“No.” He yanks me tighter to his body, so close I almost can’t breathe. “I was thinking you deserve a man with a smooth back. And then I was thinking how I’d carve him up like a fucking turkey, anyway. So it wouldn’t much matter.”
“Gosh, the romance of it all.”
He pulls back with a frown. “I’m telling you I’ll kill any man who touches you and you make a joke?”
“I told you. I’m from New Orleans. We don’t scare easy.” I attempt a smile to lighten his mood, put him at ease. “Anyway, you didn’t really mean it.”
“You don’t think so?” He leans in until our faces are a mere breath apart, eyes blazingly intense. “I had to kill a dozen men with my bare hands to escape the enemy camp where I was tortured. Tortured for two years. Daily. I have no qualms taking a knife to anyone who breathes on you.”
My heart pounds up against my eardrums, my adrenaline spiking, but I don’t break our eye contact. Two years. Torture. He doesn’t want sympathy, though. I can see it in the challenging bristle of his posture, the clench of his jaw. He’s daring me to utter one word of solace. “To carve up a man for breathing on me, you would have to leave the oil rig first,” I murmur, issuing my own challenge. “What would happen afterward? Would you be my man, instead?”
Those breathless words are out before I can button them up.
What do they mean? Do I…want Butch to be my man?
I think of him in my tiny apartment, fixing my leak without having to use the step stool. His broad shoulders requiring him to turn sideways so he can fit into my shower stall. I think of him in my bed, his arms wrapped around me every single night of the week and euphoria spreads from my scalp to my toes. If I can get him off this rig, maybe…maybe there is a chance for this vision to come true?
Perhaps I’m crazy to be jumping so far ahead. I just met this man. But I’d be lying if I said my heart isn’t already attuned to him. If I said I didn’t feel a connection burning a path between us the moment I stepped into the engine room.
Butch’s eyes widen at my question, pectorals rising and falling unsteadily. “A man who can’t even fuck you? What kind of life would that be?”
“You don’t know for sure that it would hurt,” I whisper, reaching down to pop open the fly of his jeans and lower the zipper. “We won’t know unless we try.”
“No. Fuck! What are you doing to me?” Butch growls, taking two big fistfuls of my hair and angling my head back, licking up the veins of my throat. But he pauses with a strangled sound when I reach into his jeans and fondle his massive sex, stroking the throbbing thickness of it, gasping when it swells into my palm.
“I want my Daddy,” I choke out, nerve endings zinging and popping with the excitement of being so truthful. So raw and unashamed.
“Enough! If I made you cry, it would rip out what’s left of my heart.” With a visible effort, he untangles our embrace and steps back, chest heaving. And there it is, that unwieldy shaft, bobbing through the opening of his jeans and then some. It’s hard and aroused, but the sheer weight of his sex causes it to sag low, dragging down the front of his jeans. The tip is shiny. Huge and red. His balls are drawn up like tight stones, visibly distressed by the pressure they carry. Butch swipes at the sweat beading his upper lip, then wraps a fist around his arousal, beginning to stroke it. “Do as we discussed, little girl. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
He doesn’t understand.
My sex is flexing, searching for him. I’m hot and empty. In need of him.
But I can’t promise I won’t cry a little the first time he puts that thing inside of me and our bond is still finding its footing. Maybe we’ll get there eventually?
Something relaxes inside of me at that possibility. And that’s when I realize that my reasons for coaxing this roughneck off the rig have changed. I still want to sell this heap of machinery left behind by my father, because it could make life so much easier, but…I think I want to coax Butch all the way back to New Orleans with me, too.
God help me. For now, though, we have to focus on bringing him up to the deck. Bringing him up there and showing him the world isn’t going to end if he leaves the engine room.
With that goal in mind, I trade places with Butch.
I slide off the table and maneuver him so he’s leaning against it instead.
Butch grips the edges of the table, a muscle popping in his cheek. He watches me without blinking, waiting, and being the object of his lust makes me bold. Makes me feel coveted and desired. Suddenly, the fact that I’ve never done anything remotely resembling a striptease before doesn’t matter. All that matters is giving this man pleasure, the way he did for me in the bunk bed. The way he will again if I ask for it.
I start with my boots, bending forward slowly to unlace them, well aware that from Butch’s position, he can see down the front of my tank top. I’ve tugged it down low enough for my breasts to almost spill out, though my bra manages to keep them contained. Based on Butch’s reaction, I might as well already be naked. There’s a long, low grunt and a rustle of clothing—and when I finish removing my boots and straighten once again, he’s taken his shaft in his hand, rubbing it up and down, twisting that huge fist up and down his wide manhood.
Butch is…hot.
Intimidating, yes. Huge. A little scary.
But somewhere over the course of the last few hours, his size and ferociousness have become the things that physically attract me. Now his jaw is bunched and he’s focused in on my thighs, his hand sliding up and down, up and down as we work together to give him satisfaction.
Turning away from him, I strip off my tank top, letting it linger on the tip of my finger a moment before allowing it to flutter to the ground. Making hot eye contact with him over my shoulder, I unhook the front clasp of my bra and drop it, gratified when Butch lurches off the table.
“Let me see them,” he rasps, wetting his lips. “Want to see the tits.”
Humming in my throat, I turn, but at the last second, I cover them with my hands. Apparently I’m more of a burlesque performer than a stripper, because the tease is what’s turning me on. What’s making this exciting for me. A cog twists in my tummy when he lets out a frustrated groan, pounding his free hand on the table.
“Show them to Daddy.”
The demand in his tone makes me shiver, but I don’t drop my hands until I’m a foot away from Butch. Then I release my breasts and arch my back so he can inspect them. Oh, but he does so much more than that. Not only does he moan brokenly, but I watch in awe as his erection mottles and jerks, spurting a rope of semen onto the floor between my feet. And I love it. I love that he can’t maintain his control around me. That my body alone can cause his to react in involuntary ways.
I want more more more.
“My fuck would make them bounce,” he grits out, muscles flexing violently with every rough yank of his hand. “I’d suck them for fucking hours.”
God, he wants to have sex so badly. It’s such a stark need in this virile man. In that moment, I make up my mind that we will reach that place. He’ll be inside of me—I’m going to make it happen. Maybe not right now, but soon. I’ll give myself to this man who lives with a wealth of pain and refuses to put me through any.