clung like a sweater charged with static electricity.
“We’re going to a…fair?” I asked him, rounding the front of the pickup where he’d parked next to a line of other cars in a field-turned-parking lot.
“You sound like you’ve never been to one,” Ryker replied, taking my hand in his.
“I haven’t,” I said.
Ryker stopped in his tracks and faced me. Sliding his sunglasses down a notch, he peered at me over the rims. “You can’t be serious.”
I shrugged. “Not really high on my family’s To Do list.”
“It’s awesome. You’re gonna love it.” He resumed walking.
“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said.
“Fried foods, of every kind imaginable. Beer garden. Tractor pull. Pig races. Rides. Games. What’s there not to like?”
“What kind of fried foods?” I’d had a funnel cake once, years ago at Disney World, and it had tasted like heaven on earth. “Do they have funnel cakes?”
Ryker grinned at me. “Darlin’,” he drawled, “if a funnel cake is what you want, a funnel cake you shall have.”
That made me feel good. I liked the whole country-boy thing he had going on. I’d never been to a county fair, and now it seemed I’d picked the perfect person to attend my very first one with.
The fair was teeming with all kinds of people dressed in all sorts of clothes. Denim seemed to be the preferred fabric, though the amount one actually wore varied widely. Some girls wore cutoff jean shorts that crawled so far up their rears I wondered how they could possibly sit down. These girls most often paired their outfits with cowboy boots.
After seeing the tenth or twelfth pack of girls go by dressed like this, all of them taking a good look at Ryker as they passed, I leaned over and asked, “We are in Illinois, right? Not Texas?”
He laughed. “You’re definitely a city girl,” he teased.
“Hey, I just didn’t know there was a country-girl-hooker dress code for coming to one of these things,” I retorted.
“You look pretty damn good to me,” he said, tugging on my hand so I lightly bumped into his side as we walked. He didn’t let up, his arm sliding behind my back and keeping me close. It was the kind of thing a man did with a woman when he had sex on the brain. I was flattered, and turned on, and was more than happy to sidle closer to him as we strolled through the crowds.
Hanna’s face flashed through my mind and with an effort, I pushed it away. I couldn’t change the past, and Ryker was right. If I didn’t get my mind on something else for a while, my ability to cope would be even less than it already was.
Ryker smelled fantastic. I could get just a hint of his cologne over the odors wafting through the air—kettle corn, freshly mown grass, and hot dogs. The bells of the carnival games were carried on the warm breeze, as was the sound of hundreds of people talking, laughing, and generally having a good time.
True to his word, Ryker bought me a funnel cake buried under a snow-white mountain of powdered sugar. We sat at a picnic table to eat it, and I laughed as we both proceeded to get powdered sugar everywhere.
“This is messy,” I complained, showing him my sugar-encrusted fingers. “Now how am I supposed to get this off?”
He didn’t reply. He did something better. Taking my hand, he popped my index finger into his mouth.
I drew in a sharp breath. The warm slide of his tongue against my finger made butterflies dance in my stomach. Then he lightly sucked and I felt it much lower than my stomach.
Ryker was watching me from behind his sunglasses, but I couldn’t see his eyes, just my reflection in them.
After a moment, he moved on to my middle finger, giving it the same treatment. I couldn’t look away from his mouth as he held my hand, the softness of his tongue against my skin making me think things that had me pressing my thighs together to ease the sudden ache between them.
Finally, he slid my fingers from his mouth and rested my hand on his thigh.
“Better?” he asked.
In what sense? My heart was racing, my breath was coming way too fast, and my panties were damp.
The curve of his lips was knowing and said he knew exactly what he had done—was doing—to me, and that he wanted to do more. I was suddenly all for that.