A Fallow Heart (Tommy Creek #2)(75)

“Cooper?” her dulcet voice rattled him into reacting.

He closed his eyes and bowed forward to rest his forehead on the steering wheel. “I feel like a total shithead.”

“Why?” Concern lacing her voice, Jo Ellen scooted to him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

He leaned heavily into her but refused to open his eyes. “Because I hate coming here. I hate seeing him like this.”

She sighed. “That doesn’t make you a shithead. Feeling pain from seeing your father’s misery makes you compassionate.”

Touching his back, she eased her fingers over his tense muscles. But her caress didn’t relax him, as he was sure she meant it to. His body only pulled tauter.

“I wouldn’t do that right now if I were you.”

When she shivered, he glanced over his shoulder, his eyes burning with emotion. He groaned when he saw the tips of her breasts hard and beaded under her blouse.

“I feel like a pressure cooker. And if you keep touching me, I just might lose my composure.”

Her lips parted. Tilting her chin up in challenge, she said, “So then lose it.” To tempt him further, she slid her hand down his back to the base of his spine where her touch slid half an inch into the gap at the waistline of his pants, pushing him past his limit.

His eyes dilated and his nostrils flared as he turned to face her fully. “I meant sex.”

She pulled in a sharp breath. “I know.”

“Right here,” he rumbled. “Right now.”

She nodded, seemingly too aroused to speak.

He scanned her face and found all the answers he wanted to see. “Jesus.” She was serious. She would. Right here.

All logic gone, he cranked the key in his ignition, killing the truck.

Jo Ellen broke down first. “Cooper,” she whimpered, reaching for him.

He met her half way, his mouth open as it slammed against hers. A part of him realized they sat publicly in the open on the parking lot of his father’s nursing home, but a majority of him didn’t care. He needed Jo Ellen. He needed her very essence to fill him where he was empty, where he hurt.

Sinking his fingers in her hair to cradle her head, he ravished her lips as he urged her backward on top of the bench seat. Lost in her, he consumed, plundered for more, and sought something from inside her he could never extract by physical means. She kissed him back, touching him as if she wanted to give him exactly what he sought.

“Someday,” he said against her throat, barely pausing to take his mouth off her warm skin. “I want to love you on a bed full of pillows and blankets. I want to get tangled in sheets and comforters until we’re wrapped together so tight they’ll need the Jaws of Life to separate us.”

She gave a small laugh as she rained kisses along his jaw. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever made love on a bed before.”

He pulled back, frowning.

With a flush, she lifted her hand to cover her mouth, but he caught her wrist. Ducking her head, she admitted, “Travis and I never—”

When a growl gurgled from his throat, she jerked her face up, her eyes growing wide with alarm.

But he waved his hand, encouraging her to continue. “You and he…what?”

“I…I…it’s nothing.” She shook her head frantically and squirmed slightly under him, letting him know how uncomfortable she’d gotten.

“Jo Ellen,” he gritted out, his teeth strained together. “Just because I want to punch something every time I hear that name doesn’t mean you can’t say what you want to say. So please. Tell me what you and he did so I know what not to do.”

She opened her mouth…and a cell phone rang from the depths of her purse.

He closed his eyes, hissed a mutter against her neck, and groaned. “You should probably answer that, huh?”

She touched his hair. “I don’t have to.”

“No.” He sighed. “Go ahead. We can’t finish this here anyway.” He didn’t pull back but continued to pin her to the seat of his truck, slipping his hand up her waist to cup her hip before he opened his mouth and caught a bit of skin at the base of her throat between his teeth.

As he licked her pulse, fully prepared to torture her the entire time she talked to her caller, she shuddered and fumbled to dig her phone from her purse. When she lifted the display screen, she frowned at the number. “Hmm. I wonder who this is.”

Cooper’s palm found its way inside the hem of her blouse and smoothed a titillating circle over her belly, making the muscles underneath tense and quiver.

“H-hello?” she breathed the word as she answered the annoying ring.

There was a pause before Cooper heard the faint voice of the caller hesitantly ask, “Jo Ellen?”

“Yes.” She sucked in a breath and arched while Cooper moved his mouth’s attention south, finding her aching nipple between the layers of cloth. “This…this is Jo Ellen.”

“Hey, it’s Travis. You told me to call whenever I made it into Tommy Creek.”

Cooper froze as the muffled voice from her phone’s speaker reached his ears. Blood thundered through his head, making his vision blur and his cranium feel crammed tight with a buzzing roar as he lifted his face and took in the features of Jo Ellen’s guilty expression. Color leeched from her cheeks as she met his gaze with wide eyes.