ten minutes, and it was so not her. But it clearly was her. And she clearly was going to die if she didn’t get to have sex with Brady in the next ten minutes.

When he pushed her away, panting hard, she gave a whimper, wanting his tongue back inside her mouth, plunging firmly, wetly, rhythmically. But he kept her at arm’s length, like he needed the space. “Where’s that sleeping bag?”

She had forgotten about the sleeping bag. Heck, she had forgotten her middle name. It was a good thing he was still coherent. “In that bag in the corner.”

“Excellent. Good. Very good. But damn it, I have to talk to you about something first.” He looked agonized.

Uh-oh. She didn’t like the sound of that. If he had a girlfriend, she was going to shove him off this truck into the dirt. With trepidation she said, “Yes?”

He raked his hands through his hair in a way that made him even more appealing to her. Piper had never, ever been as attracted to a man as she was to him. And he was a man, she made no mistake about that. Not a boy like the others she’d been involved with.

Taking a deep breath, he looked up from his jeans and met her expectant gaze. “I just want to make sure you understand that I’m going back to Chicago.”

That was it? Piper let out a whoosh of air in relief. “Of course I know that.” He had said it, hadn’t he? His grandmother had said it. It was a given that a man like Brady would not want to stay put in a town like Cuttersville, which he had run away from at eighteen. “I know.”

She did, and if she had indulged in a fantasy or two that he would stay longer, well, that was her problem. But she’d never gone so far as to fantasize about them being together long-term. She wouldn’t allow herself to do that.

“So what are we doing, then?” he asked.

Piper didn’t think a man generally asked that type of question. She raised her eyebrows. “Having fun?”

His brow furrowed. “Yeah. We are.”

“So is there a problem?” She didn’t have one other than the fact that she really, really wished he had waited until after she’d had an orgasm to have this conversation.

“No.” He jumped down into the truck bed and walked over to the bag she’d pointed out to him.

Piper waited, sure the conversation wasn’t over. There was something else he wanted to say.