Page 44 of Hand Picked
Gage nodded. “Mary said it was very moving.”
“Dear God,” I muttered.
“And then Jack made Helena get down, for safety reasons—”
“No shit,” Porter exclaimed. “The woman is, like, a hundred and twelve.”
“—and he told her she’s not allowed to campaign for signatures to save the Peak inside the diner and he’s not even sure which way he wants to vote. Hawk got really upset.”
“Not surprising. Hawk’s got years’ worth of pent-up emotions that have to come out sometime,” Drew said.
The others nodded, but I frowned. “I think you meanmonths. They only started talking about the development recently.”
Marco gave me a pitying look I didn’t understand.
“It’ll blow over,” Knox predicted. “Hawk’s not one to hold a grudge, especially with Jack.”
“I dunno.” Gage sounded troubled. “Sometimes you can only push a person so far before they start coming to some important realizations.”
I felt like I was missing some subtext in the conversation, and normally I would have insisted on knowing all the details so I could manage shit for everyone… but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for more information. My brain had officially reached maximum capacity, and I told myself I’d think about it later.
When later came, though, Hawk and Jack were the furthest thing from my mind.
Instead, as I lay in my antique four-poster bed, staring out the window at the dark sky, all I could think about was the same damn thing I’d been thinking about all day—LukefuckingWilliams.
The heart-stopping feeling of seeing him in danger.
The sweetness of his smile when it got caught up at one corner of his mouth.
The pulse-pounding feeling of seeing him almostnaked, clutching that stupid curtain around him back in his RV, and wondering what he’d look like without it.
I felt my dick throb in my loose cotton sleep pants, and I pushed the heel of my hand against it.
Fuck.
I groaned softly and turned onto my back, shoving off the quilt and pushing my pants down to my thighs so I could stroke myself more firmly.
I was definitely not going to jerk off thinking of Luke Williams because that would be fucking weird.
Or, okay, it would be fuckinghot, at least in the moment. The weird part was sure to follow, though, probably when I spontaneously chubbed up at the next parent-teacher conference or couldn’t meet Luke’s eyes during a neighborly conversation because my brain was chanting a guilty chorus ofI jerked off to you.
But fuck, there was something about Luke Williams.
Like the little smile that hovered around his lips like he always found something to be happy about. Or the way he ate ice cream like he was savoring every individual flavor, in a way that turned out to be weirdly erotic. Or the chaotic paint-spatter freckles on his shoulders that I was always, from this day forward, gonna know were hiding under his button-down shirts and sweater vests. Or the startled expression on his face when he’d caught me staring at him earlier today, and the way the surprise had morphed, for one quick second, into curious hunger that had me checking the front of his sweatpants for a dick print like a horny teenager…
And finding one.
Shit. My cock was harder than it had been in… God, way too long. Fuckingaching,with precum already beading at the tip. And it was thoughts of Luke Williams that had gotten me here.
But as I ran my thumb over the head, collecting the wetness there and using it to ease my way as I pumped myself with my fist, I let myself go with it, because… well, because the man was seriously fucking hot, and I was tired of denying or overthinking that. Maybe Porter had stumbled on the truth earlier when he said I’d been harboring a secret attraction for Luke for longer than I wanted to admit.
“Nfff.” I couldn’t stop the low moan that rose up from my throat as I imagined Luke right there in the cool quiet of my bedroom, watching me jack off for him. I imagined the way he’d look at me, his eyes wide and hot with lust.
I imagined pushing him into that snowbank earlier, in front of God and anybody who might come by, and kissing the fuck out of him… then warning him in dirty, explicit detail about exactly what I’d do to his ass if he ever did something so dangerous again.
I imagined ripping his clothes off in that tiny trailer, holding him down on those soft blankets he’d made, and touching his body until he screamed my name and his head was full of all the curse words he’d never let himself say.
My balls tightened until they were snug against the base of my dick, and I bit my lip as I threw my head back into the pillow, fighting to stay quiet.
