Erin McCarthy - Full Throttle

Not to mention his.

Suddenly, the full impact of what he had done, agreed to, hit him hard, and he squeezed Shawn’s hand.

Most people didn’t fall in love in two weeks.

But he wasn’t most people.

He couldn’t expect her to feel the same way anytime soon. But he could give her reasons to eventually feel that way. He could be the best damn husband anyone could ever ask for, in bed and out.

Shawn looked up at him, puzzled. “What are you thinking?”

“You don’t want to know,” he told her. They were thoughts that would probably scare the living shit out of her. Thoughts of forever and love and family.

“I can’t believe we have this wedding party in eight days.”

“Yeah. Me either.”

If the party didn’t scare her senseless, Rhett had five months to convince her to consider that their relationship might be real. He was confident he could do it.

He wasn’t letting Shawn go, now that he had found the woman for him. End of story.

* * *

SHAWN knew Rhett was right—she probably didn’t want to know what he was thinking. It was probably something along the lines of being horrified that he had agreed to this fake marriage and how guilty he felt over duping his family. Shawn didn’t really want to hear that said out loud, because then she would feel even more guilty than she already did.

Every day she spent with Rhett, she grew more and more confused. If this was a business arrangement only, then it was a shitty thing to be doing to the people in their lives, loss of Hamby Speedway or not. But if it wasn’t just a business arrangement—which most of the time it sure didn’t feel like that—then what the heck was it?

Rhett, despite his reputation as being serious and intense, was the easiest man to be around she had ever encountered. All her previous relationships had felt like she was jockeying for position, a teasing game of one-upmanship, communication centered around taking jabs at each other under the guise of joking. Like two guys in a locker room, not a man and woman who claimed to care about each other. It wasn’t like that at all with Rhett. He was kind and considerate, he asked her opinions, and he listened to her woes and worries. He offered useful advice, and he got excited over her successes.

Then in bed, well, there were no words to describe how absolutely sexy he made her feel, and how totally absorbed by pleasure she was when he was of a mind to have sex with her.

So what did it all mean? She had no clue. All she knew was that the last week had been one of the best of her life. She was pumped about the opportunities she and Rhett were planning for the track, she was pleased to have a partner to even discuss them with, and while she’d never been lonely in her house before, Rhett fit into her home perfectly.

But here at his parents’ house, the images of his siblings and their spouses blending on one long wall of happiness and expectation, Shawn felt torn between wanting this to be real and horror with herself for violating something so clearly sacred. The Fords weren’t her family. They respected marriage. Shawn found that she herself did, more than she had ever realized before all of this.

“What did we get ourselves into?” she asked with a laugh that was intended to sound casual, jovial, but sounded shaky instead. She meant regarding the party, but the truth was, it could be said for the entirety of what they had been, and were, doing.

But Rhett just shrugged, still looking at the pictures, not her. “The party will be fun.”

She wanted to scream that that wasn’t what she meant. She wanted to very pathetically ask him how he really felt about her. She wanted to say that she was grateful to him.

Instead, she copped out and joked, “At least we can get drunk. We’re practically obligated to drink champagne, so we might as well take advantage.”

Rhett finally looked at her. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “Good point. It will loosen you up.” He leaned closer to her, his breath caressing her cheek and causing her to shiver. “Then I can take you up the ass like I’ve been wanting to.”

Hello. Shawn had never engaged in that particular activity, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. “We’ll see.” If he wanted to kick up the kink, honestly, she’d prefer they dust off her vibrator. The back door had never been a fantasy for her.

But he just gave a slow, seductive laugh that had her hoo-hah heating up. “Since when do you call the shots? We do what I want, and you’ll like it.”

The fact was, she probably would. He hadn’t been wrong yet.

“OH, no. No. Absolutely not. As in hell no,” Shawn said, in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind. She was not going to ride the mechanical bull. “This isn’t a real bachelorette party because I’m already married, so I do not need to act like an idiot.”

She was perfectly content to sit at the sticky table in the country western–themed bar and drink her beer while she moved her feet to some Tim McGraw tunes. Simple. Worked for her.

Charity had other ideas. She was dressed in nothing but a denim vest with fringe dangling at her ta-tas, a tiny denim skirt, and hot pink cowboy boots. “Don’t be a spoilsport!” she said, wetting her lips with yet more lip gloss and fluffing her blond hair. “Cut loose a little.”

“I think you’re being loose enough for all of us,” Eve told her with a grin.

“Bitch.” Though Charity didn’t look particularly hurt. “I want to dance! You old ladies can sit here like a bunch of lame-os, but I’m going to dust off my two-step. Harley, you coming?”

Her twin shook her head rapidly. “No.” She looked like she would prefer to paint her naked body with honey and go strolling through a bear’s den than dance on the floor with a multitude of skimpily dressed women and one drunk fifty-year-old man who was aiming too high with his flirtations.

Shawn was with Harley on this one.

Eve shook her head when Charity asked her. “I can’t dance. I look like I’m being electrocuted.” She sipped her beer and glanced around. “Man, I do not miss being single. This is a meat market, and not the freshest cuts, I have to say.”

“Thanks,” Harley said with a frown, pumping her straw furiously up and down in her fruity drink. “That’s very helpful to those of us who are single.”

Oops. “You don’t want anyone here anyways,” Shawn protested. “There isn’t a guy here worthy of you.”

“That argument gets stale when you haven’t been on a date in a year.”

“I can sympathize with that,” Shawn said. “Before Rhett I was on a dry spell that had the trees begging the dogs to lift a leg. When you least expect it, you’ll meet someone.”

“I doubt it,” Harley said. Then she smiled, “But this is your night anyway. Though I have to admit, I’m having trouble keeping track of Rhett and Nolan’s sisters. There’s just so many of them, and their names all seem to end in ‘y.’”

“Tell me about it,” Shawn agreed. Five of Rhett’s sisters had come and were at the bar ordering drinks. “They all look similar, too, and the only one with a stand-out name, Rachel, is the one who lives in California. The rebel.”

Eve snorted. “Yeah, she’s so rebellious that she works as a CPA.”

“You know, to people like Sandy and Nolan Senior, and my grandparents, and your parents, leaving the Carolinas is akin to seceding from the South. Unless you move to Georgia.”

“Then they just think you’re being stubborn.” Eve grinned.

Danny, Sammy, Andy, Melissa, and Dawn, the Ford sisters, came back to the table, various drinks in hand.

“It’s too bad Jeannie couldn’t make it,” Andy said. “But Asher was projectile vomiting.” Given the way she was swaying her hips to the music and grinning, the sympathy seemed more like relief that it wasn’t her stuck at home with a sweaty kid.

“So tell us gossip about Rhett as a kid,” Eve said. “So we can shame him tomorrow.”

Danny laughed. “He was spoiled, I can tell you that. Dad wanted another son, which is why half of us girls have male nicknames. I don’t think Mom cared one way or the other, but there is no question he was her baby. And ours. We used to put him in our old dresses.”

The image of Rhett dolled up made Shawn snort. “That must have been a sight to behold. He’s so . . . masculine.” Immediately, she felt the heat in her cheeks. That didn’t sound right. It sounded very smitten and girly. Yikes.

Melissa rolled her eyes, lifting her drink, which looked an awful lot like straight bourbon. “He wasn’t born six two with rock-solid biceps, you know. He was a scrawny enough little kid. With a freakish ability to never blink. For a while we were sure he was Damian from The Omen reincarnated. Mom was a little pissed about that when we started calling him JB, for Jackal Baby.”

Eve laughed. “That sounds like something I would have done. I love it.”

“Would have done?” Shawn asked. “Hell, you still would.”

“True.”

Danny set down her drink and stripped off her hoodie. “Okay, I never get out of the house. Ever. I am going to dance. I may be too old for this shit, and I may be happily married, but sometimes a woman still needs to shake what the good Lord gave her.”

“Charity is already out there. She’s the one surrounded by a cloud of White Diamonds. She thinks wearing an Elizabeth Taylor scent will attract older men with money.”

All the sisters went out to the dance floor. They didn’t try to drag Eve, obviously knowing their sister-in-law well enough to realize she couldn’t be dragged anywhere, not even out of a burning fire if she had decided she wanted to stay and get a tan. Harley was no match for them, though. One tug, and they had her. Shawn bailed by saying she wanted to talk to Eve. Which she did, so it wasn’t a total lie.

“Do you really want to talk to me?” Eve asked, shifting her chair closer to Shawn’s to be heard over the music. “Or were you just trying to get out of dancing?”

“I wanted to ask you something.” It was a weird thing to ask, but hell, Shawn was curious. She’d never been married before. “How often do you and Nolan have sex?”

Eve spit out the beer she’d been sipping and choked. “Goddammit, Shawn! Will you fucking warn me if you’re going to ask something like that? I almost drowned from my Heineken.”

“Sorry. But I am serious. Like, what is normal when you’re married?”

“Well.” Eve wiped her mouth with a cocktail napkin and then rubbed it down the front of her tight shirt. “I would say on average, it’s three times a week. It would probably be more like four or five if our schedules didn’t keep us apart. Why? Is Rhett falling asleep watching TV instead of banging you? He’s only twenty-five, for crying out loud.”

Shawn coughed. “No. Um, it’s kind of the opposite. We’ve had sex every day for the last ten days. I was just wondering if, you know, that’s normal. And if, maybe at some point, it’s going to slow down.”

Eve’s jaw dropped. “Ten days in a row? Are you serious?”

Shawn nodded.

“Are they quickies, or are they like actual sexual events?”

Oh, they were not quickies. “Actual events. Usually at least an hour, most closer to two.” And every day had been a little more freeing, a little more arousing, a little more all-encompassing. She’d never been so in tune with her body, never had so many orgasms in such a short span of time. It was amazing and wonderful and, frankly, scary as hell.

“Holy crap. I think I need to have a word with my husband.” Eve laughed. “Though, honestly, at some point I think that would just be overkill for me. Nolan and I have a rocking sex life and that would just cut into my sleep schedule. So, how do you feel about it? Is it boring or something? Is that why you’re asking?”

That most definitely was not the problem. “No, it’s not boring at all. I love it. It makes all the sex I’ve had before look like child’s play. I was just wondering if at some point we’re going to have a sexual crash, and then it will be nothing. Or if I might be doing harm, you know, like wrecking my vagina or something. I would think it needs a break at some point.”

“It’s not a Walmart worker. It doesn’t need an hour for lunch.” Eve made a face at her.

“I know.” Shawn laughed. “It just seems like it can’t be good for it.”

“Well, ask it. Like ‘Hey, vag, how are you feeling today?’ If it feels beat up, tell Rhett to give it a rest for twenty-four. Otherwise, I think you’re good. I mean, isn’t that what it was designed for?”