“I don’t want to go home. I’m never going home. Shut the door.”
He shook his head. “No, Lindsay, don’t be childish.”
The rage she’d been holding off for days came roaring out of her, ripping at her throat as she shrieked and slammed the door. She turned, chest heaving, staring at him while she took hold of the drenched silk dress and yanked it off her shoulders to the floor. Stepping out of it, she shed her panties, stockings, and bra, all the while watching his eyes widen and his mouth drop open.
Finally she stood in front of him, naked as the day she was born. She reached for him, pulling him close by a belt loop. Quickly she unbuckled, unbuttoned, and unzipped him. But when she reached for his shorts, he stayed her hand. “It’s not like I’m this, uh, expert or anything. I’ve only ever … oh, shit.”
She smiled and lifted the waistband of his underwear away from his erection. It was a glorious thing, it was all hers, and she meant to have it. Right now.
He shuddered when she smoothed her palm, and then her fingers, up and down it, loving its length and heft, its heat, the moisture at its tip.
“Oh, God,” he groaned when she reached lower, cupping the warm flesh below, feeling it contract at her touch.
He grabbed her legs, lifting her up, kissing her while he moved toward a hay bale. All Lindsay knew were his mouth and hands and the heat below, between her legs, which urged her forward in ways that scared her. “Please, please, please,” she sighed as he sat, settling her on his lap, her legs on either side of his. He latched onto a nipple, sucking hard and making her shudder.
Lightning had resumed. It lit Anton’s face as he looked up at her, gripping her ass, his eyes shining. She combed her fingers through his thick, wet hair. “I’m not scared. I want this.”
He nodded. She lowered herself slowly, gasping at the new sensation, of being penetrated, spread by the part of his body that was inside hers. He sighed, and then pressed his lips against her sweaty neck before letting them slip to her breasts. Her hips seemed to move of their own accord. She pressed all the way down. It hurt, but in the most glorious way possible. She ground against him, finding friction while at the same time igniting something new, deep inside her, that made her move faster.
He let her set the pace, licked and suckled her breasts, fingertips digging into her hips. A tornado of sensation rose in her, heating her from between her legs, where she felt every inch of him, to her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her face, even making her scalp tingle, while she moved faster and faster, racing toward … it.
“Oh … oh … oh, yes!” She yelped while her entire body shivered and seemed to pulse with a new and wonderful sort of energy.
Anton had his face against her chest. His breathing came in ragged gasps. “I’m … gonna …” He arched up, and she reached over him to prop her hands on the wall, watching his face, fascinated by his expression as a sudden warmth filled her below. His hips kept moving. He kept groaning. She kept watching. Knowing that her life would never, ever be the same again.
Chapter Ten
Lucasville, Kentucky
One year later
“You can not be serious,” Kathy stared at her from the messy kitchen table. She had baby Antony on her knee, entertaining him with a set of rubber rings he kept gnawing on before tossing them to the floor with squeals of delight. Lindsay poured them both a glass of iced tea.
“You are serious.”
“As a heart attack,” Lindsay said, pressing the cold glass to her temple.
“Oh, honey,” her friend said, handing the baby his toys once more. “This one is such a handful, and you have all … this.” Her gesture encompassed the kitchen of the quad level house that required, among other things, a new air conditioning system. “Plus that brewery.”
Lindsay observed her oldest friend from her fresh perspective. She had, indeed married Anton, about two weeks after that first encounter in the storm, concocting a lie about her being pregnant. Which, ironically, turned out not to be a lie. It had been a somber affair, but one her father insisted on, wedding dress, mostly empty church and all.
She’d been ecstatic, not least because she was making her mother perfectly miserable.
Anton’s parents had been there, of course. His side of the room had overflowed with family. Her mother had barely spoken to any of them, leaving immediately after the ceremony, Lindsay’s morose father in tow. Her brothers had warmed up to the Loves at the small reception they’d hosted at their modest home on the other side of Lexington. Lindsay knew Anton’s mother did not approve of her, felt she was too big for her britches, and completely unable to function outside the protective circle of mansion, servants, and money.
“And the hips,” she’d tsk-tsked the first time Anton had taken her home to meet the family. “Not good for the babies.”
But Lindsay had been bound and determined to prove her wrong on every count. They’d been forced to spend the bulk of her pregnancy as tenants in her mother-in-law’s basement. Luckily, they had hours and hours to explore each other’s bodies, coming up with more ways to have sex than Lindsay ever dreamed possible. She learned she was insatiable when it came to Anton. His ardor matched hers.
So, after days spent sitting and staring out the basement windows and sharing stilted conversation and lunch with her in-laws and whatever cousins happened to have joined them, she’d greet Anton when he got home, bringing their dinner down to their miniscule space that held a bed, a shower, toilet, and sink, with just enough room left over for a large, overstuffed chair. And they would fuck each other silly until they fell into sweaty heaps and would feed each other the now-cold pasta or steak or whatever else his mother had prepared.
Lindsay had been operating in a fog, more or less on autopilot, since their strange farce of a wedding. She barely registered her humble, slightly damp, surroundings. The fact that Anton’s mother couldn’t seem to find a truly nice thing to say to her didn’t make much of an impression. She even attended their Catholic church in Lexington, but drew the line at conversion and setting a christening date for their baby. The ritualistic nature of their weekly services did soothe her, and she appreciated the young priest who always had a kind word for her in his soft Irish brogue.
But when the days stretched to weeks, the weeks to months, and she got bigger and more unwieldy, things took on a much less rosy hue. One late-spring, humid night near the end of the pregnancy, when it felt as though breathing the air in the dank basement apartment would finally suffocate her, she started crying and couldn’t stop.
Anton was summoned home, smelling of brewery and smoke, frantic, thinking the baby was coming.
Once she’d convinced him that wasn’t it, that she was miserable and wanted to go home, he’d knelt beside her, taken her hands in his and said, “My love, my Lindsay, we are home.” She’d stared at him, sniveling and hiccupping and swollen all over, and burst out with a string of curses.
He’d helped her to her feet, then up the rickety steps to the overheated kitchen. Anton’s mother was always cooking it seemed, and the house was always full of neighbors, cousins, and the one grandchild from Anton’s oldest brother Leo and his wife.
Nodding and smiling to everyone as they passed, Anton kept pulling her out of the house. Once he had her installed in his truck, he drove all the way to Lucasville while she continued to sob hysterically.
On the southwest end of town, he turned down a dark road, then into the driveway of a house she could barely see. He got out and helped her down, then led her up a few steps to a plain white front door with a small window at the top. “Where are we, Anton? I’m tired. I need to lie down.”