She might think he was a fake, but this attraction was genuine. He glanced down at his growing erection. Didn’t that prove it?
He leaned against the plastic wall, slightly out of the stream of water, automatically fisting himself and thinking about the way her breast had felt in his hand. The first stroke just made his stomach drop, so he let go, blinking water out of his eyes to find some soap.
Not seeing any, he took a steadying breath and put his face under the water, unable to resist the burning need to touch himself again. To imagine her slender, feminine hands stroking him just...like...that.
“You need soap?”
His eyes popped open at the sound of Frankie’s voice on the other side of a flimsy white shower curtain.
“Yeah.” His response came out gruff as he flattened his hands on the wall to keep them off his dick as the water picked up temperature. “Bet you have plenty of that, huh?”
“And none of it has a name yet.” Her hand reached in, holding one of her brown and yellow bars of goat’s milk soap. “I call this one...Morning Shower.”
Reaching for the soap, he captured her hand, too, giving it a slight tug. “Man, do you lack imagination.”
She laughed and slipped out of his grip. “That’s why I need you.”
He took the soap and sniffed. “Spicy,” he said.
“Yes! There’s sage in there.” She was so close, just one thin piece of plastic away. All he had to do was slide that curtain and...
Instead, he rolled the soap in his hand, foaming up. “Nice lather.”
“That’s not a very good name.”
Laughing, he gently soaped his ribs. “Shit, that hurts.”
“I’m afraid ‘shit that hurts’ won’t sell, either.” The curtain moved slightly, and he waited, not breathing, but she didn’t draw it back. “I was thinking about something a little more, you know...sexy. Got anything?”
Right here, sweetheart. He stroked himself, once, quickly, closing his eyes as the suds intensified the pleasure against his insanely sensitive skin. “I might be able to come...up with something.”
He heard her throat catch with a laugh. “You know what I mean. Does that scent make you think of anything...evocative?”
Like her mouth when she opened it to his or the sweet curve of her ass when she bent over to pick up a milk bucket? That was evocative as hell.
With his palms covered with lather, he tried to wash his body, but his hands just went right back to the place where he wanted her fingers to be. Sliding up and down, fondling his tingling balls, rounding the tip with her—
“Got anything?” she asked.
Other than a raging boner? “Um...let’s see. I’m thinking about...” Sliding. Into. “You.”
She chuckled. “Very sweet, but ‘you’ isn’t going to sell soap. How about some words like...”
Like that. He squeezed himself, unable to fight the battle now.
He could have sworn she laughed. “Like...I don’t know. I’m not very good at this. Luscious? Can you work with that?”
Her lips were luscious. If they would just close over him right...there... “Yeah, that’s good, but...”
“I know, I know,” she agreed. “Not good enough.”
Not nearly, but he couldn’t stop now. He pumped a little harder, fighting to hold back any sounds of his self-pleasuring, silently rocking his hips and wishing like hell he was rocking into her.
“Succulent?” she suggested.
Yes. Please suck it.
“Sweet?”
That would be so damn sweet.
“Oooh, how about tantalizing?” She dragged out the word, low and sexy and just enough to put him right over the edge. “Sultry? Sensual? Steamy and...Elliott? Elliott, don’t you have any words for that fragrance?”
Yeah. Not anything that would go on a soap label. “Nothing terribly...soapy.”
“Try harder.”
“If you insist.” Giving in completely, he leaned against the wall, biting his lip to keep from grunting, pumping furiously now. “It just isn’t”—good enough—“real.”
She laughed again. “Is anything that has your hands all over it?”
He looked up at the curtain, certain she was watching, but it held firm to the wall. Fire danced up his back and down his thighs, his whole body hot and hard and...finished. Biting his lip until he could taste blood, he shot an achy, unsatisfying, completely inauthentic load against the wall, momentarily satisfied, but hollow as hell.
Easy, yeah, but not good enough.
“Elliott? Are you okay?”
No, he wasn’t okay. He was a shell of a man who wanted more than fake sex. Damn it! He wanted her, and he wanted it to be real. No matter how difficult it would be for a man who liked things easy.
“I said...” He cleared his throat and turned his hands under the stream, rinsing them. Finally, he inched the curtain back, but she wasn’t there. “Frankie?”
“Right here.”
He jerked around to see her at the other side of the shower, looking in. She raked him with a gaze that made him want to scream out in a wholly different kind of pain.
She gave him a hungry look, her gaze lingering on his partial erection. “Maybe we should call that one Party of One.”
He snapped the curtain closed and swore under his breath. “That name sucks.” And so did a self-inflicted handjob when he wanted the real thing.
He heard her laughing as she left the bathroom.
Chapter Nine
“Becker, is that woman biting you?” Nate slipped his sunglasses down his nose, just to get a better look at Elliott, but not far enough that anyone at the outdoor pavilion restaurant would recognize him.
Elliott brushed the mark on his arm, faded in the few days since Dominic had inflicted it. “Had a run-in with a buck.”
On the other side of the table, Zeke leaned in. “A buck? Like a bronco?”
“A buck is what you call a male goat, Einstein.”
Zeke and Nate shared a look, cracking up.
Elliott looked up at the deep blue sky and blew out an exasperated breath. He knew this lunch wouldn’t be easy. They weren’t going to like what he had to say, they weren’t going to let him off the hook, and he hadn’t really wanted to come to lunch at all. The days on the farm had slipped into a nice routine, next to Frankie from dawn to dusk, sneaking a few kisses whenever he could, laughing a lot, getting to know her. And, hell, he’d finally gotten promoted to the sofa at night.