Now, in hindsight, he wondered if he’d been a fool not to let off some steam with Sherona. If he had, he might not have become so ludicrously horny at the sight of an old friend.
It was frickin’ pitiful.
His hand had sufficed for his sexual urges for the last year and a half. No . . . Longer than that, he reminded himself grimly. Depression and a raging libido didn’t tend to go hand in hand.
He’d bought two bottles of Jameson earlier. They were still in the trunk of his car, sorely tempting his pornographic brain and temper-tantrum-throwing cock. For a split second, the image of filling up the bathroom sink with whiskey and sticking his prick straight into it flashed in Rill’s mind’s eye.
He laughed under his breath. Made sense, in a bizarre way. He wanted his damn cock to shut up and give him some rest. But there was no way around it.
He’d have to knock out the monster by swallowing the poison.
Jaysus, he thought grimly as he stalked out of the bathroom. And Katie had crowed that she’d come there to save him.
Katie woke up in the middle of the night, freezing. She rose from bed and turned off the air-conditioning unit. The temperature must have dropped during the night. Technically, it was autumn, but summer just didn’t want to abdicate her throne this year. Maybe autumn had finally ousted her tonight, Katie thought sleepily as she felt around at the end of her bed for her robe. Her throat was dry. The water in the dormer bathroom appeared to be completely shut off. Maybe she’d hire someone from Vulture’s Canyon to come up here and make it functional again. It was going to be a pain to stumble downstairs every time she had to pee or get a drink—
“Rill? Where are you going?” she called out a few seconds later when she stepped over the threshold of the kitchen and saw him walking out of the house. He’d been so elusive for the past few days, catching sight of him suddenly took her by surprise. If he kept it up, she’d be more likely to see Sasquatch in these woods than Rill.
He paused in the process of opening the screen door. Katie’s eyes widened when she fully registered the image of him. He was wearing only a pair of boxer briefs. Smooth, naked skin gleamed with moisture. His wet hair stuck up in odd angles all around his head. His long legs were dusted with dark, crinkly hair. His skin wasn’t tanned, but Rill was black Irish, to be sure. His complexion carried the olive tone of some distant Roman or Spanish ancestor who had settled in Ireland.
Her gaze caught and remained glued on his crotch. He was turned in profile. His cock and balls were a heavy package barely constrained by white, stretchy cotton.
He just stood there, apparently as frozen to the spot as she was. It took her stunned brain several seconds to realize she’d been staring . . . and that he’d never replied. She pried her eyes off the compelling vision of his cock. His muscular abdomen was beyond flat; it was slightly concave below his ribs and powerful chest and shoulders.
“You haven’t been eating properly. . . . You’ve been starving yourself. I bought groceries today. I wish you’d let me cook for you,” she mumbled through a dry throat. She couldn’t think of what else to say, standing there in the presence of his flagrant male beauty.
Her skin prickled as he continued to pin her with his gaze, still not moving. He studied her with such intensity that Katie nervously glanced down at herself. She pulled her robe closed when she saw how exposed she was in her typical sleepwear—cotton boy short briefs and a tank top. Her nipples pinched even tighter beneath the weight of the extra layer of fabric. Perhaps her slight grimace at the sensation roused him, because he stirred.
“What I do and what I don’t do are none of your business,” he said harshly before he walked out and the screen door slammed behind him. She rushed after him.
“What . . . ? Are you truly crazy, walking out there in the middle of the night, wet and mostly naked?” she shouted through the screen. He must have gone over the edge, she thought. The temperature really had dropped overnight. Where was he going? She heard a rattle of keys and burst onto the porch.
“Rill? You’re not driving anywhere. Have you been drinking?”
“No. But I’m planning on it,” he replied, a dangerous edge to his tone.
She stuck her hand out, trying to find the stair railing. In the distance, she heard a popping sound and a noise like a rustling paper bag. She jumped when the trunk of his car slammed shut, shattering the silence of the night.
“Rill?” she asked when she saw a large shadow moving in the blackness. He came toward her—fast. She backed up the stairs anxiously, bumping into the screen door. She turned around and opened it.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Katie,” he said when he caught the closing door and followed her into the house. She noticed he carried what looked like two bottles of liquor in a paper bag in one hand. Figured.
“What?” she asked, edging backward toward the lit kitchen.
“You stay the hell out of my way and keep your mouth shut.”
She came to an abrupt stop next to the stove and eyed him disdainfully.
Well, it began that way, until she once again noticed his heavy cock straining against white cotton and followed the thin strip of dark hair that rose from beneath the low waistband of his briefs and kissed his taut belly button. The beguiling trail disappeared, but it teased Katie’s gaze upward to a powerful chest, where dark hairs were again in evidence, albeit not thickly, just above Rill’s nipple line. Katie had formerly had a preference for a hairless chest, but she decided then and there that the sight of a real man—such a flagrantly male specimen—had completely reformed her.
Well, Rill had.
She wanted to touch, to run her fingers through that crinkly hair, to make a tactile feast out of the smooth skin and hard muscle just beneath it.
When she realized she’d completely forgotten to be defiant in the midst of her drooling, she straightened and crossed her forearms beneath her breasts.
“That doesn’t sound like a ‘deal’ to me. It sounds like a proclamation. What do I get out of it?” she challenged.
He took another step toward her . . . close enough for her to see the gleam in his eyes. She didn’t look down, but she was highly aware of his cock straining between them. It was a little like trying to stand on the beach and ignore a tsunami roaring toward the shore. She resisted an almost overwhelming urge to retreat when he leaned down and his face came less than a foot from her own.