Irresistible: A Small Town Single Dad Romance (Cloverleigh Farms Series Book 1)

Things happened fast.

I kicked the door shut with my heel. I backed her into the room. I tore at her clothes, and then my own, although I only succeeded in removing her hoodie and pants, and though I was shirtless, my jeans were still tight around my knees.

Didn’t matter. Within five minutes of arriving at her door, I was fucking her mercilessly on the living room carpet, driving my rock-hard cock into her soft, warm body again and again and again. It was almost like I was punishing her for refusing to let me be.

And she clearly wanted to punish me too.

She wrapped her legs around me and clawed at my back. She whispered my name against my lips and cried out with every deep, hard thrust. She moved beneath me, rocking her hips in tandem with mine, pulling me closer to her body until we were gasping and shuddering and clinging desperately to each other through a simultaneous orgasm so intense, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think.

It was obvious the other night hadn’t been a fluke—whatever this thing was between us was real. And powerful. And not going anywhere.

When I finally opened my eyes, I saw her face beneath mine. She turned her head to the side, giving me her profile, chin slightly raised. Then I realized she wasn’t holding on to me anymore.

Fuck. I was such an asshole.

I detached myself from her and sat back on my heels, head hanging low. “Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I could have stopped you.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. “Why didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

I leaned over her again, bracing myself above her shoulders. “Hey. Look at me.”

She didn’t, so I put two fingers beneath her chin and turned her head. Her lower lip trembled, and I had to kiss it.

“Stop,” she said softly.

A smile hooked up one side of my mouth. “Now you want me to stop?”

“Yes. You’re confusing me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m confused myself.”

“Why did you come up here, anyway?”

“Because I’ve been fucking miserable all week. Because that night with you was the best I’ve felt in years. Because it doesn’t matter why I should stay away from you—I can’t.”

“Don’t tease me. Do you really mean that?”

I nodded. “I got all the way out to the parking lot tonight. I got in my car. I turned the fucking engine on, and I sat there, getting more and more furious with myself that I couldn’t go.”

“Really?”

“Really. Finally I gave in. But I knew it wasn’t fair after what I’d said, so I promised myself that if you told me to leave, I would.”

She looked amused. “I did tell you to leave.”

“Uh, yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Clearly that was a promise I should not have made.”

“It’s okay.” Her hands swept up and down my back, her touch sending warm shivers across my skin. “I want to be with you.”

“I want to be with you too.” I brushed some hair back from her forehead that had come loose from the knot on top of her head. “But I’m not going to be able to make any promises, Frannie. I meant what I said—I’ve got nothing to offer you.”

“That’s not true,” she said with that irresistibly stubborn tilt of her chin.

“You say that now, but just wait. My life is complete chaos. Most days I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.”

“You don’t need to worry about me, Mack. I don’t want to be another responsibility in your life. And I don’t need promises or labels.” She took a breath. “I just want to feel like I’m somebody to you.”

I smiled down at her. “You are. But we’ll have to be careful. I don’t want the kids to—” Suddenly I realized something—we hadn’t been careful tonight. I panicked, backing off from her again. “Oh, shit, Frannie. I didn’t even think. I—”

She silenced me with one hand. “No worries. I’m on the pill, and I’m very, very good about taking it.”

I relaxed a little. “Okay. Whew. That’s good.” The last thing I needed was another baby right now. Or ever.

“Give me a few minutes, okay?” she asked, getting to her feet. “If you want a drink or anything, help yourself. I don’t have any beer, but I’ve got wine, whiskey, vodka, tequila …”

I raised my brow. “Should I be worried about you?”

Laughing, she gathered her clothing and headed for her room. “No. I’m not a huge drinker, but I do like a little whiskey by the fire now and then.”

“Whiskey by the fire it is.” I looked around and noticed the fireplace at the far end of the room. Scooping up my clothing, I threw on my underwear, jeans, and shirt and wandered into the kitchen.

By the time Frannie came out of her bedroom, dressed the same way she had been before but with her hair loose around her shoulders, I’d poured two glasses of whiskey and lit the gas fireplace, which lacked the romance of real wood in my opinion, but it warmed the room.

She smiled as she joined me on the couch, tucking her legs beneath her. “This is nice.”

I took her glass from the little coffee table and handed it to her. “It is. Much nicer than what I was heading home to, which was an empty house.”

She took a sip of her whiskey. “So the girls are with your sister?”

“Yeah. Jodie. She’s got a daughter a year older than Millie and a son Felicity’s age. They all get along really well. I wish they lived closer.”

“I wish Sylvia lived closer too. I hardly know my nieces and nephew.” She smiled sadly.

“How is Sylvia? I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

“Good, I guess. I don’t talk to her much, either.” Frannie tipped up her glass again, then stared into it. “That’s something I’d like to change, though. I should reach out to her. Are you close to your sister?”

I nodded. “Pretty close. I mean, we’re both busy with kids and jobs, but we were tight growing up. She’s only seventeen months older than me. And she’s married to a great guy. They make it look easy.”

She looked up at me, her expression curious. “Can I ask what happened with your marriage, or is it too personal?”

I exhaled and tossed back some more whiskey. “My marriage was tough from the start. Carla got pregnant with Millie right before I was set to deploy, and we got married fast before I left. We’d only known each other for a few months.”

“Marines, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What made you join?”

“I was kinda lost for a while in my early twenties, didn’t really know what I wanted to do yet. I’d dropped out of college because I was too immature to handle the responsibility and my parents told me they weren’t going to pay for me to fuck around anymore.” I took another drink. “I needed to burn off some energy and I wanted to get out of here. One day I decided being a Marine sounded kind of badass. So I signed up.”

“And you were in Afghanistan?”

I nodded. “Twice. And I was in Iraq too. So I was gone a lot during the early years of our marriage, while the older two girls were little. That didn’t help. Then, when I got out, I wanted to move back up here where I’d grown up, and she wanted to move to Georgia, where she was from. She said she’d agree to come here if I agreed to have another baby. So we did both.” I paused to take a drink. “But it didn’t matter where we lived. We never really made each other happy. Eventually resentment set in.”

“Resentment over what?” She took another small sip.

“Oh God, you name it. She resented feeling like I’d married her out of a sense of duty more than anything else. She resented being left alone with kids while I was deployed. Then when I came home and struggled to readjust to civilian life, she resented me for not bouncing back faster. She also felt abandoned again because I worked during the day, managing a hardware store, and went to classes at night so I could finish my degree.”

Frannie nodded slowly and took another sip. “How’d you end up at Cloverleigh? Did Sylvia get you the job here?”

“Yeah. I’d finished my degree and was looking for a better job, and I ran into her one day when she was home. She introduced me to your dad.”

“Did things get better once you had a good job?”

“Not really. We fought all the time, and when we weren’t fighting, there was a lot of angry silence.”

“That must have been awful.”

“It was.” I frowned. “I tried to make it work, I really did—especially for the kids’ sake. But nothing I did or said was right, and I got tired of being the bad guy. Eventually I stopped trying, and she ran off with someone else.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be, not for me, anyway. It’s not like Carla and I had some great love affair. But our kids deserved better. I feel horrible every day that I failed them.”

“You didn’t fail them, Mack.” She put a hand on my leg. “Sometimes marriages don’t work out. It wasn’t your fault.”

I’d heard the same from my sister, from Woods, from my parents … but I couldn’t convince myself of it. Rationally I knew it wasn’t fair for Carla to blame me for the divorce, but her words had a way of eating at me deep down. Maybe I hadn’t loved her the way I was supposed to. Maybe I didn’t know how.

Frannie swirled the amber liquid in her glass. “The girls don’t talk about their mother much.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. They missed her a lot at first, but since she’s only seen them a couple times since, the separation anxiety has eased. I’m sure somewhere in each of them is a gaping wound and a permanent fear of abandonment, but day to day they seem okay.”

“That’s a credit to you,” Frannie said.

“And their therapist.” I threw back some more whiskey. “I’ll be paying those bills for years to come. Millie’s been asking some tough questions lately, wondering if her mother even loves her.”

Frannie gasped. “What did you say?”

“I said yes, and I think that’s the truth, but fuck if I know what’s in Carla’s head.” I took another big swallow and ran a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry, Frannie. I didn’t mean to unload all that on you.”

“Hey,” she insisted, putting a hand on my leg again. “I want you to unload on me. You can tell me anything.”

I smiled at her. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was a mess, and some of her eye makeup from earlier was smudged under her eyes, but it didn’t matter. She still made my heart beat faster. And the way she was sitting there so patiently while I dumped out all my emotional garbage, the way she gave me all of her attention and said all the right things … it made me feel validated and understood in a way I hadn’t in a long, long time. I did feel like I could tell her anything.

But I’d had enough talking.

“Thanks,” I said. “But you know what? Nights like this are going to be few and far between, possibly nonexistent, and I don’t want to waste any more of it complaining about my ex. Tell me about you.”

Light danced in her eyes and she lifted her shoulders. “What do you want to know?”

“Hmmm.” I took one last sip of whiskey and set the empty glass on the table before reaching for hers too. “Mostly I want to know why you’re not closer to me right now.”

She giggled, letting me put her drink aside and pull her onto my lap the way she’d been the other night, straddling my thighs. My shirt was unbuttoned and she immediately put her hands on my chest. God, it felt good to be touched that way. I’d forgotten how good.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now I want to know why you’re still wearing so many clothes.”

She grinned devilishly before unzipping the sweatshirt she wore and tossing it aside. Then she hesitated, glancing at the fire, which was the only source of light in the room. At first I didn’t understand why, but when she tugged the little white tank over her head, I noticed the scar on her chest.

Immediately I reached out and traced the long, ragged, dark pink line that ran down her sternum, between her breasts. “Does it hurt?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“What was the surgery for?”

“I was born with a congenital heart defect called a bicuspid aortic valve. I had several surgeries as a baby to repair the valve, and eventually one to replace it when I was ten.”

“That sounds scary.” I looked up at her with concern, placing my hands on the sides of her ribs. “You’re okay now?”

“I’m totally fine. The worst that happens is I can get tired easily, and I have to watch my cholesterol. I have a slightly elevated risk of an aneurysm or heart failure. But I’m very good about paying attention to my body, and I eat right and exercise, and take all my meds and keep all my doctor appointments like a good little girl.”

“Good.” I looked at the scar again, and she sighed.

“I know it’s really ugly, but I’ve made my peace with it.”

I met her eyes. “Every inch of you is beautiful. Inside and out.”

“That’s how I feel about you too,” she whispered.

Pulling her closer, I fastened my mouth to one perfect pink nipple, teasing the tip with my tongue. She threaded her hands into my hair and moaned softly, arching her back. My dick was hard again in no time.

Lucky for me, she was just as hungry for more as I was, and she ditched her pants and yanked mine down inside a minute. I couldn’t even speak as she sheathed my cock with her fist and moved it up and down, then licked her fingers and touched herself in a way that made my chin hit my chest.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I whispered, glad this was round two or else I’d have come all over myself in seconds.

She lowered herself onto me slowly, her eyes shut, her mouth open. I put my hands on her hips and fought the urge to buck up beneath her. When I was buried inside her, she opened her eyes and looked at me as she started to move.

At that moment, I didn’t care about the age difference or whose daughter she was or how I was going to add her to the chaotic mess that was my life. All I knew was how good it felt to be with her this way, to see the desire in her eyes, to watch her come apart above me, to be the man she saw when she looked at me, not the one I saw when I looked at myself.

We went a little slower this time—probably because I let her set the pace for once. She didn’t race to the finish line, but the gradual buildup was just as intense, and the climax an even sweeter reward, our bodies pulsing together in perfect harmony.

When it was over, she fell forward, her head on my shoulder, her chest heaving against mine. I wrapped my arms around her and inhaled the scent of her soft wavy hair.

“Mack,” she whispered.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have to go home tonight?”

I thought for a moment, realizing quickly that I didn’t want this fantasy to end so soon. Tonight, I was just a man going after what I wanted. What I needed. What felt good. When I walked out of here, it was back to real life. Who knew when I’d have this chance again? The truth was, I had no clue how this was going to work—how I would balance being who I needed to be with who I wanted to be. Maybe I was just setting myself up for another failure. Maybe it was stupid to think I could make this work. Maybe in a week she’d realize that feeling like somebody to me wasn’t worth the trouble and she’d move on.

But tonight … tonight could be ours.

“No,” I told her. “I could stay here with you.”

She picked up her head. “Do you want to stay here with me?”

“Yes,” I said, pressing my lips to hers. “I do.”