Panty Dropper (Southern Comfort #1) - Melanie Shawn Page 0,1

the reason wasn’t always what ya’d think. This encounter, for example, was born out of emotional necessity, not carnal desire. I needed a distraction, a fleeting amusement. Things were a little too heavy and I was chasing a mental diversion through physical activity.

Acrylic fingernails scraped along the ridge of my straining erection, trapped behind the zipper of my Levis. “Damn. You’re not a snack, you’re a whole meal,” she said, her voice low and throaty.

I brushed soft, auburn hair away from my current distraction’s face as she toyed with my belt buckle.

It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate her efforts at seductive back and forth, but there was some time pressure at work here. I was due in a meeting and she was on her ten-minute break. I wanted to see those luscious lips wrapped around my thick cock, no matter how cute her smile might be.

And it was cute, if nothin’ special. Kind of like the girl herself. Reddish brown hair, fair skin, brown eyes. A mouth that looked like she knew how to use it for more than talking. And hell, I wasn’t in this thing for conversation—I’d only met her fifteen minutes before. Not to be blunt, but we weren’t holed up in this closet because I was curious to know what she had to say.

Of course, I’d never put it to her like that. That was no way to talk to a lady.

“I hope you’re hungry, darlin’,” I encouraged in my huskiest, sexiest, highest-batting-average voice. I’d found that “honey” or “darlin’” were always good choices when I couldn’t remember a female’s name, and… Lily? Or Posey? Or something floral… didn’t seem to notice. Quite the opposite, actually. Her fingers unhooked my belt buckle and then deftly unbuttoned my fly.

The brown-eyed cutie giggled as her fingers brushed across my waist. “My auntie warned me about you Comfort men.”

I’d never seen this girl in my life before I’d walked in to find her sitting behind the front desk. She’d explained that she was a temp and I’d figured that she was new to town. I had no idea that she had people in Firefly. “Your auntie?”

“My Auntie Caroline.” Her brown eyes twinkled as her fingers continued to explore my torso.

“Caroline Shaw?”

“Yep. That’s her.”

Miss Shaw was in her late sixties and a staple in Firefly. For decades, she’d owned Pretty in Peach, which had been the sole beauty salon on the island until the Montgomerys bankrolled The Beauty Mark for their daughter Kendra. It was the family’s attempt at “rebranding” her, which had become necessary after their only daughter was “cancelled” as an Instagram model after a brief stint as a spokesperson for diet pills that caused major organ failure.

“What did your auntie warn you ’bout, honey?” Miss Shaw had always been kind to me and my brothers, which was a hell of a lot more than I could say for a lot of people in this town. I figured it was because she’d been engaged to my Uncle Henry before he’d been killed in a plane crash.

“She said that y’all were cursed.”

Naturally athletic physiques weren’t the only thing that was passed down in the Comfort bloodline. The “curse” ran three generations deep.

The story went that Lucille Abernathy, of the famed haunted Abernathy Manor, had been engaged to my grandfather, but he fell in love with my grandmother and left Lucille at the altar. She’d put a curse on him that day, folks said, dooming any male in his bloodline who found love to either die or to lose that love tragically.

The “Comfort Curse” was not something I put much stock in. But if anyone would believe in it, it was Caroline Shaw, considering my uncle had been killed a month before they were set to walk down the aisle.

“And she said,” she continued, “that all the Comfort men had strong jaws, wide smiles, big hands, and kissed like the dickens.”

Those weren’t the words that were normally used to describe us. We were well-known for being associated for descriptors that started with F.

I ran my fingers along her jaw, and bent down ready to show her that I lived up to our reputation. “Is that right?”

My lips brushed across hers as she whispered, “And that you and your brothers were known for three things. Fighting. Flirting. And fucking.”

There it was. The three Fs. My older brother was the fighter. He could knock anybody out cold with one punch. My little brother flirted with anything with a pulse, and that left