I took several gulps, the cool liquid soothing my parched throat. It didn’t help. Had no one ever told him when he was eating, he sounded like a man who was being loved on hard? I sneaked a peek at him again. He had his eyes closed, grinding the food between his teeth. His neck moved with the motion of swallowing his food. He had a beautiful neck, thick and pale. Did he bruise easily?
Shit.
The jostle of the truck alerted me to the unevenness of the road. We’d left the town behind and were headed toward the rolling hills cradling Bristlecone Springs. Deeper into the country, where the residential homes gave way to farmland and livestock. I swerved around a deep hole sharply to avoid ruining my tires, but I gripped the cup too tightly, and the lid flew off. Soda spilled over my hand and onto my lap, with most of it getting on my shirt.
“Shit.” I pulled over to the side of the road. “You okay, Ozzie?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Just soaked. Fuck.” I was pissed at myself for getting distracted, watching Ozzie eat, for fuck’s sake. What an embarrassing way to have almost met the devil. I crashed my car from lusting after the way my son’s fiancé swallows his food.
I’d be the laughingstock of hell.
Lusting…
Good god. This was insane.
“Oops, let me help.” Ozzie dug into the paper bag the food had come in and brought out a handful of napkins. He unbuckled his seat belt and leaned over, mopping the liquid from my shirt. My heart hammered at the proximity of his face to mine as he worked with his pink tongue peeking out of the corner of his lips.
“Gosh, you’re all sticky.” He raised my shirt and dabbed at my stomach. My muscles contracted as he shoved the napkins higher and brushed my nipples, which pebbled instantly at his touch.
A groan slipped from me. I slammed the cup into the cupholder and grabbed his wrist, but not before he grazed my nipples again.
“Your shirt’s still pretty wet,” he said. “You might need to take it off. There should be more… Gray.” He gasped.
Had he felt my hard nipples? “What?” I followed his gaze. He was staring at the unmistakable bulge of my erection behind the zipper of my jeans. “Shit.” I released him, and Ozzie practically threw himself back in his seat with his neck craned to the right and stared out the window.
I shoved at my erection. My dick liked it a little too much, but what to do? No way was I going to remove my shirt after that. Better this kind of sticky than making a mess in my underwear.
“Ozzie.” I didn’t know what to say, but I had to say something. How did I explain to him what I didn’t even understand? I’d slept with other men I’d just met. But usually, because I deliberately went out already predisposed to getting laid. This… meeting an ordinary guy and springing a boner out of the blue was a first.
“It’s my fault.” Ozzie’s attempt at a laugh came out as a high squeak. “I know I’m not responsible for… that.”
“Exactly.” My chuckle was just as terrible as his fake laugh. “Had it been anyone touching me, it would have been the same. We men are wired to react that way to someone touching us.”
“Right. It’s a very natural reaction.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t have known I have sensitive nipples. Why, in my earlier years, I could come just by…” Shit. Runaway mouth. TMI, Gray. “Well, you get it.”
Please let him not get shit. Why hadn’t someone invented a button you could hit and rewind the last five minutes? Just five minutes was all I needed. Was that too much to ask?
My hands shook when I put the truck in gear and resumed our drive. An uncomfortable silence saturated the cabin, getting thicker with every yard.
“Do you mind if I put the radio on?” I asked. Anything to break the nothingness between us. If he kept staring out the window like that, he would get a crick in his neck.
“Nope.”
I switched on the radio out of sheer desperation. The station I’d listened to earlier had changed to playing a different genre of pop songs that sounded too upbeat for my mood. I turned the knob again until the soft crooning of a country ballad I didn’t recognize filled the cab.
Ozzie had abandoned his food. I couldn’t blame him. I would be upset too if my almost father-in-law popped a boner at my touch. Would he tell Carter? The last thing I wanted was more tension between my son and me. Besides, nothing had happened. There was nothing to tell, right? But what if he mentioned it?
By the time we arrived at the ranch, Ozzie seemed to have forgotten about what had happened. He sat up straight, making tiny sounds in the back of his throat. His whole body was so expressive it oozed his excitement.
“I didn’t realize how big the ranch actually is,” he said.
Of course he hadn’t. The one time he’d been here, it’d been in the dead of a winter night, and a blanket of snow had covered the land.
“One of the largest in the state.” I made no attempt to temper my pride. The land was my roots, my life, my legacy. I loved every rugged inch of it from the mountains that hemmed us in to the south to the crystal-clear river that served as our northern boundary.
