Those thighs squeeze tight, so tight, trying to hold in the needy ache between. “You’d have to be gentle when you do that,” I tell him. “My pussy’s really shy.”
“Is it?” His breathing harshens, his teeth scraping over his bottom lip as he hungrily stares at me through the screen. “Fuck, I want that shy little pussy now. I want to get so damn deep inside you, baby.”
“You can do that, Ranger—” The ringing of the period bell interrupts me. As soon as it falls silent, I lean in closer and tease him, “But first you have to pass your oral examination in front of the class.”
He groans and laughs. “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll put you up on your desk and give those kids a hell of a lesson in biological reproduction.”
My classroom door opens and I bite my lip to stop the response I would have made. Another student follows the first inside, and suddenly the room is filled with the scraping of desk legs and the thudding of books onto desktops and the shuffling of papers.
Onscreen, Ranger closes his eyes as if in pain. “Maybe I’ll step off-camera for a minute. You hear any weird grunts, it’s just the bears roaming around up here.”
I muffle a giggle behind my hand and that draws his gaze to mine again.
Quietly he says, “So next Saturday, yeah?”
“Yes,” I confirm softly.
“All right. I’ll be staying at the—”
“Don’t tell me,” I interrupt urgently. My entire body is suddenly taut with fear. “Don’t tell me the hotel, don’t tell me which city. Just…text me the details on Saturday morning.”
Face unreadable, he looks at me steadily for a long, long minute. “Why?”
I can’t answer that. I can’t even think of a good answer for it.
Ranger comes up with one, teasing me a little, as if sensing my terror and deliberately trying to put me at ease. “Afraid you’ll blow off those Friday night plans and come looking for me?”
I laugh shakily and nod. The ringing of the next bell saves me from answering.
But that’s exactly why I’m afraid.2Ranger“If the food chain collapses and we start cannibalizing our family members,” my brother muses from his bed of wildflowers, “I call dibs on Grandma Florence. She’s already salty—and real well seasoned.”
I grunt out a short laugh, shoving my laptop and satellite uplink into their cases. I’m almost sorry to say goodbye to those kids. But not sorry the end of the school year means Alicia has free time coming up.
“Where’s the pot of honey?” my brother asks.
“What pot of honey?”
“The one we were going to fight over if the little fuckers didn’t pay attention. Though I wouldn’t have keeled over until at least the second punch. I have some pride,” Brandon says, sprawled out naked in the field with purple flower petals in his hair and idly scratching his belly.
“I don’t have a damn pot of honey.”
“So you’d have lied to a bunch of little kids? I don’t think you’re cut out for this teacher gig.”
I’m not. It was some bureaucratic bullshit that got me roped into this long distance learning thing last summer, and I had every intention of being such a surly bastard that they’d make someone else take over. Then Miss Alicia Simmons came onscreen, so fucking pretty and sweet and sharp, and changed my mind.
Hell, she changed everything for me.
“I notice you didn’t say a thing about that new job as district ranger and moving to her little hometown. Maybe you aren’t as sure of her as you think?”
“I’m sure of her.” Whether Alicia’s sure of me is the question. She seemed real spooked when I told her that I was visiting. Spooked and aroused. So I’ll use that arousal to keep her with me while trying to soothe whatever fears she has.
Finished packing up, I haul my equipment toward my truck. Brandon lumbers to his feet, following along.
“I notice you didn’t say a thing about biting her, either.”
“That’s a conversation that we’ll only have if we need to.”
I hope to fuck that we don’t need to.
“She didn’t look sick to me,” Brandon says. “You ask me, she looked damn good.”
“That’s because you only saw her this one time.” While Brandon was ambling around behind me, with the kids screaming that there was a bear and to look out. So I had their attention the whole time.
Alicia’s attention, too. And she does look damn good. That long red hair is thick and shiny, just waiting for me to mess it up with my big hands. Her eyes are clear and bright, and her porcelain skin blushes so damn easy. But last autumn, she didn’t have hollows in her cheeks and her clothes didn’t hang off her body like they do now.
We reach the truck and Brandon starts dragging on the jeans he left in the front seat. “Maybe she’s doing that…what’s it called? The diet where you mostly eat fat and meat. The kitty diet? Shit, we’ve been on that diet our entire lives.” He snorts out a laugh. “Which is fine for a bear. But you? A big bad wolf, eating a kitty diet. You ought to be hanging your head in shame.”