Steve kissed her jaw and said in a devastatingly sexy voice, “I guess our next intimacy challenge will have to be addressed another time.”
Roux couldn’t help but be overjoyed that there’d be a next time. “What challenge is that?”
He nibbled at her jaw, his thrusts faster now. “Coming together.”
“I’m sure you can make that impossible dream a reality as well.”
He shifted to peer into her eyes again. “I won’t ever give up, no matter how many times it takes.”
“That only encourages me to fight against you accomplishing your goal.”
“Don’t,” he said with a wicked grin. “I plan to make you come by every imaginable means.”
Now that was a plan she could get behind. And on top of. In front of. Underneath. Next to.
He pressed his cheek against hers, his thrusting hips claiming her in a frenzied, feverish tempo. Her excitement began to climb again, a more primal pleasure unfurling deep inside her. His hot, gasping breaths against her neck made goose bumps rise to the surface of her skin. She kissed his throat, the saltiness of his sweat delighting her tongue. And when he thrust into her one last time, his body shuddering with release, she decided giving was almost as good as receiving.
He collapsed on top of her, and she wrapped her arms and legs tightly around him to draw him as close as possible.
“You weren’t faking, were you?” she asked, unable to resist teasing him.
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t know how to fake that,” he answered breathlessly.
“Yes!” She slapped his ass triumphantly.
He rose up on his elbows to look down at her. “If you don’t want me to fall madly in love with you, you’ll have to start being a little less smart, sassy and fun, and a lot less sexy.”
He thought she was smart, sassy, fun, and sexy? Her belly was full of all sorts of fluttery butterflies as she tried to come up with the right discouraging thing to say to keep him at a safe distance.
“Why wouldn’t I want that?”
Yeah, those probably hadn’t been the right words to drive him away. But even at the prospect of Iona’s wrath, as Steve’s gorgeous face broke into a devastatingly winning smile, Roux didn’t much care if her career fell to pieces. She’d never make it all the way across Europe without sharing a bed with this man.
Fourteen
Steve lifted Roux’s hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. It felt good to let a woman close to him again. It had been much too long since he’d opened his heart to the possibility of loving someone. And she was just so damned easy to love. How could he resist?
She was gazing out the window of the rental car at the extensive cornfield they were currently driving past. “Uh, Steve,” she said. “Not to complain, but BFE, Illinois, was not what I had in mind when you suggested we get away for the weekend.”
“This is just a short stop. The jet needs to refuel.”
Which obviously required them to rent a car and head out into the middle of nowhere. He hadn’t told her why they had stopped in flyover country. If he did, and she wasn’t keen to meet his family, he would have easily been persuaded to head due south, but he’d met her family already, and it only seemed fair that she should know where he came from as well. He loved his parents. They were good people. But it was his grandfather that Steve most wanted Roux to meet.
“You aren’t taking me to meet your family, are you?” she asked, turning her head and narrowing her eyes.
“Some of them,” he admitted with a shrug. He turned onto a familiar gravel road, nostalgia getting the better of him when they rumbled past the tree he’d planted on Earth Day over twenty-five years ago. What had once been a prickly twig in a paper cup was now a towering spruce.
“I planted that tree when I was in first grade,” he told Roux, feeling a bit odd about sharing something that lame with her. Like she gave two shits about some stupid tree.
“Wow,” she said, turning to watch the tree out the back window. “It’s huge. You must be at least eighty if you planted that sucker.”
He gave her a sideways glance of annoyance, but truly he enjoyed her teasing, even if it poked fun at his advanced age. “At least I’m old enough to legally drink.”
“I’m twenty-five, okay? Just ask if you want to know how old I am. And you are?” She tilted her chin down.
“Thirty-four.”
“Ancient.” She winked, grinning saucily.
“Brat.”
“I wouldn’t have ever guessed you were a farm boy,” she said, her attention turning to the big red barn in the distance. The house wouldn’t be visible until they crested the next hill.
“Oh, I’m not. Never was. These wide-open spaces make me feel small. And that’s why I headed to Los Angeles when I was sixteen. I met Zach my first week there.”
It had been a chance meeting of two homeless teenage drummers living in cars parked illegally side by side. They’d been inseparable ever since. Steve often wondered how different his life would have been if he and Zach had played different instruments. Surely they’d have ended up in the same band.
“You went all that way on your own?” Roux asked.
“No, I packed up the entire family and we headed west.” He chuckled at her wide-eyed expression. “Yes, I went on my own.”
“I guess dropping out of school didn’t hurt your career prospects.”
Steve scratched his jaw, which was starting to roughen with beard stubble. “Actually, I didn’t drop out,” he said. “I graduated when I was fifteen.”
She gaped at him.
“Not common knowledge,” he added.
“So, you were like super-smart?”
“Am.” He poked her in the side. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Why didn’t you go to college? You could have—”
“Made something of myself?” He snorted. “You sound like my mother.”
“I was going to say gotten a scholarship. You’ve obviously made something of yourself. You’re a living legend.”
Steve smiled. He did enjoy a good ego stroke. “School was boring. I wouldn’t have been able to stomach another year of it. Music has always been far more mentally stimulating to me.”
They turned in at the gravel driveway of his grandparents’ huge, old—and from personal experience, drafty—white farmhouse. It was shaped like a giant two-story box. Its only outstanding architectural feature was a small sagging front porch.
“I get that. I was pretty good at school,” Roux said. “But I was great at the piano.”
“My grandmother always wanted me to play piano,” he said, “but I preferred banging a wooden spoon on every pot and pan in her kitchen.”
Roux laughed, her eyes lighting with delight. “The beginnings of a metal drummer genius.”
“Every living legend has to start somewhere,” he said with a wink.
He opened his door and hurried around the sedan to help Roux climb from the car. She hadn’t waited for him to open her door, but she didn’t protest when he took her clammy hand in his and helped her navigate the rocky surface of the driveway.
“When I was a kid, I used to walk on this gravel barefoot,” he said.
“Ow,” she said. “Did you do that while wearing overalls and chewing on wheat stalks?”
He rolled his eyes. “No. While smoking a corncob pipe, obviously.”
“I’m sorry. That was a bigoted thing for me to say. I’m not familiar with country life except for what they show on TV.”
Steve heard clanking coming from the long metal-sided garage near
the house. That would be where they’d find his grandfather. Probably restoring some old tractor, which had always been Pops’s favorite hobby and which kept him busy now that Steve’s dad and younger sister had taken over farm operations. “I need to warn you that Pops is deafer than a newborn kitten but refuses to admit it.”
Roux chuckled. “Deafer than a newborn kitten? Is that country talk?”
“Yep. You’ll catch on faster than a rabbit with his tail on fire.”
She laughed again. “Y’all don’t really talk like that, do you?” she asked, trying and failing at a southern accent.
“No. We’re too far north for y’all.”
Steve squinted as they stepped into the dim interior of the garage, willing his eyes to adjust. Something heavy clattered to the ground with a metallic clank, and within seconds he was being squeezed in a tight hug.
“It’s not Christmas, is it?” Pops asked, patting Steve vigorously on the back. The man was uncommonly strong for an old guy. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop in for a minute,” he said loudly, directing his voice toward Pops’s left ear, which was better at picking up sounds than his right.
“You got a show in Chicago this week? I’m sure my nephews would have mentioned it.” His family—including third cousins—still came to Exodus End concerts when they were held within driving distance. And though Chicago was a full two hundred miles from home, it was close enough to warrant a road trip.
“I’m on a break, actually. Heading to Europe in a couple of weeks.”
“What do you mean? I’m wide awake.”
He had no idea what Pops had thought he’d said, but didn’t bother to repeat himself, because Pops had just noticed Roux standing behind him. The old man’s breath caught, and his glossy eyes lifted to Steve’s.
“Who’s this beauty?”
“This is Roux.”
“Who?”
“Roux!”
“Woo? I’d have wooed her back in the day!”
“No, Roux. With an R. Roux.”
“Was I rude? I apologize.”