Endlessly Yours

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The thing about living alone for so long was that you sometimes got tired of waking up with a hard dick and having nothing else to do with it other than introduce it to your opposite palm for the morning so you didn’t get bored with the other. With a sigh, I leaned against the shower wall, hot water spilling down my back, as I wrapped my left hand around the base of my cock and tugged. I licked my lips, imagining a faceless woman on her knees, her lips wrapped around the tip of my dick, careful of the piercings, with her tongue sliding in the slit at the tip.

I grunted, running my hand up and down my length, imagining the woman doing the same thing with her smaller hands. She would bob her head, her tongue flattening as she would let me slide down that pretty little throat. I’d pump in and out of those plump lips, loving the way that one hand would be squeezing the base of my cock, the other holding my thigh. Her nails would dig in, just at the point where pleasure turned to pain, and I would wrap her hair around my fist and slide deeper down her throat. Then I’d hold her still, eyes wide as I fucked her face, her hand moving down between her legs so she could get herself off, loving the way that she would take my cock.

Now my hand moved faster, imagining the way that my hips would move, and she would rock her body along with me. Only in my head, the hair around my fist turned blonde, and familiar gray eyes stared up at me. I cursed, but I didn’t stop. Instead, I squeezed even harder, imagining the way that she would lap up every drop of me. I couldn’t help but think about the way that her cunt would squeeze my dick once I slid into her from behind. She’d arch her back for me, and I would lick up every single tattoo that I knew dotted her spine. Then I’d bite down over the rose on her shoulder, and slam home, filling her with my cum, as she clamped down around my cock, coming right along with me.

I opened my eyes, sighing at myself as I moved the head of the shower to wash my cum off the shower wall.

“You’re a sick, sick man, Brooks.”

I knew I needed to stop having dreams about Rory. She wasn’t mine. I knew that. She knew that. And we’d made our deals. Only I could practically smell her soft vanilla scent in my fucking bathroom. It had to be her lotion or something. I didn’t want to think about it because I wasn’t going to touch Rory in any way possible. I regretted every single moment we’d shared that night, and I wasn’t about to lean into that desire or attraction once again.

I was Pavlov’s dog, and she was the bell of my memories. Because as soon as she came around, my dick went to attention, and it took all within me not to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with it.

As it was, Rory was spending way too many hours on the property. And I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

I didn’t want her. I wasn’t sure I even liked her. And I didn’t know her.

But my dick didn’t answer to me. Nor did it ever listen to me. I did what it wanted. I quickly finished showering, paying extra attention to the Jacob’s ladder piercing I had on my dick. It had hurt like hell when I had first gotten it, but that had been years ago, and it had healed up nicely. All I had to do was make sure when I got myself off, I didn’t twist in a certain way. The women that I had been with since that fateful night in an airport bar where I’d had too much to drink, and too much grief to realize what a mistake I was making, had liked the piercing. Yes, they were a little afraid of it at first, especially if they wanted to wrap their mouth around it, but they got used to it. And with the condoms, the specialty condoms that I used, they could still feel it when it hit that spot, and in the end, they begged for more.

But I never gave it to them.

I had always been a one-woman man. From high school on, I had loved one woman.

And Amara was gone. My wife, my soulmate, was dead.

And now I never stayed with the same woman for more than a night. Was that breaking the promise that I hadn’t truly made to her? I didn’t think so. I was already going to hell for multiple reasons. By desecrating her memory by sleeping with a stranger that turned out not to be so unknown to me on the first anniversary of losing Amara, I’d taken the first of many steps in that direction.

What kind of hypocrite did that make me? What kind of hellscape did I deserve? Now, I slept with women that I met in bars, ones that I knew wanted nothing but a single night of pleasure, and we’d walk away without exchanging anything but a name.

And a few orgasms.

And yet with all those women over the years, it was Rory who continued to fill my daydreams when I needed to get off.

Rory—my brother’s wife’s best friend.

Of all the people in all of the world, it had to be her.

Honestly, the statistics didn’t make any sense. I had met Rory miles away from here. Hell, I hadn’t even lived outside of San Antonio at the time. My brothers and I had only moved here a couple of years ago when we had joined our cousins on this Wilder Retreat and Winery adventure.

I was a contractor and used my hands to build things for a living. So when my cousins had needed help in restructuring and adding on, I jumped at the chance to use my company for that. Because I was tired of sitting in a home that I used to share with my wife and pretending that I wasn’t dead inside.

There had been too many dark nights where I had wanted to follow her, and that told me I needed to get a grip.

Amara would never forgive me for so many things but leaning into one thought that had been one dark thought too far, would have broken her.

So I’d moved outside San Antonio to the Wilder Retreat and Winery, along with my brothers.

Now we were one big happy family, the ten of us.

And every other person was married, with most of them either already having kids or talking about them.

I was the single man out, and I didn’t care. It wasn’t as if I was going to follow along with them. After all, I had been the first one to get married. I paused in my thinking. No, my cousin Evan and his wife Kendall had been married before me. They had been young, married too quickly, gone through hell, and after their divorce, had caught up again and gotten married. Their second chance was something that only made sense to them, but at least they were able to have one.

I was never going to have a second chance with Amara. Because cancer sucked, and it took everything from you.

I stopped pulling on my Henley and frowned. Why the hell was I focusing on Amara this morning? We had a family meeting, I had a shit ton of things to do at work, and I needed to avoid Rory because she kept coming onto the property to work with Ava. That meant I didn’t have time to focus on the grief that seemed unending. It had been enough time that I should be okay. Or at least, should be able to go through the days without feeling like hell. And honestly, that was the truth. I could have an entire day where I didn’t think about Amara, only to wake up in a desperate grip of grief.

Because I wasn’t the man that Amara had married. Nor was I the man that had held her as she took her last breath.

I wasn’t even the shell of a man who’d slowly meandered his way through the first two years without her.

I was Brooks Wilder. Contractor. Builder.

And grumpy asshole. I should probably put that last part on my business card. Just to warn people.

I looked in the mirror, realizing it was summer in Texas and 103 degrees today, and pulled off my Henley to find a T-shirt. Sometimes I forgot that I didn’t live in the North anymore. Amara and I had lived up in Wisconsin for a few years, and that had been ingrained in me enough that I’d forgotten my Texas roots for a moment when I’d been on autopilot.

I shoved my feet into my work boots, tied them up, grabbed my wallet, keys, and phone, and hoped to hell that somebody made coffee at the retreat.

When my cousins had first opened Wilder Brothers, the Wilder Retreat and Winery, they’d just gotten out of the military and had needed to figure out what they were going to do with their lives. That side of the family had all joined up to the Air Force, other than our cousin Eliza, who’d married into the military instead with her first husband. My brothers and I hadn’t joined the service but had gone our own ways. So when the cousins needed a way to blend back into society and figure out what to do with the rest of their lives, they bought this land with the winery and inn that had already been established.

Over the years they’d added to it, and I had helped along the way. Now it was one of the top ten inns and wineries in the state of Texas. Which, considering the size of Texas, was a big thing.

We had grown exponentially in the past few years, to the point that we had waitlists, celebrity weddings, and high-stakes security that my brother helped run.

All in all, I was glad that I didn’t have to deal with a lot of the business aspects of it.

The cousins had all originally lived on the property as well. Now most of them had moved on with their families and moved out with their families, but each living close enough that they could be at the retreat in an emergency quickly. Some of them still lived on the land itself because there was enough acreage for that to happen.

In fact, my brothers and I had bought into the family estate by buying the land next to the original inn.

So now we have double the acreage and could expand.

My brothers still lived on property with their wives and families.

But I didn’t.

I was a builder, it’s what I liked doing.

So I’d built my home and a few other homes on another section of property that wasn’t attached to the retreat.

Not that I wanted to be alone, which could always be an issue, but mostly because I wanted space and for my business not to be completely wrapped up in the other Wilder businesses. It was always good to have your finger in a number of pots. Everyone else did in the family.

So I had built my home and a few others on the property, so it was nearly a neighborhood, but it wasn’t as if we were an HOA community with a groundskeeper or anything. I owned all of the homes and rented them out, and somehow, I created a fiefdom.

At least that’s what my brother called it.

I shook my head and drove the few miles to the retreat.

I went in through the employee entrance, a new section that we had added in the past year, and nodded at the security who let me through. It was odd to think that this was our lives now, but I didn’t mind it. I wasn’t the complete loner and asshole that I’d been when I had first moved here, and I tried to be calmer and nicer.

But there was always an edge of anxiety these days.

And then as I parked my truck next to a familiar SUV, I realized exactly where that anxiety came from.

Of course Rory was here.

She wasn’t going to be at the family meeting, but she was going to be on the property. Doing something. Probably drawing in one of the forested areas or near one of the creeks on the property. I didn’t know precisely what she did, but she was here often enough that I couldn’t escape her.

Lucky me.

Another truck pulled in beside me, and I lifted my chin at Wyatt.

“I guess we’re both running late,” my brother said as he jogged next to me so we could head in to the main area of the estate.

The property itself held a spa, over a dozen little cabins, a whole winery, a large barn and access building that was for the weddings and other events that the family had on hand, and countless other small buildings that helped the resort work.

There were two main buildings, though, that were at least three stories and gorgeous. When a storm had come through and destroyed part of it, it had been my job to restore it.

And it was still one of the highlights of my career.

The Wilder offices were on the top floor of the main building, away from the restaurant and guest rooms.

The fact that there was a large enough meeting space for every single Wilder and their families surprised me to this day. Although I knew that some companies rented it out for their private retreats.

“We’re not that late,” I said as I looked at my phone and cringed.

“Okay, a little late.”

“I really hope there’s coffee,” Wyatt said.

I raised a brow. “I thought you would at least have some coffee in your system with the way that you’re bouncing your toes.”

Wyatt just grinned at me, that leer that made me roll my eyes.

“Oh, that perk didn’t come from coffee.”

“I really don’t want to know what you and Ava are up to.”

“Faith was at a sleepover. It was a good morning. But I’m running late.”

I shoved him as he laughed, and we made our way up the stairs and into the main meeting room.

We were indeed the last ones there, although I knew not everybody was showing up for this meeting today.

“Oh good, you’re here. We have coffee,” Eli said, and both Wyatt and I grinned at each other before heading over to fill up two cups.

We were a large extended family of ten, with Eliza making eleven. Eliza lived up in Colorado with her family that she had married into, and she no longer had a stake in the company. Not that she wasn’t part of our family and visited often, but because she had wanted to ensure her brothers had a way to begin their lives fully. I wasn’t sure of exactly everything that had occurred, but I loved Eliza and her kids. Each of my cousins and brothers was there, although none of the spouses were. I had found that odd at first, but it was Eli’s wife, Alexa, who had explained what the meeting was about.

I was also grateful that my parents hadn’t decided to name the four of us with the same letter. The cousins each had names that started with the letter E, and sometimes I still got the names confused.

It didn’t matter that we had all grown up together and knew each other. I couldn’t keep up with it. And now that everybody was having kids, I swore we needed name tags.

“You guys need to have a meeting where you discuss the family at its core. We already had the large meeting with all forty of us. Now it’s time to make a decision,” Eli’s wife and the Wilder wedding planner had said.

So now, it was the ten of us for a meeting that I hoped would go well.

“Now that we’re all here, let’s talk expansion,” Eli said, and I let out a breath and knew it was time.

“Are we talking about on the property or somewhere else?” Ridge asked as he leaned back in his chair.

My brother was smiling more than I’d ever known him to do so, and it made me happy to see. He put his feet up on the table. Nobody told him to remove them, and I had a feeling he hadn’t even noticed he was doing it. Ridge ran security with one of the brothers-in-law, with one of the Wilder brothers-in-law, and it all was a complicated system that they seemed to figure out on their own.

“Both,” Eli answered. “We haven’t truly used the acreage that you guys have added. And we will once we decide if we’re going to add more restaurants or more places to stay or just keep it as it is. I know we have business plans and we’re ready to go with what we need there, and Brooks is going to be busy.”

I lifted up my coffee. “I’m working on plans as much as I possibly can. You’re just going to have to be patient,” I said with a shrug.

“And frankly, I don’t want to use anybody outside of our family to build,” my brother Gabriel said. Gabriel was rarely here, considering he was usually out on tour with his band. But this was an important family meeting, and so we were all here together.

“We also don’t want to use a company outside of Brooks. Although I know you do subcontract,” Eli said.

I nodded. “Yes, I can’t do everything.”

“Somebody write that down. It seems like an important thing to remember,” Wyatt joked. “We can engrave it on a plaque and gift it to Mom for Christmas.”

I threw a balled-up napkin at him, and Ridge caught it before putting his feet down as if noticing that he was tipped back in his chair and could fall.

“We have plans for the acreage,” Eli continued. “But I’m talking about the expansion that we all agreed to, but we need to discuss it one more time because it’s a big endeavor.”

“I’m fine with doing whatever,” another cousin said. “We’ve already decided this as a family without just the main core Wilders.”

“True, but that means that we’re either going to be spread too thin or giving up responsibility. It’s a big deal,” Eli continued.

“We already agreed,” I said with a shake of my head. “We’re going to buy up the inn and brewery that Roy, your friend, suggested. And we’re going to do what we did here. Maybe not at this scale, but you’re doing it for a reason. You have friends getting out of the military that need jobs. They need careers. So while we’re not going to be on-site every single day, we’re going to train them. And they’re going to have a path. We already made this plan. I’m in to help build. Just tell me where to sign on the dotted line.”

Everybody continued to speak, but in the end, we agreed.

We would be buying another parcel of land and a whole new adventure.

The Wilders were expanding and growing.

And I was going to be part of it.

Which, in the end, was good. Because it would keep me busy.

When the meeting ended, I grabbed my stuff and headed out before people could talk to me. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the line of questions that had been popping up more than usual.

Namely, trying to set me up on dates.

I didn’t know what it was about married couples, but as soon as they were happy and in love and settled down, they wanted everyone else to do the same. Had I been that ridiculous when I had been married? I wasn’t quite sure since my life had been wrapped around work at Amara. But no, I hoped to hell I wasn’t that annoying.

I looked through my list of things to do for the day and realized that I needed something out of the supply closet. So I opened the door, walked in, and bumped into a soft body with a very familiar smell.

“Wait, don’t!” Rory called out as the door closed behind me.

“Don’t what?” I asked, my voice rougher than intended.

“Don’t shut the door. It’s stuck.”

While the light was on, it was dim, as one of the bulbs had gone out. No one had told me, and we had staff to fix it, but since no one had noticed, I was going to have to do it myself.

“Are you sure you just didn’t turn the handle correctly?” I asked, aware that that vanilla scent was infiltrating my nostrils, and the closet was way too small for comfort. In fact, I could feel every single curve of hers pressed to mine.

And, of course, my dick noticed.

I quickly turned so she wouldn’t feel it against her stomach and tried the handle.

It didn’t budge.

“I might be blonde, but I’m not an idiot. I know how to open a door.”

“Well, why didn’t you call someone?”

“Because my phone is in my office. Why don’t you call someone?” she said.

I reached into my pocket and cursed. “My phone’s in the meeting room. Fuck.”

“Oh, this is great. I am so happy that my claustrophobia is getting a nice little workout today.”

I frowned and turned to her, squinting in the dim light.

“You’re claustrophobic?”

Her chest heaved, her breasts lifting with each deep breath, and I tried not to notice the way that her V-neck T-shirt showed every single inch of cleavage.

I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly watering.

“Just a little bit. And you are very big, Brooks. And you’re taking up way too much space.”

“How long have you been in here?” I asked, my voice deep. Gruff.

“I have no idea. But could you step back?”

“My back’s already to the door, Rory.”

“Oh. Well. I guess the whole us avoiding each other is really going well, right?” she asked, her voice going high-pitched.

“I’m not avoiding you. I’m just staying away from you.”

“I’m so glad that you cleared that up.” She looked down between us and cleared her throat. “Could you really not back up because it’s kind of hard to ignore a certain part of you?”

Damn, it seemed my dick ended up pressed to her stomach, and there was no alleviating that. At least, not the way we wanted to.

“Sorry, I can’t control him.”

“Gee, this isn’t awkward at all. I’m sure someone will come searching for us soon. Or at least you. Ava doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Ava’s at home,” I whispered, my throat tight.

“Oh, crap.”

The dim light wasn’t bright enough for me to see every inch of her, but just enough so I could see those plump lips and the way that she practically shivered in my hold.

Without thinking, I slid one hand around her waist and the other over her ponytail. I tugged slightly and her mouth parted.

“Brooks.”

“Just shut up.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up. You shut up.”

“Fine,” I growled.

And then I crushed my mouth to hers.

I pulled on her ponytail, hard, and she gasped into my mouth as I licked along the seam of her lips. She once again parted for me, kissing me back with as much fervor.

She tasted of mint, coffee, and everything Rory.

I moved into her, grinding myself against her as she slid her hands up the back of my shirt, nails digging into my skin.

I deepened the kiss, practically devouring her as I did the one thing I promised myself I would never do.

I kissed Rory Thompson once again.

And she kissed me back.

And when I finally wrenched myself from her, ready to come in my jeans like a teenager, we both stood there, panting.

“That didn’t happen,” I rumbled.

“The problem is…it did.”

And when one of the cleaning staff opened the door behind me, Rory practically shoved me out of the way and ran. And I stood with my back to the doorway, wondering what the hell I had just done.