Page 67 of Snake

Part of his brain kept trying to wedge caution into this moment, kept asking that question: What the fuck? But it made less impression on him each time. He did not fucking care. It was possible that he felt better right now, with Autumn, touching her, feeling her, tasting her, than he had in the past twenty years of his life.

He did not care why this was happening. He did not care how long it would last. He did not care what it meant. He did not care what came next. All he wanted was this, as long as he could have it.

All the bullshit that was his life would be there later, just as shitty as ever. For now, he wanted this one good thing.

Whatever it was.

Chapter Sixteen

What the hell are you doing?

Once again, Autumn gagged the stupid voice in her head. This time she hog-tied the twit and locked her in a closet. She was doing exactly what she wanted to be doing, and for once in her life, she was letting want have the reins.

That voice had been in charge most of her life, telling her to ignore homophobic jerks who made comments about her dads when she wanted to dump drinks on their heads. Telling her to focus on work and find fulfillment in her life through success in her career, when she wanted to find someone to share her life and fill it that way as well. Telling her to manage Chase and use his interest in her to her own advantage, when she wanted to sue him so hard she claimed MWGP right out from under him and his father.

Telling her to be smart, to be strategic, to make no decision until she could see the whole field before her, to make no move that might spiral out of her control. Her inner hall monitor.

That voice had been screaming at her today. Everything she’d done, every decision she’d made (if anything could be said to rise to the level of an actual decision), was reckless. Everything carried the chance of consequences she couldn’t imagine—and those she could, all of them bad.

There was not one single sane reason that she was locked in a bedroom with Daniel Cox, lying beneath him on a bed of ambivalent quality, while he pushed her La Perla bra up from her breasts and sucked one into his mouth like he meant to feed on it. Nothing about where she was now had anything to do with strategy.

But oh, how she wanted this. Him. She wanted him. Daniel Cox, a hick biker who hated his name, hoarded words like each one was solid gold, and frowned so much she could go spelunking in the crease between his eyebrows.

Before today, her answer to the question of what she wanted in a romantic partner had been the same: somebody attractive but not so handsome it became a defining feature of his personality. Somebody educated, who paid attention to the happenings in the world and could hold up his end of a conversation. Somebody who knew how to dress—by which she meant somebody who knew their way around Tom Ford and Burberry, or at least, like Pops, Brooks Brothers.

In high school, she’d made a vision book for all her plans for her life; four pages had been devoted to her dream guy, represented on those pages by a magazine cut-out of Henry Cavill. Back then, she hadn’t yet figured out that really handsome men generally spent a lot of time looking at themselves. Now she’d consider extreme good looks to be a red flag.

Cox was the opposite of her supposed ideal: Cavill-level good looks, with that thick blond hair and heavy blond beard, those ridiculously blue eyes, those broad shoulders, that dangerous shadow taking up permanent residence on his expression. Despite the surprising tendency for random bursts of poetry, he hated to talk, and his education had stopped with trade school. And his dress? T-shirts, jeans, battered boots, and, of course, the kutte. He wouldn’t know the Burberry plaid from a lumberjack.

But Autumn was interested in more than looks and style. When she thought of her ideal partner, she also listed other traits: somebody with a good heart, somebody who wasn’t skimpy with respect, someone who treated her as both an equal and a treasure.

She hadn’t fully realized it before today, but Cox met each of those vastly more important criteria. Even when they argued or bickered, he didn’t condescend to her, try to diminish her. He met her head on, he listened, he said his piece, and he listened again. He treated her as an equal.

And he’d held her hair back while she’d puked. He hadn’t taken advantage of her when she’d drunkenly thrown herself at him. He’d put her to bed and held her when she’d told him she was afraid. As mortified as she felt about that particular night, what it said about Cox was a lot—all of it good.

This was a man with a good heart. Maybe it was encased in concrete and rebar, but it was in there.

It was in the way he gazed down at her now, the way he’d gazed at her since he’d first kissed her tonight—a hungry, needy look, but pulsing too with confusion and maybe even fear. He didn’t understand this any better than she did. They were both off the map, off script, in unfamiliar territory, with no understanding of the language.

Seeing her own feelings in his eyes had Autumn absolutely gone for him, at least for this moment.

What would happen when it was over? She did not care. Later could take care of itself; she was tired of being strategic. A lifetime of careful vigilance had wearied her to her bones, and Cox’s tender ministrations were like therapy. Every quivering thread of pleasure he drew from her body seemed to close a place she’d been bleeding without realizing it.

He growled—growled—against her breast, and his arms and hands clenched around her suddenly, forcefully enough to crack her back. It didn’t hurt, but surprise propelled a soft grunt from her.

His head shot up, and Autumn whimpered at the loss of his mouth.

“I hurt you?” he asked on a gasp.

She’d been so wrong about this man. Brushing her fingers through his hair, she shook her head. “No. I want this—all of it.”

His frown deepened as he studied her, checking for the truth.

An impulse clutched at her throat, to tell him how much she wanted it, how he was rewriting everything she’d thought she knew about sex and men and having sex with men, and she swallowed hard, pushing that impulse away. Too intense. Throwing caution to the wind was pretty great, as it turned out, but she didn’t want to scare the poor man. Or herself.

This was a singular moment in time, and it couldn’t be more than that. She didn’t want her mouth to make promises her mind, in the coolness of distance, wouldn’t keep.

So she raised her head from the pillow and planted her mouth on his. He made a low, rumbling sound and settled in, his hands pushing all over her, finding the hooks of her bra, the last buttons of her blouse, the zipper of her trousers. Autumn kicked her shoes off and got busy with his clothes, raking his t-shirt up his back until she had it nearly over his head and he had to lift up to rid himself of it—

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