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  “All right,” she said and crossed her arms.

  I still had no intention of putting my hands on her luscious body. Whatever else Jenny might be, she was young and frightened. We exited the back way and when I lifted her onto the back of my bike, zipping my jacket around her, she became my responsibility.

  “Won’t you be cold?” she asked, hesitantly circling her arms around my waist as I eased the bike out.

  “Yes,” I answered shortly, not adding that the heat of her body at my back was helping to solve that problem even as it created another problem in my pants. My arms were bare as I was only wearing an old t-shirt from Carson’s Garage in Emblem. The snow flurries had thickened and even though there was no way they would last long, they would wreak havoc on the roads in the meantime.

  “Hold on,” I told Jenny, glancing down at the peachy skin of her right leg. Her skirt was short and when she straddled the bike it rode up more. A lot more. Yeah, I would need to cover this girl with some more damn clothes if I was going to make it through the night without climbing on her.

  I drove slowly down Main Street and then veered off a side road that led to scattered dwellings in the belly of the desert. It was where I had spent most of my life. There were no streetlights and the land was black as pitch, but to me the desert had always been beautiful. I loved it. It was likewise cruel, searing hot, with more than a few terrible memories so I also hated it. Its conflicts were mine as well. It was where I belonged.

  Jenny shivered and tightened her grip on me. I slowed down even more, hoping it would reassure her that she was safe riding on my bike. She was safe with me.

  “Almost there,” I shouted back to her. If she gave me an answer then I couldn’t hear it over the wind.

  Earlier tonight Creed’s girl, Truly, had gently teased me. She told me I needed to find a ‘nice’ girl. I knew what she meant. My cousins had laughed along in agreement. They thought I should go find a girl like the one who was reluctantly clinging to me right now. I had answered with a grin and a crude remark.

  What I didn’t say was that I’d had one of these nice girls before, and not just in the biblical sense. I’d had her and thought I loved her and then I’d made a mess of her. It was a fact that tormented me but yet it kept me in check. What kind of a son of a bitch would I be if I let the same thing happen again? I couldn’t pretend to be like my cousins. I couldn’t be redeemed.

  Even before I’d rolled to a complete stop Jenny hopped off the bike. She stood a few feet away while I parked and climbed off. Pretty much all I could see of her were small clouds of frost as she exhaled.

  “Is this it?” she asked. “This is where you live?”

  I unlocked the flimsy door of the trailer. “It’s no palace,” I admitted, “but it’s home.”

  She sighed and turned to face the darkness. “I wasn’t born to palaces anyway,” she muttered and I wondered about her. If she was from California and attending ASU she must at least hail from some money. So what the hell was she doing slumming around Emblem on Christmas with the Doria brat? Then there was the mention of her sister in Quartzsite, the one who was apparently married to some biker. Quartzsite wasn’t known for its wealthy residents.

  Doesn’t matter who she is. She’ll be gone tomorrow.

  “You coming in?” I asked, holding the door and flipping on the switch inside so she should see.

  She was hesitating. She knew once she went through the door of that broken down trailer in this rural nowhere she was at my mercy. I didn’t know how many other ways I could promise her that I wasn’t going to try a goddamn thing. I might not know much about Jenny, but there was a spirit of reckless defiance in this girl. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have hopped on my bike no matter how bad her choices seemed.

  “Here,” I said, offering her the only thing I had.

  Jenny didn’t move any closer. She stared at the phone in my hand. “What should I do with that?”

  I smiled. “Hold onto it. That way if I do anything fucked up you’ll have a lifeline.”

  She let out a sarcastic little laugh. “Something tells me it wouldn’t do me a lot of good all the way out here. And frankly I wouldn’t have the opportunity to use it.” She made a sweeping gesture. “I mean, look at the size of you.”

  Honey, you ain’t seen the size of me yet and if you did it would blow your academic little mind.

  I bit my tongue and didn’t say that. It wasn’t worthy of her.

  “Jenny,” I began, hoping that by saying her name I would come across as sincere. “I swear you haven’t got a thing to worry about, not with me, not tonight. Now can you come in out of the cold so I can stop propping this door open and freezing my nuts off?”

  She accepted my phone. She stared at it and then looked up at me. “You never answered my question,” she said.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Whatever it is, the answer is no.”

  Jenny actually managed to smile, a brilliant college girl gift that showed she was appealing as shit and capable of seducing any man. “How old are you, Deck?”

  “Sixty five. Now will you come inside?”

  “Yes, now I will come inside.”

  I should have moved away from the door because she had to squeeze past me and I could feel the firm outline of her breasts through my shirt.

  Too young, too young. Legal, yes. But too fucking young!

  I would need to keep repeating that to myself until my middle leg learned the lesson. Just then it was preoccupied as my eyes swept over a ripe female ass and communicated the message. The more I looked at her, the more my dick demanded her.

  Jenny took two hesitant steps and found herself in the middle of my living room. The trailer was only a single wide model, housing its third Gentry generation. It was originally owned by my grandfather who reportedly used it as a place to split up the hillbilly heroin he got into dealing. Jenny Smith might be a little upset if she learned that old man Gentry expired on the spot beneath her feet some thirty years ago when he tested out his own products a little too zealously. Back when I was a kid I lived here with my folks for a while until my mom got fed up with Chrome’s shit and moved us a mile down the road. Chrome himself used to shack up here on his rare Emblem visits until he was mowed over riding the wrong way on a northern Arizona highway. Now it was mine.

  “You can sit down,” I told Jenny, taking care not to accidentally touch her as I edged around where she stood frozen in the middle of the floor.

  “Where?” she frowned.

  I yanked a chair from beneath the shallow tabletop that was bolted to the wall. Jenny stared at the peeling yellow paint on the old chair. Then she shrugged and sat, neatly crossing her legs at the ankle.

  “Then where will you sit?” she asked.

  “Don’t need to sit,” I answered, taking a look in the small fridge. I thought I had a few beers in there but Benton might have snagged them when I wasn’t looking. I closed the fridge. It was probably better there was no poison around because I needed to stay sharp. Now that I was warming up and Jenny was primly perched ten feet away with her soft legs on display, I just wanted to wrap that business around my waist and hit it deep.

  “How long have you lived here?” she asked politely, shrugging out of my jacket and hanging it carefully behind the chair.

  “Closing in on three years straight,” I said, stretching my arms and silently pleading with my boner to stand down. “Ever since I got out of the Marines.”

  She nodded. “And what do you do?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “So? You don’t like girls who can talk?”

  “I like women who know when to shut the fuck up.”

  I hadn’t meant to say it so sharply. Jenny looked momentarily startled. She really needed to put the jacket back on and cover her fucking tits; her nipples were showing through her lace bra and that see-thru joke of a shirt. Even if she’d been ugly I’d want those things inside my mouth and Jenny was pretty goddamn far fr
om ugly. Her features were delicately sculpted and a slight turn of her head showed a profile that was achingly lovely. Despite that, there was something slightly wrong about her appearance. Her skin was creamy and vaguely freckled, at odds with her black hair. As I looked at her more closely I realized her eyebrows were considerably lighter, meaning her hair color was likely not natural. It didn’t matter; she still had more quality than anything I had touched in a long time.

  “You think I’m not a woman?” she challenged and she wasn’t flirting. She was pissed.

  I pointed to the brown accordion door ten feet away. It didn’t do a very good job of staying shut but at least if she was on the other side I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore. “Bed’s in there. It’s yours for the night. Bathroom’s in that closet. And no, I don’t think you’re a woman. You’re a kid, Jenny. A dumb kid who is too innocent to understand how fucking tempted I am right now. So watch your step, sweetheart, and get on the other side of that door before I decide to lay you down and give you one hell of a wild workout.”

  I thought that would be the end of it. She’d scurry behind the door and I wouldn’t need to see her again until sunrise.

  Jenny slowly stood up. I’d noticed defiance in her already tonight and I’d blown it off as reckless immaturity, but as she glared at me I saw something darker in there.

  “I don’t take orders from you,” she said and then she pulled her shirt over her head. “Or from any other man.”

  “Is that so?” I growled, drinking in her body as the hard ache in my dick intensified.

  “Yes. And I’m old enough to know what I want and when I want it.”

  Oh yeah, little girl? We’ll see.

  I got rid of my own shirt and advanced on her. “No nineteen-year-old ever knows shit about what they want.”

  She took a step back and swallowed, her eyes widening at the sight of my bare chest. I only half remembered where I’d come by many of the tattoos decorating my body; unlit dives in foreign countries with a bottle in my hand and a colossal pain in my heart.

  Jenny’s eyes narrowed and she regained her composure. “I do,” she said clearly and I saw the hunger in her. Jenny was out to prove something, either to me or to herself or to the world at large. She wanted to use me to do it. That was fine. I wanted to use her for something too.

  “So what do you think now, Deck?” she asked, standing in front of me in her bra, those pretty tits heaving with every breath.

  I didn’t have anything to say. My dick had gone berserk and was taking over. If Jenny expected that I would kiss her softly and ease into things then she was wrong. I had her bra off and my mouth on her tits before she knew what was happening. After all, she was begging me to treat her like a woman and this was how I treated women. She didn’t make the slightest objection as I sucked away and moved to her neck, crushing her against me as I grabbed two handfuls of her hair. My knee went between her legs and I pushed her into the wall, shoving her skirt up over her hips. Jenny might be a good girl in the daylight but right now she was hot and ripe and rubbing herself against me, twisting out of my grip, running her mouth over my chest.

  There was a ghost of my own conscience whispering that this was wrong. I’d brought her here with the most honorable of intentions, only to treat her like sleaze in the end. Jenny was a troubled girl and I was about to screw her like she was some drip snatch I’d grabbed off the street. I was doing this in spite of the fact that for a split second she’d reminded me of Amelia. Maybe I was letting this happen because she had reminded me of Amelia. That momentary glimpse of what I’d lost was the cruelest knife. I had to get it out somehow. I pushed her head lower and she was eager, kneeling down and fumbling with my pants until I helped her.

  “Ah, SHIT,” I groaned, bracing my hands on the wall at her back. For all Jenny’s enthusiasm, she didn’t seem real educated on what to do once my dick was in her mouth. I didn’t care though; just the feel of it in there was insane.

  I looked down at her; thick black hair cascading over slim shoulders, eyes closed, tits bobbing, and was relieved that she didn’t remind me of Amelia anymore. That was why I was going to give her what she wanted. Jenny had decided she wanted to be fucked by the bad boy biker and I planned to fuck her good.

  “Deck,” she gasped when I suddenly picked her up and heaved her over my right shoulder. It wasn’t the most romantic gesture, but we could fit through the narrow doorway to the bedroom that way. I knew that because I’d already done it a thousand times with women who faded from my memory as soon as they left my bed.

  I tossed her down on the mattress, watching the bounce of her tits as I got her panties off and spread her out. Glancing down, I saw my earlier impression had been correct; Jenny wasn’t really a brunette. She reared away and held me off though when I tried to put my face down there. I chuckled and got between her legs as I grabbed a box of condoms from the crate beside the bed.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said through clenched teeth and held her hands close to her chest in fists, like she might let loose with a swing at my jaw if I did anything else she didn’t like.

  Once I got my junk all covered I seized both her wrists and pinned them on either side of her head. “I’m not laughing at you,” I told her, letting my dick graze the place it wanted to plow right into. I was a half second away from ramming into her so hard her eyes would roll back when I got a good look at her face. She was biting her lip and her expression was closer to distress than desire. It was rather unsexy. My dick screamed at me to pay no attention to the reluctant girl it wanted to get inside of. But Jenny had suddenly lost all her fiery boldness and I hesitated.

  “You ever done this before?” I asked her, just barely this side of finding out for myself.

  Her expression was suddenly guilty, apologetic. “Sort of,” she mumbled.

  Sort of?! SHIT!

  I pulled back instantly and Jenny shyly tried to cover her breasts with her arms. As I sat up on the edge of the bed and battled my own crazy urges, she crept over and touched my back.

  “Look, it’s okay. I still want to do it,” she whispered.

  She took her hand away when I didn’t answer for a while. I went to the ancient armoire I used as a closet and pulled out an equally ancient gray sweatshirt, tossing it back to her. I waited as she silently pulled it over her head. Since my outraged dick was still hanging out I pulled the condom off and tucked it back into my pants before I faced her again.

  Jenny was embarrassed as all fuck. She gave me a fierce look and I suspected she would rather let Willie O’Melia feel her up than cry in front of me. She was mortified though. She pulled her skirt down as far as it would go, held her head up and prepared to stalk out of the room while gripping the shreds of her dignity.

  “Jenny,” I said. She was going to ignore me so I got behind her and wrapped her in a vice-like grip while she struggled to push me away. Her firm ass was carelessly rubbing against me and my cock roared to life again.

  “Stop it,” I demanded, tightening my arms around her until she managed to relax. I pushed her hair aside and spoke close to her ear. “Listen to me. It’s not because I don’t want you. Baby, I would tear this shit up.” I moved my hand under her skirt and stroked her briefly, trying not to groan over how ready she was.

  Then I took my hand away and smoothed her skirt down. “And if you ask me on any other night I will.”

  She said nothing. She sighed and let me hold her.

  “Not tonight,” she finally nodded.

  “No,” I confirmed. “Not tonight.”

  “Thank you, Deck,” she whispered and it was such a weird thing to say that I released her in surprise. I’d never had a woman thank me for not fucking her before.

  Jenny walked back to the kitchen and quietly sat down in the chair again. She pushed her hair out of her face and looked at me calmly. It seemed as if she wanted to pretend the last five minutes hadn’t even happened. I was happy to pretend the same thing.

  “You hu
ngry?” I asked her, moving to the kitchen and opening the cabinet above the sink.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JENNY

  Deck offered me a box of crackers and a bag of beef jerky. I didn’t watch as he pulled his shirt over his head. His sheer unapologetic masculinity was so raw, intimidating. My hand suddenly went to my lips as I remembered just how close I’d been to that hard body.

  Oh my god, I had his penis in my mouth. The penis of a stranger, a total goddamn stranger!

  My face burned. In fact I had suddenly become blistering hot all over. The sweatshirt he’d given me was huge, reaching to my knees. It also smelled like him; a musky sort of aftershave I recognized from the moments I’d been all over his skin. I knew Deck had done me one hell of a favor by seeing through my false bravado and pulling back when he did. Now he was trying to do me another one by chewing a knot of jerky as he looked mildly out the window.

  “Is it still coming down?” I asked, nibbling on the corner of a cracker and keeping my legs crossed at the ankles.

  “Barely,” he shrugged. “It’s sticking more than I thought it would though. Roads’ll be fucked up.”

  When I realized what else had come within centimeters of being fucked up I dropped the box of crackers. Deck didn’t turn around. Apparently he wasn’t going to ask me any questions about where I came from or what I’d meant about my dubious virginity. Maybe he was respecting my privacy or maybe he just didn’t care. I wouldn’t have told him about it anyway.

  “Why yes, I’ve done this before. Once. The boy was beaten and exiled. Two days later I was married off to a psychotic old man. But you still think I’m sexy, right? Right??”

  I stood up, feeling dizzy. “I need to get out of here for a minute.”

  He didn’t try to stop me when I went through the door. Just before it closed I spied my bra in the corner. The sight of it prompted a fresh wave of humiliation. I didn’t feel any better when I was outside in the cold darkness but at least I wasn’t hot anymore. I noticed a dim light about a hundred yards off and squinted until my eyes detected the shape of another structure. It had a low roof and was likely a trailer, or perhaps several trailers joined together. I wondered who lived there.