“I told you he’d ji—“ Charlene elbows Violet on the boob before she can finish her sentence.
Lance traces the gummy bear necklace with a fingertip. “These are real, aye.” He takes my face in his hands, heedless of the sixty witnesses, and presses his lips to mine. “Ah fuck, ya taste like candy,” he mutters, tongue sweeping inside my mouth, tasting the remnants of the gummy bear martini I’ve been sipping to calm my nerves.
I wrap my hand around his wrists and attempt to disconnect our mouths. I’m sure my face is as red as my name. “We have guests.”
He blinks a couple of times, like he doesn’t understand, then he looks around, a sheepish grin turning up the corner of his mouth as he raises a hand in greeting. “Everyone make yourselves at home, aye? I just need to speak to my precious Poppy alone for like, twenty minutes, maybe more, depending.”
“Lance!” I shriek when he makes like he’s going to pick me up and haul me off.
Thankfully, he’s just playing. He sets me down and pats my bottom. “This dress is something else,” he murmurs in my ear. “I’m going to enjoy taking it off you later.”
Later doesn’t arrive until two in the morning when the last guest has left. “You threw me a birthday party,” Lance says after he closes the door for the final time and sets the security alarm. His accent is still more prominent than usual, although there were an unprecedented number of shots. “No one’s ever done anything like that for me.”
“I wanted it to be special. Did you have fun?”
“Aye.” He cups my face in his hands, dipping down to press a soft kiss to my lips. “But it’s been right painful looking at ya all night in this dress and not being able to get you outta it. I’d like to do that now, if that’s all right with you.”
I smile against his lips. “Aye, that’s more than all right.”
“Come on then. Let me take ya to bed and show you how grateful I am.” He links our pinkies and leads me upstairs.
Lance moves my hair out of the way and kisses my shoulder as he unzips the dress. Coming to stand in front of me, he hooks his fingers in the straps and drags them down my arms, releasing a heavy breath as he takes in the lace-edged bra and panties that match the dress now pooled at my feet.
“Bloody hell, precious. Where the fuck did you find this?” He bites the end of his thumb and shakes his head. “You’re a vision.” Stepping in close, he runs his fingertips along the edge of the bra, causing a hot shiver to run down my spine. The gummy bear necklace disappeared over the course of the evening, Lance swooping in every once in a while to suck another candy off my chest before whispering into my ear about other things he’d rather be eating.
“I want to worship you for a while.” Picking me up, he carries me over to the bed, stripping out of his shirt and pants as he climbs up after me.
His touch is slow and reverent. His kisses are soft and lingering. My bra stays on at first, the cups pulled down, my nipples traced first with light fingertips and then followed by the warmth of his tongue. Lance moves down my body, unhurried, despite the hours spent whispering about how much he couldn’t wait to get me up here and naked.
When he reaches my navel, he sits back on his knees, hooks his thumbs into my panties, and drags them down my thighs. “Does this come as a bikini?” he asks, dropping them on the comforter.
“I don’t know. I can check.”
“Please do.” He smooths his hand along the inside of my thighs before shouldering his way between my legs, and then his mouth is on me, laving, slow strokes that push me higher and higher until I unravel.
He prowls back up my body, hips settling between mine, thick erection pressing against me, and then he’s easing in, filling me.
His eyes drift shut, and when they open again, his expression is undiluted rapture. He pushes up on one arm, his other palm coming to rest over my heart. “This. You. What you give me. You’re the best gift, precious Poppy.”
Darren & Charlene
WHY DID I write/include this? This was meant to be the prologue for Pucked Love. However, it would’ve revealed very early on Charlene’s messed up personal history, which was something I wanted to keep under wraps until later in the story. Writing this helped me frame Charlene’s personality and her choices, particularly when it came to her mother and her relationship with Darren. It also would have shifted the storyline quite a bit if she’d fallen in love with the idea of him at fourteen, which isn’t quite how things roll out in the actual story.
Love at First Sight
CHARLENE
AN RV IS equivalent to an unmarked grave. At least in my worst nightmares it is.
Let me explain what that means.
I spent my childhood living in a trailer park. Not the kind where your neighbor is some guy named Billy Bob who wears filthy tanks with horrible huge armholes. The same kind of man who always has a cigarette hanging precariously from between his thin pursed lips while he leers at you and makes you hate the dark and being alone. That wasn’t my trailer park experience—although that might’ve been preferable.
I grew up on The Ranch, which really wasn’t a ranch at all. It was hidden away on a desolate patch of Utah dirt, set up with several greenhouses and a dozen or more trailers, full of mostly women I thought were my family. I learned later they weren’t.
Everything changed the day I got my first “monthly bleed,” otherwise known as a period, Shark Week, or Aunt Flo’s Monthly Visit. But monthly bleed was the phrase of preference at The Ranch. I was fourteen and a half, which is important, that half. I was a late bloomer. Thank heavens for that. I’d been around enough women to know this was part of life, and it signified my transition into womanhood. I still slept with a stuffed animal named Miss Flopsy, so I didn’t feel that womanly at the time, but all my sisters made it seem like some kind of rite of passage. I felt gross and ill and my tummy hurt, so I couldn’t see what was so awesome about it.
Anyway, the day I went from a fourteen and a half year old to a woman, my entire world changed. In the middle of the night, my mom—who really isn’t all there sometimes—stole me away from GHH.
It was all very Prison Break. We escaped through a hole in the barb-wire topped fence—I kid you not—and there was even a getaway car, a bag of money, and thank the Lord, an entire backpack of the candies my mom made, day in and day out. They were herbal. Calming. And I pretty much lived on them.
Leaving GHH was both scary and monumental, as it was my first time off The Ranch ever. At least that I could remember. And my first time hotwiring a car.
It was traumatic.
It was terrifying.
And an adrenaline rush.
It was also a blessing. But it took me a while to figure that out, too.
I love my mom, but she’s a little light on the logic and a few other key elements that make a person rational and capable of good decision-making. Hence the reason we ended up in an unconventional trailer park in the first place.
On our escape trip across central US in an old Volvo that barely ran and had no heat, I experienced a myriad of firsts. First trip to the grocery store—oh my gosh! So much food in one place and so many things I’d never eaten before. Fruit Loops looked so fun! I was sorely disappointed that they all tasted exactly the same, even though color dictated they should taste different, like Life Savers. First time wearing jeans—so weird to have fabric encasing my legs when I was used to dresses.