Not when Rill required saving.
She bit her lower lip, her gaze roaming over Rill’s body and lingering on his groin. His cock was moist and softening, but still firm and beautifully shaped. Her pussy tightened with desire. Her cheeks heated.
Good God, she was staring at a man who was dead drunk and she was getting turned on.
She stepped forward determinedly. He shifted in his sleep and mumbled something when she gingerly lifted his feet off the floor. Katie froze. When he once again began to breathe rhythmically, she swung his long legs fully onto the bed with effort.
She cased the scene for remaining incriminating evidence. Luckily his feet were bare, so she had only minimal trouble jerking his lowered jeans and underwear off his legs and feet. There was no way she could get his shirt off without risking waking him. She compromised by tossing the blanket over him.
He probably would assume he’d started to undress for bed and fallen on the bed in his drunken state, unfinished.
She hurriedly re-dressed in the hallway and exited the house. She recovered her leather carryall from the front seat of her car. On her cross-country trip, she’d grown into the habit of stowing the bare necessities in the shoulder bag for the night instead of taking her large suitcase into the hotel for the nine or ten hours she’d spend there.
A hot shower didn’t completely restore her composure following what had just happened, but it helped. Afterward, she unpinned her hair and let it fall around her back and shoulders. Her reflection in the filthy vanity mirror over the sink looked a bit desperate.
Had it really happened? Had Rill Pierce really just been deep inside her?
And why the hell had she allowed him to come inside her?
Rill’d had an excuse, of sorts, for his impulsive idiocy. Not a good excuse maybe, but a comprehensible one. He’d been drunk.
Katie had no excuse, or at least not the sort of excuse a grown woman should claim when she knew better.
At least the chance of getting pregnant wasn’t huge. The timing would have been off. It was little consolation, everything considered, but Katie’d cling to that threadbare comfort for now.
She wandered through the house, inspecting her surroundings fully for the first time and trying to quell a rising sense of panic.
When she’d pulled up to the “Mitchell place” earlier, she’d seen a classic American beauty of a house that had been neglected and fallen into disrepair. The home nestled in the midst of towering oak and maple trees. The foliage had started to turn despite the lingering summerlike weather. The vivid hues of the turning leaves against a muted lavender sky had looked a little surreal to Katie’s city-dulled eyes.
The house where Rill had gone into exile had three gabled dormers on the second floor and an enormous wraparound porch. The home possessed excellent bones, Katie decided, even if its faded and chipped painting and a few broken porch posts did give it a sad, forgotten air.
The interior was much the same, she discovered, as she walked through the kitchen, which featured appliances that at one time in their history had been white, and a chipped linoleum floor, but also handcrafted maple cabinetry, wainscoting and trim. She scowled at the crumb-covered counter and the sink filled with dirty dishes—mostly glasses left over from Rill’s drinking.
The next half hour was spent restoring some order to the kitchen and scrubbing the appliances until the pure white was once again revealed. She picked up the nearly finished bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey on the counter and poured the remainder in the sink. She closed the cereal box she found and headed for what she’d come to suspect while cleaning was the pantry door.
“Brilliant,” she exclaimed a moment later as she peered into the pantry. She stood next to the closed bottom half of a double Dutch door. The top part of the door was open, revealing a plethora of delightful handmade bins, drawers and shelves inside the pantry. She entered and found three unopened bottles of whiskey along with very little else on the handcrafted shelves, aside from another box of cereal and a mousetrap.
The man was determined to kill himself, she thought grimly. The realization sent a jolt of fear through her, just as it had earlier when she’d leaned over that bed while Rill worked his cock into her.
God must save pussies like this for dying men.
“Dying man, my ass,” she mumbled heatedly. She marched over to the sink and poured the rest of the whiskey down the drain.
Afterward, she inspected the living room with the tattered but comfortable-looking furnishings and magnificent carved oak fireplace. A snowy version of the local news played on the ancientlooking television set. Katie shut it off, wandered around the rest of the first floor and walked out onto the front porch.
How the hell had Rill ended up here?
How had she?
She became aware of a dull ache between her thighs, an undeniable reminder of what had just occurred. Was it possible to forget it had happened? Rill had gotten inside her mind and spirit long ago. Allowing him into the final territory of her body had been a mistake. Anyone could see Rill had nothing to offer a woman since Eden had died.
Except for his cock, that was.
The ache in her sex seemed to slowly expand to her belly. The loud chorus of birds and tree frogs she’d heard when she pulled up earlier had ceased. All was quiet now that darkness had fallen. More stars than she’d ever seen in her life winked at her from a vast midnight-blue dome. Some kind of animal—a coyote?—howled eerily in the distance.
She suddenly felt very small and insignificant standing there in the midst of the Shawnee National Forest, an alien in a strange land . . . an exile.
Her thoughts again strayed to what had happened in Rill’s bedroom. Her core clenched with arousal at the memories of the impulsive tryst even as her gut tightened with regret. Or maybe that hollow pain was hunger? She hadn’t eaten anything all day except for a breakfast sandwich at a drive-through outside of Kansas City.