Calder Born, Calder Bred (Calder Saga 4)

“I’ve got to have you,” he muttered against them and drove deep inside them without meeting any resistance.

His lingers tugged at the snap of her jeans, fumbling awkwardly with it before it finally popped apart. The ensuing urgency was mutual as he roughly worked one side of her jeans down over her hip while Jessy pushed on the other side. His weight moved onto her, their legs tangling as she banged her knee against the steering wheel. The heat of his body more than made up for her lack of clothes, her white jeans getting shoved onto the cab’s dirty floor. At this point it didn’t matter that he hadn’t stripped. It was sufficient that he had unzipped his pants.

Even though Jessy didn’t now exactly how to do it, she knew what to do. In such restricting confines, cooperation was required. Without hesitation, Jessy reached down and guided him into her, sparing each of them the awkward and frustrating probing. She had anticipated the sharp rip of pain and had her teeth clenched to check any outcry. It gradually dulled with his rhythmic movements, and the beginnings of pleasure silvered into the sensations.

All the discomfort fled as her enjoyment climbed to an exquisite level. Her arms were wound tightly around him, trying to clutch all of him to her while their kisses became rougher and hungrier, always demanding more from the other. Jessy had been silent in her pain, but she made no attempt to contain the raw sounds of pleasure that came from her throat when the climaxing storm of sensation shuddered through her body, turning her bones into jelly.

She had barely begun to recover some measure of sensibility when his arms gripped her hard to his body, her flesh absorbing the racking shudders that went through him. The stiffness slowly flowed out of him as he slumped onto her.

The position that had been so satisfying became uncomfortable; his body became a hot, oppressive weight; the quarters became cramped and her muscles protested against the hardness of the seat. She pushed at him, prodding him into moving off of her.

10

It took some maneuvering before both of them were upright again. Jessy began pulling on her clothes, forced by the steering wheel to angle her body into Ty’s side of the truck. Inside, she felt all warm and loose, silky as cream.

With glowing interest, she looked at Ty. A smile tugged at her lip corners when she noted the hat still perched crookedly on the back of his head. She snapped the waistband of her jeans together and reached over to pull the front of his hat onto his forehead in a proprietorial gesture. His reflexes were slow, but Jessy made no attempt to elude the reach of his hands that gathered her to him. He was so relaxed she could feel the limpness of his muscles as she snuggled into his arms. The brim of his hat brushed her head as he bent to rub his mouth over her hair.

“You gotta marry me, Tara,” he stated thickly, and Jessy went still.

“What?” She insisted he repeat it, hoping she hadn’t heard him correctly.

But Ty took no heed of her request, not even noticing that he was caressing a body that had gone cold in his arms. “Tara, honey,” he groaned. “I love you.” His low voice was neither so thick nor so slurred that Jessy could doubt what she’d heard.

Gripped by a rigid numbness, she woodenly pulled out of his arms. His lax hands made a feeble attempt to hold on to her, but it was a simple matter to elude them. Jessy did it without thinking, moving out of his reach to the driver’s side.

Her fingers curled around the steering wheel in an ever-tightening circle that became a stranglehold. She stared at nothing; everything was focused inward on the devastating discovery that in his drunkenness he had made love to her believing she was someone else. And, fool that she was, she had thought all those things he’d said had been meant for her.

She had been used. It didn’t matter how willing a partner she had been. Ty had used her to fulfill his own fantasy. A violent trembling started and her blood turned into hot ice.

“You bastard.” Jessy turne

d her head to glare her hatred of him. She wanted to tear him apart with her hands. “You low-down, rotten bastard.” The low fury of her words was pushed through her teeth, gritted so tightly together.

But it made no impression on him as he sat slumped against the seat, his chin tucked low against his chest. For a minute, Jessy was too blind with raging pain to notice the deep rhythm of his breathing. When the realization sank in that Ty had passed out, she wanted to scream.

There was no tenderness left in her when she grabbed his shoulders and roughly tried to shake him into consciousness. “Wake up, you son of a bitch.” There weren’t enough vile names to call him. But neither her cursing nor her shaking disturbed his sleeping stupor.

Jessy slammed out of the truck and stalked around to the passenger side. She jerked open the door and stared rigidly at his slumped and unconscious figure. His hat sat crookedly on the back of his bowed head, an insulting reminder that he hadn’t bothered to take it off to make love to her.

“I oughta drag you out and leave you where you fall.” Jessy wasn’t sure why she didn’t carry out that threat unless it was because her second choice had more appeal.

Pain usually had a sobering effect, or so she’d heard from bunkhouse tales of drunken cowboys. Cursing and shaking had failed to rouse him, but pain should.

Doubling up her fist, Jessy took aim on his slack mouth and chin and pulled her arm back. Her lips pressed together in a thin line of grim pleasure as she let loose her cocked fist. The impact was jarring, but when she felt his lower lip splitting against his teeth, she understood the satisfaction men got from fighting.

The blow jerked his head, instantly snapping him awake. A dazed frown claimed his features as Ty looked around, semialert yet not quite sure what had happened. It was a full second before he noticed Jessy or felt the pain in his mouth and jaw. He pressed a hand to his mouth, then looked at the smear of blood on his fingers with bewildered amazement.

“What the hell’s going on?” The thickening influence of liquor was still in his voice, but he seemed almost sober.

Jessy said nothing and stood there waiting—waiting for him to remember what had happened between them before he’d passed out. But the yard light spilled over the roof of the truck cab and illuminated her features, accenting their strongly boned look. There were no distorting shadows to let him think she was anyone else.

“Who hit me?” Ty continued to frown at her while he licked at the cut and tested his sore jaw. “I don’t remember a fight.”

“I did,” Jessy told him, the hurt and anger going deeper at his evident failure to recall what had transpired. She vibrated with the urge to hit him again, regardless of the sore throbbing in her knuckles from the last time.

The announcement startled him. “What the hell for?” No matter how sober he sounded, there remained a lack of coordination as he tried to get his long legs into a position that would get him out of the truck.

“You had passed out,” she stated contemptuously and stepped back while he stumbled out of the cab. “And I wasn’t about to carry you into the house.”