The Copper Valley Bro Code Series: Volume 1, page 11
“Not yet.”
He replies by moving to suck on my neck again while his hand slips under the covers and over my panties.
I part my legs more, and he dips his fingers between them over the thin cotton barrier. “Fuck, Ellie, you’re soaked,” he moans.
“Touch me, Wyatt.”
He covers my mouth with his again, his tongue gliding against mine, his hard body pinning me down, one hand stroking my hair while his fingers slip under my panties to trace my seam.
We both groan into the kiss, and I suck hard on his tongue when he slides one digit inside me.
He moves slowly, carefully, while I test arching my hips into his touch. “More,” I whimper.
“You are so fucking hot.”
We dive back into the kiss while he adds another finger. I reach between us and fumble with the button on his shorts. When I finally reach inside and wrap my hand around his solid cock, he jerks his fingers hard inside me, reaching that desperate, aching, needy spot deep inside. “There,” I gasp, squeezing him harder.
“Christ, Ellie, that feels good.”
“Deeper, Wyatt, right—oh, god, right there.”
I pump him faster while he drives his fingers deeper. I lift my right knee to give him a better angle, jerking on his cock and tightening my grip until—
Until the tickle.
The tickle behind my left eyelid.
“Oh—ah—no—ahh—”
“Come for me, Ellie,” he pants. “Fuck, I can’t—you need to—you can do it—”
“Wya—ah—ahh—”
“That’s it, baby. That’s—”
“Ah-CHOO!”
My orgasm explodes, and pain explodes in my nose as the sneeze rockets through me and my head collides with Wyatt’s. Something hot and wet squirts up my breast and into my armpit, and Wyatt grunts out a fucking hell before leaping back, covering his cock with one hand and his eye with another while he dashes to the bathroom, his shorts falling to his knees.
My eyes are stinging, my nose throbbing like someone’s hammering a nail into it, and my pussy is still having orgasm aftershocks like it’s no big deal that I just sneezed all over Wyatt and head-butted him in the middle of a heavy petting session.
I sneeze again, pain shoots through my entire face, and I stifle a whimper.
“I’m sorry,” I call weakly.
Wyatt reappears in the doorway with his shorts back on and a fuzzy gray dog in his hand. I think. My vision’s a little blurry with all the heat in my eyes, and I don’t know where a fuzzy gray dog would’ve come from.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m sorry,” I babble again. “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t realize—that’s only happened one time before—”
“Didn’t need to know that,” he mutters.
He rubs a towel—not a fuzzy gray dog—over my chest and side, and I realize he was in the middle of his own orgasm when I gave us both broken faces.
“Am I bleeding?” I whisper.
“No.”
“Is your eyeball okay?”
“Yep.”
“Um…thank you for the orgasm. It was very nice.” Oh, fuck. I’m going to have a swollen nose for Monica’s wedding. I’m going to ruin her wedding pictures.
Then I remember this is Monica, and she’ll spend the rest of her entire life telling people I helped beat off the pirate vagabonds who tried to kidnap her from Jason at the wedding, and I even have the bruised nose to prove it, and I snort out a laugh.
And then I whimper in pain, because snorting and broken noses don’t mix.
“Fucking hell, Ellie,” Wyatt mutters. “We have issues. Can you walk? How’s your leg? Get up. You can sleep in the guest room. I’ll clean this up tomorrow.”
He’s still holding his eye while he finishes wiping me off.
“Are you sure your eye’s okay?”
“Yes. Go on. You can’t keep going on no sleep.”
“I can clean this—”
He stands, plants his fists on his hips, spreading those shoulders even wider and holy banana pudding, the man could probably crack a walnut with those ab muscles.
He clears his throat. Oh, right.
He’s glaring at me. “I’m aware you’re perfectly capable. And I’m going to clean this, including the banana pudding, and you’re going to go to sleep anyway. Say thank you, Wyatt.”
I glance over and realize there is, in fact, banana pudding spilled all over the comforter.
“Thank you, Wyatt,” I mutter with a sigh as I silently mourn the lost dessert.
“Are we done arguing now?”
“Are we ever?”
His lips twitch again, and dammit, now I’m on the verge of smiling too, despite the pain still radiating out of my nose.
“Make you a trade,” he says suddenly.
“Why do I not trust you?”
“I’ll let you clean this up tomorrow if you show me that notebook you took away from Tucker this morning.”
I scurry out of the bed as fast as my leg will let me go. “Fine. I’m going. But if this swells up and bruises, I’m telling people I tripped while saving Tucker from a rabid coyote.”
“And I’ll tell them you threw a log at me when I tried to help.”
“Perfect.”
Before I can limp out of the room, he snags one of my hands. I glance up at him, suddenly aware that I’m standing here in nothing but my bare breasts, soaked panties, and the mangled scar on my left leg.
But he doesn’t look down.
Nope, not Wyatt.
He simply presses a kiss to my forehead. “Friends?”
“Can I still tell you not to tell me how to do things?”
“And definitely give me your wrong opinions when I’m doing something not your way.”
I ignore the sarcasm. “Only if you agree to do the same.”
He snorts softly, and I’m pretty sure it’s a snort of laughter and not utter and complete frustration. “You’re one of a kind.”
“And thank god for that. Beck would never keep up if there were two of me.”
I swear he’s smiling when I leave the room.
Mostly because I’m not sure my ego could take the hit if he was vehemently agreeing with my awful attempt at a joke.
13
Wyatt
The sound of the house alarm buttons being pushed wakes me from a dead sleep at 4:30.
Someone’s breaking in.
I fly out of the bed and land on soft feet, and I don’t bother pulling on a shirt, because it’s not going to be any protection against an intruder. I hit the bottom of the stairs when the lights flicker on, blinding me.
“Freeze, asshole!” Ellie barks. Something whizzes past me and thuds against the door.
The dark figure next to the alarm panel sighs. “A guy drives all night to answer a distress call, and what does he get? He gets a dildo launched at his face. Nice, Ellie. Real nice.”
“Davis?” she shrieks.
The slender, man-bun-wearing, bearded intruder bends over and grabs the massive purple thing from the floor. It’s longer than his tatted-up arm. “Fucking hell, does that even fit? Put your fists down, Wyatt, it’s not about her honor. You see the size of this thing?”
Ellie snatches it back, but once she has it, she grabs it by the base with her other hand and wipes the first one on her shirt.
“Go put pants on,” I hiss at her.
“It’s like a swimsuit, Morgan,” she snaps back. “And this isn’t mine. It was in the drawer in the guest bedroom.”
All three of us momentarily stare at the two-foot-long, six-inch-thick dildo dangling from her fingers. I try not to look at the mangled, leathery scar on her thigh, but my stomach still dips thinking about what she’s been through.
“You should mount it,” Davis says, nodding to the dildo.
Ellie goes stiff like she’s going to beat him with it, and I’m about to slug him when his lips twist in a familiar smirk.
“On Beck’s bedroom wall,” he finishes.
His dark eyes flit between us. “And you two should be more careful when you’re having sex. Looks like you had a threesome with a boxer.”
Ellie’s eyes bug out.
“We weren’t—” I start, yanking my hand away from where it instinctively went to test the tender skin around my eye, but Davis pops a rare full grin and turns to the door to the basement.
“What’d you do to fuck up Frogger? And where’s the coffee? If I’m gonna fix this, I need fuel.”
“Screen went out, so we pulled the plug to reboot.” I jerk my head back at Ellie. “Please go put pants on before Tucker comes down here and sees you walking around like that, because he’ll tell his mother and I’ll never hear the end of it.”
I can deal with the guilt of seeing her scars.
But I really don’t want Tucker thinking about women in underwear any younger than hormones finally make him.
“And don’t forget my coffee, wench,” Davis calls.
“Oh, go cut your hair,” she replies good-naturedly with a smile.
She heads to the kitchen, swinging the dildo of indeterminate source, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to at least wrap it in a garbage bag, if not take it all the way out to the trash herself.
I follow Davis into the basement. He was the youngest in our group growing up—of the guys, so excluding Ellie—the slowest to warm up to people, and he was the first to want to call it quits on the boy band thing. I don’t know exactly what he does for a job now, but I know it involves computers, coding, and the nuclear reactor a couple hours south of here.
“Should’ve told us you were coming. We would’ve left the light on.”
“Three calls in an hour, and you thought I wouldn’t come?”
“Three?”
He smirks again. “I don’t know what you told Beck, but he wanted photographic proof that his score’s still the highest.”
“I kissed Ellie. On video call with him.”
“About fucking time, dude.”
“Shove it, Remington. Not going there.”
He flips on Frogger and whistles low. “You wiped it.”
“Can you write a new high score on it?”
He gives me a don’t be a dumbass, of course I can look. “Gonna take donuts and coffee. Wouldn’t mind pretty company.”
I spread my arms. “I’m free until my kid’s up.”
“How’d Ellie break it?”
“Maybe I did it.”
“Dude. If it was your kid, you would’ve just told Beck. If it was you, you would’ve just told Beck. If you’re calling me to fix it, it was Ellie. Man up and do something about it already.”
Easy for him to say.
He has a career—and a bank account—that mean he doesn’t move every one to four years unless he wants to. He doesn’t have an ex-wife and a son to take care of, and no idea what he’s going to do to support them if he has to leave the military next summer because of orders anywhere but Copper Valley. And he doesn’t have a clue how ill-prepared I feel to be a good partner to anyone, let alone my best friend’s sister.
Help her heal?
Yeah. I’m in.
Anything more than that?
I’m not the man for the job.
14
Ellie
“Oh my god, what happened?” A human-size tropical bird—I mean, Monica rushes to join me outside The Muted Parrot, Shipwreck’s bright, cheerful coffee shop, four hours after Davis made his unexpected appearance Wednesday morning.
“One of Beck’s friends showed up in the middle of the night,” I tell her. “I didn’t get much sleep.”
“Because he gave you two black eyes?”
“Oh! Oh. That. No, that was me walking into a cabinet door.”
“You had sex with Wyatt!” Monica whisper-shrieks like I didn’t just give her a perfectly reasonable explanation that had nothing to do with having sex with Wyatt. She claps her hands, and her fake red, yellow, and blue feathers all flap up and down with her as she bounces. “I knew it. I knew you weren’t fake-dating him just to make Patrick quit acting all superior.”
Oh, shit, I’m totally transparent.
“Of course I’m not,” I whisper back. “I sneezed right as I hit the big O and we knocked heads and I can never have sex with him again.”
She looks around.
I do the same.
Because I really, really shouldn’t have said that.
However…it will be a great reason to break up with Wyatt at the end of the week. No blame. Just the simple truth that it’s dangerous for us to be together.
There’s no sign of Patrick anywhere—yes, I continue to worry he’ll realize I’m a loser who’s still not dating—which probably means he’s on a work call. I wonder if Sloane’s bored out of her mind, or if she’s taken to mindlessly playing Treasure Hunter on her phone like I used to when I was waiting on Patrick to end one of his important work calls so we could go somewhere.
Some days I get really pissed at myself for not seeing the signs sooner that he didn’t check the box for good husband material, even if his resume did. I like to think he changed while we were dating, that he wasn’t always a workaholic tool, but what does that say about my influence and our relationship?
You drive men to work too hard so they can avoid you.
Lovely.
Monica pulls me into the coffee shop. She lifts two fingers for the barista, who doesn’t bat an eye at getting a sign language order from a parrot, and she points at the back table, then drags me around the seashell-themed room until we’re in the sun room at the rear of the restaurant.
Cautiously, it should be noted, but she’s still dragging me over.
We have to look crazy, even in Shipwreck. Me in a knee-length denim skirt and a different Jolly Roger T-shirt from yesterday, as requested, and her dressed like a five-and-a-half-foot-tall parrot. I’m pretty sure the costume is just to annoy Jason’s parents, but not completely sure.
I’m also impressed that she went through with it. I thought she was kidding when she showed me the costume online.
“Do we all get parrot costumes?” I ask as she pulls out a seat and points a wing, gesturing me to sit.
“No, I got you a monkey costume. Explain to me exactly why you think you can’t have sex with Wyatt.”
“We’ll both end up dead.”
She makes a go on gesture, like being dead isn’t reason enough to not have sex. It also makes her beak flop around her head, and her brightly-colored feathers all dance with the motion.
I lean in close and lower my voice. “The first time we had sex, I had my car accident. We…messed around a little two nights ago”—yes, yes, it was just a kiss, but I’m warming up to this story—“and Beck’s Frogger game died mere hours later. We were in the middle of you know last night, and I sneezed and gave us both black eyes. We are not supposed to have sex. I can take a hint from the universe.”
“Wait. You said this happened mid-orgasm? Like, you got off, so the sex couldn’t have been bad.”
Bad? It was so far the opposite of bad that I don’t have a word for it.
And that was just his fingers.
I might burst into flames if we ever went farther.
“Ellie! You’re seeing someone? That’s fantastic.” Libby Rock, the middle-aged proprietress of The Muted Parrot, tucks her pirate wench skirts under her and pulls up a chair after setting a plate of scones on our table. “Who is it? Is it that handsome single dad from your lunch yesterday?”
“I heard Pop’s going to play matchmaker for all your kids,” I tell her in a desperate bid to distract her.
It doesn’t work. “Meh. He says that every couple months like clockwork. Tell me it’s the single dad. He’s a handsome one. And those muscles—mm-mmm. And so very polite and apologetic after the pizza mishap.”
“The pizza mishap!” I say triumphantly. “He kissed me on the sidewalk, and then the pizza mishap happened too. This is not a coincidence.”
“Ellie thinks she and Wyatt are cursed and should break up,” Monica tells Libby.
“Ah. Fear of commitment. Natural, after what happened with the last one she dated.”
“Monica’s marrying that last one I dated’s brother tomorrow,” I remind Libby.
“But she’s not marrying that barnacle you escaped from, thank goodness. They’re brothers, not clones. Now, you explain to me what’s bothering you about committing to this nice young man.”
“His name’s Wyatt,” Monica supplies. “The hot single dad. He’s in the military and flies experimental planes. Total badass with a big heart.”
“Not helping,” I tell her.
“You’re welcome,” she replies, lifting a scone. “Oh, white chocolate raspberry. Libby, you are a goddess.”
“Come, come, tell us the problem,” Libby says. “Physical, emotional, or vaporal?
“Vaporal?”
“Pits, feet, or ass stinks?”
Monica chokes on her scone.
“He smells very nice,” I concede, because despite actually having a good excuse to fake break up with him—since we’re only fake dating—I am willing to be his friend.
For Beck’s sake.
One day, my brother’s going to crack the wrong joke and need the rest of us to fall in line to get him out of trouble, and Wyatt and I sniping at each other won’t help.
“Does he have performance issues?” Libby asks.
“No matter how I answer that question, it won’t be three hours before everyone in town thinks they know everything there is to know about my sex life.”
“Two lattes and an ice pack,” the barista says, setting coffees and a bag of ice with a dish towel on the table. “And this is why I recommend padded headboards.”
“Your face does kinda speak for itself,” Libby tells me with a grave nod of her short graying curls.
“I walked into an open cabinet door.”
“I threw out my hip trying a new position once. Took me four days to walk again, but the memories last a lifetime. Ah, to be young and nimble again.”
“Wyatt’s stationed in Georgia, and my job is in Copper Valley, okay?” I need something, or I’ll be hearing everyone’s opinions on my love life before we make it the two blocks to the town square to try our hand at digging up old Thorny Rock’s treasure. “Yes, we have attraction, but we have other things working against us.”
