Chris grabbed her by the hand and led her past three Jellicle cats, one Seagull minus the Flock and a very tall but adorable Mary Lou Retton in her American flag leotard.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Back to the future,” he said.
Hand in hand they left the reception and weaved through the lines of parked cars until they reached Chris’s truck. He opened the door for her, she got inside and he followed, shutting the door with a decisive slam. He put his keys in the ignition and turned on the radio. “Interstate Love Song” by the Stone Temple Pilots was playing.
“I feel so much better now.” He sighed and leaned his head back against the seat with his eyes closed.
“It is a good song.”
“No, I feel better because you’re here.” He turned his head and looked at her.
“I’m here. And I’m going to stay here.”
“No more Hawaii?”
“I’ll go back tomorrow and put in my two weeks’ notice. And I’ll start packing up.”
“You don’t have to. I’ll still love you from here even if you’re there.”
“I know I don’t have to,” she said, “but I want to.”
“What else do you want to do?” he asked with a grin. He had the best smile of any man she’d ever known. When not smiling he looked serious and somber, but when he grinned, it was impossible not to grin back.
“I want to come home. I want to see my family more often. I want to make Lost Lake Village amazing. But more than anything, I want to do this.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him to her. He kissed her as he lowered her onto her back on the leather bench seat of the truck. She didn’t waste any time getting her hands between them, unbuttoning his jeans and stroking him. He was rock hard in her hand. She ached to have him inside her.
“We’re in public, sort of.” He didn’t seem to mind that too much as he’d already pushed her vest and shirt up to her neck and unhooked her bra.
“I don’t care. I need you,” she said as he unzipped her jeans and yanked them down her thighs. “I’ve needed you for three days.”
Chris slipped his fingers into her and inhaled sharply. “You do need me, don’t you?” he asked. “You’re so fucking wet.”
“For you. All for you.” She started to run her hands through his hair and found that she couldn’t. “Chris? What the hell is in your hair? It’s...”
“What?”
“It’s crunchy.”
“Mousse,” Chris said. “It’s supposed to be the ’80s, right?”
“Okay, fuck me fast because when we’re done, I’m washing your hair in the river if I have to. And if that doesn’t work, I’m getting a razor.”
“I didn’t hear anything after you said ‘fuck me fast.’”
“That was the important part.”
Chris laughed and kissed her again. Braced between her knees, he rolled on the condom and sunk down on top of her. This was no time for niceties, no time for whispering sweet nothings or making plans for the future. They could do all that later. Now they just needed to fuck each other, hard and without further delay. Chris thrust deep into her and Joey groaned as quietly as she could. That was it, that was what she needed. The aching inside her was so sharp and so sweet and his cock was the cause and the cure of it. Joey held tight to him, as tight as she could as she rocked her hips into his again and again, dizzy from the pleasure, racked with need. Her inner muscles contracted and clenched around him as he pumped into her with rough and hungry thrusts. On the narrow truck seat, they could barely move, which only made it all hotter and sexier and more desperate. Her orgasm hit her hard, all at once with barely any warning. She flinched and gasped as her vagina spasmed around Chris. He knelt over her and took her naked breasts into his large hands. With long rough thrusts he rode her to the beautiful end, coming in silence and then sinking onto her again. He kissed her face, her lips, her neck and nipples.
“This has been a good day,” she said. She drew a heart in the fog on the window.
“Happy birthday,” Chris said.
“Very happy. And Happy Halloween,” she said, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. He was still hard, still inside her. Maybe they’d make love one more time before going back to the reception. Maybe they wouldn’t go back at all.
“Oh, yeah, it’s Halloween, too, isn’t it?” he asked. “Trick or treat?”
“Trick.”
“I totally tricked you into falling in love with me so you’d stay,” Chris said. “And it worked.”
“That wasn’t a trick,” Joey said.
“It wasn’t? What was it then?”
She kissed him and then kissed him again and then one more time for good measure.
“My treat.”
* * * * *
Want more sexy stories set on Mount Hood, Oregon? There are two more books in Tiffany Reisz’s MEN AT WORK miniseries, HER NAUGHTY HOLIDAY and ONE HOT DECEMBER, coming soon, only from Harlequin Blaze!
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE MIGHTY QUINNS: TRISTAN by Kate Hoffmann.
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The Mighty Quinns: Tristan
by Kate Hoffmann
Prologue
THEY’D LIVED IN the blue house on Downey Street for just five months. Tristan had been so excited to move in. A real house after the family of five had spent their summer living in the car or sleeping in a tent. But when his father had died and the cold weather set in, things became desperate again.
They scraped together just enough money to survive from panhandling, petty theft and their mother’s disability payments. The Quinns couldn’t pay their rent, but no one wanted to evict tenants in the middle of winter. That was what their mother depended upon—the guilt of strangers.
Tristan stood at the window, scraping his finger over the frost that coated the inside. The heat and the electricity had been turned off two months ago. They’d been forced to depend upon a smoky fireplace for warmth and a gas-station restroom for water and plumbing facilities.
“Where is she?” Tristan’s little brother, Jamie, asked.
Their mother had taken their other brother, Thom, out to pinch some food from the local market. They’d been caught last month stealing a box of cereal, but the store owner had refused to press charges during the holiday season. He’d sent them home with a huge box of food that had lasted nearly a week.
Up and down. That was the way life seemed to work for the Quinns. Just when things started looking a little better, something would knock them down.
Tristan rubbed his arms through his jacket, his breath clouding in front of his face. His mother and Thom had been gone far too long. Something had happened, and Tristan was afraid of the consequences.
They were always just a few steps ahead of CPS—Child Protective Services—the dragon that loomed over their small world, waiting to snatch one or all of them away. Tristan couldn’t go to the police to find his mother because they’d discover that he and his brothers were alone, living in an unheated house in the middle of a Minnesota winter. And then CPS would separate them, possibly forever. So he and his brothers were forced to wait and wonder where their mother was—sometimes for a day or two, sometimes, if she managed to score some booze or drugs, for weeks.
The sound of footsteps on the porch caught Tristan’s attention and he held his breath, wondering who it might be. Burglars regularly broke into the house, looking for anything worth selling. The landlord made threatening appearances occasionally.
“Hey!”
Jamie smiled. “Thom,” he said.
A few seconds later, the second of the three Quinn brothers strolled in, his jacket unzipped, his face red from the cold. He carried a crumpled grocery bag, which he dropped on the floor next to the fireplace.
“What happened?”
“I told her she shouldn’t take the booze. She was already drunk, you’d think she could do without it for once. She was walking out and she dropped a bottle. It shattered around her feet. I grabbed what I could and ran, but they got her. She’s probably in jail now.”
“We have to rescue her,” Jamie said.
“No,” Tristan replied. “No. She’s safe there. She’ll have food, and a bed and heat. They won’t let her drink. If we go get her there’ll be too many questions. You know I’m right, don’t you, Jamie?”
The younger boy nodded.
“We’ll survive just fine on our own,” Tristan explained. “We have a fire and something to eat. We’ve got our sleeping bags to keep us extra warm. It will be like camping. And in the morning, we’ll go to school and we’ll be warm for the whole day and have a hot meal. We’ll make it through. We always do.”
Tristan reached out and pulled Jamie into his arms, giving him a hug. Then he looked over at Thom. “Why don’t you eat? I’m going to see if I can find some more wood for the fire. I passed a house on my way to school that had stacks of firewood. If I can take some, we’ll be warm for a few days.”
“It’s really cold out,” Thom warned. “Wear the red coat. That has a good hood.”
Tristan left his brothers in front of the fire, picking through the bag of snacks that Thom had managed to steal. Tris bundled up against the cold, then headed out, turning toward the alley that ran between the blocks of houses in their run-down neighborhood.
As he walked, he sniffed the air for the scent of a fire, squinting into the sky for a curl of smoke that might come from a nearby chimney.
Everything looked so different in the dark, especially when covered with a layer of white. But he found a house with a fire burning inside. He peered through the windows into the darkened interior, noticing the bars that blocked his entrance. But to his surprise, a side door to the garage had been left open, probably so the owner could retrieve more wood.
“This is good,” he murmured with a smile. Now he just had to find a way to carry it home. He could balance three, maybe four pieces in his hands. Not enough even for the night. He needed a way to move more wood.
The light from the alley allowed him to see the interior of the garage. He spotted a tarp and a wheelbarrow. Tristan grabbed the tarp. The wheelbarrow would be missed and he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to push it, but he could easily drag the tarp through the snow.
Tristan made quick work of the task, knowing the longer he took, the greater the odds of being caught. He managed to load up sixteen logs before he carefully closed the door and headed down the alley.
The guy would never miss the wood and Tristan’s family would be warm for the next day or two. He didn’t feel bad about stealing. Guilt was no longer an emotion he could afford. But every time he’d been forced to break the law or take advantage of someone to survive, Tristan made a promise to himself.
One day, when he was older, when he no longer had to take care of his brothers and they were on their own, he’d find a way to help people who were in trouble or struggling to survive.
He’d find them food or a nice place to live or maybe a job that would help to buy clothes and an ice cream cone every now and then. He wasn’t sure what kind of job it would be, but if there was something like that in the world, he’d find it...