Page 81 of Lucky Haven

He groans and shoves his phone in his pocket, then hoists me over his shoulder.

I shriek as the satin skirt crawls up my thighs. “Cash!”

“You started this, Lucky.” He sets me down on the tailgate and lifts my legs, pushing my skirt all the way up before he wedges himself between my thighs. “Sorry, I forgot you don’t like the nickname.”

“I don’t mind it when you say it like that. All growly and… And…”

“And what?” He cups my face and kisses me roughly.

Like that. Sometimes he says things that sound like a kiss, intimate and raw and real.

“Real. You say it in a real way.” And when I was a teenager, and people called me their lucky penny because of my hair colour and the fact I was good on a group project at school…but not because I was lucky in any other way to them.

But Cash was never like that.

He’s never called me Lucky because of what I can give him. He calls me Lucky when he’s trying to help me, or make me feel better. Or when he’s turned on.

I lean back on my hands. “I’m not wearing a bra. You should take advantage of that.”

“Fuck.” Cash takes his hat off and sets it on my head. “You’re something else, Haven. Something incredible.”

“I want to be lucky for you.”

“You are.” He exhales, ragged and rough. He tugs on the brim of his hat, until I almost can’t see him. Maybe he can’t see my face, I don’t know. But his expression shifts, gets naked and in the fading light, it looks like a kind of yearning I feel all the way to my soul.

If everything was different, we could have the sweetest courtship. Maybe we would have, in another lifetime, a lot sooner than now.

Almost thirty, and just finding this kind of happiness…

It’s bittersweet.

And Cash has been through hellfire to get to this.

I hate that for him.

But I’m proud of who he became along the way.

“Come up here with me,” I whisper, shimmying backwards. “Come up here and let me be lucky for you tonight.”

He follows, covering me with his body. He touches me reverently, easing my breasts out of the bodice of the dress, then caressing my thighs until they fall open for him. He runs his fingertips over my panties, tracing the seam of my sex from my entrance to my clit, then back again. “How are you feeling after yesterday? Not too sore?”

Sore isn’t the word I would use. “No,” I promise. “I want you inside me again.”

He rocks his hips. “Feel what that does to me?”

“Tell me you have condoms.”

“After yesterday, I’m going to have them on me every single fucking day, don’t you worry.” He cups my breasts and licks at my nipples. “Raspberries for the first course of dessert. Delicious.”

Then he shoulders his way between my thighs. “And for the second course…”

“Cash…”

He noses against my panties. “Can I taste you again, Haven? I need your honey on my tongue.”

I drag his hat over my face and give in to the pleasure.

He chuckles, low and vibrating as he tugs my panties to the side. “Good little pussy. Took my cock real well, didn’t you?”