Page 13 of Taken By the Lumberjack
I’d spent the night between cold showers wanting her and hating how badly I wanted her. The showers hadn’t been enough to make my damn cock stand down. They had only made me angry and wet.
I thought about it all day Monday. All night. And most of Tuesday morning while I was running a cut site for a client. My crew knew I was tense and so did my brothers. Another crew was there and the friction was high. Which just added to my tension.
I wished I had followed my gut instinct and simply headed to the taproom. Woken Charlie up and taken her.
But now it was quitting time, and I was headed off the mountain. Dirty and sweaty with a cut above my eye because I hadn’t been paying attention. I knew I’d hear it from my brothers — the cut, the distraction, all of it — but at the moment I didn’t give a damn.
I was on my way to her.
As I pulled into the parking lot, four more trucks pulled in behind me. My brothers.
Landry and Ridge, my two older brothers rarely came into town, much less to a bar. Landry was the oldest who we all measured ourselves against whether we admitted it or not. He was married now and had that kind of settled contentment that came from a man who’d found what he was looking for and knew it.
Ridge was like me. He had that edge of darkness running through him. I’d joined the military because of him. He’d left home because he’d refused to live in Landry’s shadow. We didn’t talk about what each of us had brought back. We didn’t need to.
Then there was Dane. The one who was steadfast and responsible. He hated being a lumberjack, preferring to work with wood another way. He made furniture during the off season and now had a steady following. I knew he would stop logging soon.
Sutton and Grant were the ones who showed up to the bars for fun — Sutton had been that way since before any of us could remember. He was recently married to his best friend, Arabella, and slightly less cocky but still the first one to say the thing nobody else would say.
Grant was the youngest, happy-go-lucky, our mother’s favorite even though she’d never admit it, and the one who’d somehow come out of the same family with the fewest edges.
When all five of them showed up, it meant it had been a bad day all around.
I didn’t say anything about it. Neither did they.
“Bar’s open,” Sutton announced when we walked in, as if this were news.
“Thank you, Mr. Observant,” Dane said.
“You’re welcome.”
I ignored my brothers’ chatter. Charlie was behind the bar and that’s all I needed to know. She looked up when we came in, her eyes widening a little. The McAllister brothers didn’t just walk into a room, they made an entrance. My brothers nodded and headed to the booth in the back.
Charlie finished the pour she was making and served the drink. I stopped at the end of the bar, watching her walk toward me. The sight of her hit me the same way it always did. Made a little of the darkness flee. The tightness of my shoulders ease. I hadn’t expected that from her — the way just being in the same room as Charlie Jones made the thing running underneath my skin slow down.
She didn’t say a word, just headed to the storage room. I followed.
“Sit down,” she ordered pointing to the office chair behind a beat-up wooden desk.
“It’s fine,” I said, but sat down anyway. Anything to be close to her again. I felt myself growing calmer just by being near her. Well, mostly calm. My cock was having its own reaction.
“It’s still bleeding.” She took a first aid kit off the shelf and sat it on the desk. I watched her find what she needed with the efficiency of someone who’d done this before. Then she looked up at me.
She stepped between my knees without seeming to think about it and brought the antiseptic wipe to the cut and I held still and let her work.
“It shouldn’t leave a scar.”
“I’m used to it.”
“Mmm.” She leaned forward and placed a bandage on the cut. Something about the simple focus of it—no fuss, no performance, just her taking care of me… I hadn’t expected how that made me feel. Nobody took care of me. I didn’t let anyone close enough for that. But her standing between my knees, herfingers light against my face, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I wasn’t sure which of us moved first.
One moment she was putting on the bandage and the next my hand was at her waist, pulling her down to straddle my lap. We both groaned. Her softness against my hard cock. Even through two layers of denim, it was enough to make all my good intentions go up in smoke.
My mouth crashed down on hers, my tongue thrusting deep and hard, the way I wanted to thrust my cock into her pussy. My hands found her hips and pressed her down harder. She started grinding against me, which was going to be a problem if she did it much longer. Like thirty seconds more.
I grabbed her ponytail and pulled her head back, right where I wanted it. My hand came out and encircled her throat—not hard, just enough to feel her pulse jump under my palm.
