“More like a python.”
He’s insinuating… Her damn cheeks heated and she put a few seconds into seriously debating just throwing herself from the moving vehicle.
She slid her sunglasses into place, using the shield to glance at his lap. Python, my ass. He’s probably got a micro peen that’s inversely proportionate to how huge he is everywhere else. She’d seen the term on a show once and looked it up, and…there were some things a woman just couldn’t un-see. It made her perversely happy to picture Quinn with one of those little anteaters.
Aubry checked the time. She’d been in the truck with him a grand total of three minutes. This didn’t bode well for the next fourteen hours and fifty-seven minutes. What am I going to do?
In any other situation, she’d just whip out her computer, stick in some headphones, and ignore everyone around her, but that wasn’t an option with her motion sickness. I am a bundle of issues.
Quinn whistled a few bars of a popular country song. “Besides, that wasn’t a kiss.”
“Pretty sure I was there. Your lips touching mine equals a kiss.”
“If that’s your idea of a kiss, you’ve been missing out. Now, why don’t you come over here and cozy on up? We should start practicing for the wedding.”
Practicing pretending they were dating.
I can’t take any more of this conversation.
“Maybe later.” She dug around in her bag and came up with her headphones. She plugged them into her phone and pulled up the audiobook she’d downloaded for just this occasion. She glanced at Quinn, wondering if the book would be enough to block out his overwhelming presence just a few feet away. It was the latest in an erotic thriller series, which shouldn’t have worked as a genre, but the author was phenomenal. Hot sex scenes and scary serial killers should be more than enough to keep her distracted.
She didn’t like her chances, though.
Chapter Four
At first, Quinn was kind of glad when the vicious little redhead popped on her headphones and turned to stare out the window. Despite all his bluster, he wasn’t interested in spending the next fifteen hours trading barbs. But somewhere around hour three, the music on the radio stopped being enough to occupy him and his mind started wandering.
Wandering right to the woman curled up on the seat next to him.
He hadn’t been lying about her ass being phenomenal. She must be doing squats while she played that damn game or something, because every time he caught sight of her in jeans, he wanted to take a bite out of those sweet cheeks. Her ass was the kind that he’d lovingly term “grabbable.” The kind of ass that would fit his palms perfectly, that he could use to hoist her higher onto his body until she wrapped those equally sexy legs around his waist and…
He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Hell, her mouth was pretty sexy, too. Her lips were just as full as the rest of her, and it was all too easy to imagine what they’d look like wrapped around his cock.
Quinn froze.
What the fuck am I doing?
Admiring her ass was one thing. Actively fantasizing about her—especially when she was right there—was something else entirely. It was the kind of thing that’d get him into trouble if he wasn’t careful. One more thought down that road and he’d be hard as a rock, and that would make for an uncomfortable situation.
What if…
Knock that shit off. Right now.
He forced himself to focus on something—anything—other than her. There wasn’t much else to think about. Things at the Rodriguez ranch had been going smoothly through the expansion. They’d brought in forty head of cattle and hired new guys to cover the increased workload. There had been a few hiccups, but nothing he and Adam and Jules’s cousin, Daniel, couldn’t handle.
The three of them had been best friends when they were growing up, and it’d been good to have them all back together again, now that Adam was in Devil’s Falls permanently, but that didn’t change the bittersweet feeling that came over him sometimes when he thought about the fact they should have been four instead of three. Their other best friend, John, had died thirteen years ago, but that didn’t make his absence any less noticeable. It was like a missing tooth—it didn’t hurt most of the time, but he was almost always aware of the empty space.
John’s death was the reason he’d told his old man to take a hike and gone into the cattle business. Life was too short. If one of the best people he’d ever known could have it taken from him in a split second, what the hell was he doing, going into an industry that he hated? All the politics and lobbying and manipulating to get ahead, and for what? More money that he didn’t need.
So he left, hell-bent on doing his own thing.
Quinn never felt more alive than when he was working himself to exhaustion, with the clear Texas sky over him and the earth beneath his boots. He wouldn’t give that up for all the money in the world.
He glanced at the clock. Four hours down, which meant they weren’t even halfway. Damn. It was going to be a long-ass trip if Aubry ignored him the entire time. It was his fault for throwing around sexual innuendos, but the look on her face had been priceless.
I’m paying for it now, aren’t I? Can’t get the damn pictures out of my head.
“Stop staring at me.”
He didn’t jump, but it was a near thing. Quinn stretched one arm out over the back of the seat and curled her bright red hair around his finger. “Can’t help myself.”
“Is that flirting?” She slapped his hand. “I really can’t tell because you’re so clumsy at it. Just like everything else you do.”
If that wasn’t a gauntlet thrown at his feet, he didn’t know what was. Quinn wasn’t normally this pushy with women—he didn’t have to be—but with her sitting there, looking all smug behind her bright green sunglasses, he wanted to… Fuck, he didn’t know. Shock her a little. “You know, I’ve been thinking—”
“Good God, don’t strain yourself.”
“—and I’m thinking that I need a better nickname for you. Sweet cheeks might be accurate, but no one in my family is going to believe I’d call the woman I’m in a relationship with something that…lowbrow.”
She tilted her sunglasses down to stare at him over the top of them. It made her amber eyes stand out all the more. “How about you call me nothing at all? Because that sounds ideal from where I’m sitting.”
“Nah. I’ve always been a fan of pet names.”
“One—I can tell. Two—save your pet names for your actual animals.”
She’d left that one wide open, but he chose to ignore it. Just this once. He twined her hair around his finger again. “I was thinking bunny.”
“You can call me bunny if you want to provoke me to actual physical violence.”
Yeah, it didn’t fit, either. He relaxed back into his seat, starting to enjoy the idea of this. “Cherry.”
“Hard pass.”
“Cookie.”
“No way.”
He wondered when she’d noticed that he was still stroking her hair. He hadn’t been lying when he said they would have to put on a good show for his family. That meant he had to get her used to him touching her, at least in these innocent ways. Or that was what he told himself as he kept playing with the ends of her hair.
And touching in the not-innocent ways?
To distract himself, he said, “Peaches. No, don’t look at me like that. You got to pass on three—that’s your limit. And you smell like peaches.” He leaned a little closer, keeping one eye on the road, and adopted his best Nicholas Cage voice, “I love peaches. I could eat peaches for hours.”
“Ew, gross.”
He sat back and laughed. “You have a problem with a man worshiping you that way?”
“I have a problem with Nicholas Cage comparing my lady bits to a fruit and, frankly, the image of him down there is enough to kill any desire the act would cause.”