One picture in particular caught his eye. She was astride, turning a barrel in a cloud of dust. The photographer had caught the fierce, determined scowl on her face perfectly, and it didn’t do any favors for his current erection.
“I had no idea I was in the presence of the Queen of the Rodeo.”
“Obnoxious, isn’t it?” she asked, wrinkling her pert nose and tossing her purse on the pale leather loveseat.
“Oh, sure. Totally obnoxious,” he joked.
She laughed. “Well, I sort of…can’t bring myself to get rid of them. For a long time after I quit competing, I packed them away. I didn’t want to look at them, but in the end, I cracked. I guess it’s my inborn competitive streak—I have to have the reminder that I accomplished something. Silly, right?” She actually seemed to be blushing.
It was insanely sexy.
“I get it,” he said. “I feel the same way when I wake up and see the unconscious hookers and the tower of empty beer cans I built the night before. It’s so hard to let go.”
He struggled to keep the statement dead serious, and sure enough, he was gifted with an alarmed look from her wide hazel eyes.
Then, suddenly, she got it. Without him having to say a word or crack a smile, her body went off alert, and she laughed. “God, you’re bad.”
“So is there some reason why you quit racing?”
Her gaze flickered from the relics of her glory days to his face. There was a directness in that stare that threatened to undo him. “Candace never mentioned it to you?”
Racking his brain and coming up empty, he shook his head. “Nope.”
“I was competing in Conroe when I was eighteen. I’d just made the last turn when—I don’t know what happened. I don’t even remember. But apparently, something spooked my horse, and I was thrown. Cracked a couple vertebrae among a dozen other things. I was black and blue all over. Ten weeks in a brace, plus surgery and physical therapy…it was…scary. My mare, Sugar, broke her leg and had to be put down.” She nodded toward the picture he’d been contemplating earlier. “That’s her there.”
“Damn, girl.”
Her lip quirked. “After I came out of all that, I just didn’t have the fire for it like I used to. I still ride, still love it, but I’m way more cautious than before. In all things, I guess.”
“I can see how that would happen. Do you still have problems?”
“Sometimes. But overall I’ve been really lucky. Very lucky. So I don’t complain too much.”
He opened his mouth to say he found it pretty incredible she would even want to look at a horse after something like that, but then being pulled from the mangled wreckage of his parents’ car at six years old hadn’t made him swear off vehicles. Just the opposite, really. He spent his spare time trying to fix them. The bigger the job, the more he liked it. But he’d never be able to mold that shredded mass of metal in his memory into anything resembling an automobile, even in his dreams.
She had caught him. “Were you about to say something?”
“Just that”—he struggled to contain the emotion threatening to crack his voice—“maybe we can compare scars.”
There was little else he’d seen in his entire life more beautiful than Macy’s smile. Maybe that was because, now that he thought about it, it was a fairly rare thing. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine?”
He winked at her. “That and other things.”
The inquisitive way she was looking at him drove him nuts, made him desperate to know what was going on behind those pretty eyes. One thing he knew for certain: there were depths in her he hadn’t even begun to fathom. She intrigued him. Sorting her out would be no simpler than twisting that hunk of distorted metal back into mint shape.
“I’m going to get you used to me before it’s over, you know,” he said.
Her pink tongue swept across her top lip. Maybe her mouth was just dry, but he took it as an invitation. The tap dancing around each other was over. They were here. Alone. She was his and he was hers, if only for tonight.
“I’m getting a little used to you already,” she said softly as he stepped closer.
“Just a little?”
She gave a slow nod, never taking her gaze from his. “Mm-hmm.”
“It’s a start.”
Whisper-soft, he leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, savoring her intake of breath and the way it made her chest graze his. She was perfectly endowed. Way more than the handful most guys claimed was ideal—he’d always said fuck that; he liked the soft flesh to overflow his hands. He liked room to explore. Ample area to kiss and lick and suck. He didn’t discriminate based on his preference, but he rejoiced when he found perfection. She was it.
A whimper escaped her throat when his tongue flickered against her lips, questing for entrance. She gave it, allowing her hands to creep up around his neck. Her flavor exploded on his tongue, sweet and sultry as a damn aphrodisiacal fruit. God. He hadn’t counted on this gentleness. It was throwing him off, making him unbalanced. He groaned and sank his fingers into her silky hair, molding his palm to the back of her head. Reaching for the fire he knew was burning inside her, even if she was afraid to show it to him yet.
Breathless, she broke away, and the smolder in her eyes as she looked up at him nearly sucked the oxygen from him in turn. “My bedroom is…over there.” She nodded to an open door across the room from them.
“Yeah? What awaits me in there? A genuine cow skull?”
She snickered. “Maybe. But most importantly, a really big bed.”
“Mmm. In a hurry, are you?”
Judging from the glint in her eyes, the flush in her cheeks, she was. He’d never noticed before that she had freckles, just a light dusting under her eyes and across her nose. Her fingers stroked down his nape, sending gooseflesh down his back. “Don’t you think we’ve waited long enough?”
“Good point.” He stepped back slightly and swept his arm toward the door. “After you.”
He’d been the last person she’d had sex with, and it had been the better part of a year. That was the longest she’d gone without having sex since she started having sex. Was that why she couldn’t stop trembling? Should she say something before he got the wrong idea?
She’d never been this excited, this aroused. It couldn’t all be him.
Taking the plunge, she tore her gaze from his and walked toward her room. She sensed him moving behind her, following closely. Between her legs, she was already slick and needy from his kiss, and if she didn’t get out of this damn constrictive bra, she was going to scream. She needed his hands on her, soothing away the aches.
One lamp had been left on in her room for ambiance. Big ugly scar or not, she wasn’t a lights-off kind of gal.
Some crazy compulsion made her turn around to close the door after he came in behind her—she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if someone would be in the living room to overhear them. It just felt more…intimate. More—
The breath rushed out of her as his hard body pressed her roughly against the closed door. He swept her hair aside and fastened his hot mouth to the side of her neck, sucking hard. The outline of his cock branded her ass. Her heart rate soared out of control.
“Oh God,” she gasped, grinding back against him. The movement gave him enough room to slide his hands under her sweater, up her quivering belly, and cup both of her breasts, kneading them with a gentleness that belied the hard-and-rough everywhere else. She only wished she were already naked for him. “Take it off,” she pleaded.
His hands slid around to her back and deftly unfastened her bra. He lifted his mouth from her neck and sought her lips. She turned her head back and drank in his kiss like a starving woman as his fingers journeyed back around and played with her bare nipples beneath the loose bra cups. Dammit, she wanted the thing gone, but this was better than nothing.
It was all too much, and she couldn’t get close enough. She couldn’t see enough. He gave her space to shed her sweater and her bra; then he planted her right back in place, raining kisses over her shoulders and the back of her neck as his fingers worked the button on her jeans. She wriggled her hips as he stripped them down her legs. Thank God she hadn’t worn boots or complicated shoes—she kicked off her flats and couldn’t step out of the denim fast enough.
That left only her panties. Just as he’d promised on the phone last night.
Seth’s breath gusted hot against her shoulder as his hand brushed the small of her back. Judging from the movements, he was unfastening his belt, wrenching at the button and—oh God, yes—yanking down his zipper.
“Let me see.” She tried to turn, but he moved up so close behind her there was no way she could, not when every lean inch of his body pressed her against the door. And he was strong enough to stop any further efforts on her part. Not that she tried very hard.
“You’re shaking,” he murmured. He leaned into her, his nose nestling in her hair. She heard him inhale, felt his chest expand at her back.
There was no refuting his observation. No explaining it either. She shook as if it were twenty below in the room, but she was burning up.