“Tell me more about that,” he said.
“Big ego much?”
“Yes.” He moved closer to her. “There is a little bit of ego involved in this. You spent ten years treating me like a Ken doll.”
“What?” she asked.
“Like I had nothing but smooth plastic between my legs.”
She guffawed. “Lies.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her up against him. Sadly, the blanket bunched between them and he was denied what he was after, the press of her skin against his. “Not a lie. That’s what started all of this. The fact that I couldn’t stand you pretending I wasn’t a man. And that I couldn’t spend another day pretending I didn’t want you. I couldn’t pretend there was nothing between us. Not anymore.”
She reached out and pinched the blanket between her thumb and forefinger. “Right now there is a very fuzzy blanket between us.”
“Not for long.” He leaned in, kissed her. Not a simple kiss either. He took it deep. He made it last. When they parted, they were both breathing hard. “But this is what I meant. Not the blanket.”
“Okay, when I met you I thought you were hot. But I was kind of off guys then. Plus, I would have gotten you arrested.”
“True.”
“And I... Well, when I finally did get back into dating it was because I was lonely. Because I had some needs. You know, like you do. But the further I went down the dating road, the clearer it became to me that I wasn’t going to have a normal future. I just... I can’t. There’s too much stuff. I don’t want to get married. I can’t...think about having another child. It just feels wrong somehow.”
He didn’t want those things either. And he had his own set of pretty good reasons. But for some reason hearing Lane say that, so definitively, twisted his stomach. He didn’t want that for her. It was a funny thing, to feel so confident in his own decision to avoid entanglements, and yet to hate that she was so affected by her past she was doing the same.
But then, another part of him found immediate pleasure in it. In the fact that this association with him wasn’t actually holding her back from anything. That it meant they could share an objective. In fact, part of him found it pretty damn satisfying.
“The way I see it,” he said, “there’s no reason the two of us can’t keep being friends.”
“Well, we better be able to stay friends. Otherwise, I’m going to take tonight back.”
“You can’t.”
“I would figure out time travel. That’s how important it is to me.” Her face was serious, so serious he might have laughed if she wasn’t so grave. “You’re right. I’ve been attracted to you for a long time. But it was so important to me that we keep what we have that I buried it as deep as I possibly could. That’s why I was so mad at you when you kissed me. Not because I never thought about it before, but because I had deliberately forced myself to never, ever indulge any thoughts about what it might be like. Mark helped me so much when I came to Copper Ridge. But you... You were the one that saved me, Finn. Our friendship. You’re the most important person in my life.”
Why? The question burned in the back of his throat, but he refused to allow himself to ask it. “Because I fix your stuff?”
“No,” she said, “just...because.”
“The way I see it, the two of us have been playing pretty elaborate games for the past while. Pretending we don’t want this, when both of us do.”
“You make it sound silly.”
“It’s not. Our friendship is important to me too, Lane. And not just that, but you. Your feelings. I’m limited in what I can offer a woman. I don’t want to get married either. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want to have a family. I don’t want love.” He reached between them, casting the blanket aside. Then he pulled her up against him. “This,” he said, rolling his hips forward, letting her feel his hardness. “This is all I have to offer you. That, and what we have already.”
“So, you’re proposing an arrangement. With multiple orgasms and steady companionship?”
“Yes.”
She blinked, the expression on her face turning ponderous. And everything in him seized up, froze. All of him, every cell in his body, waiting on her response.
“That sounds... Dangerously simple and exceedingly attractive.”
“What if it’s both?”
“Is it ever?”
He ignored the voice inside of him that said it couldn’t be. “Why not? We both want the same things.”
“More accurately we both want to avoid the same things,” she said, her tone dry.
“Yeah, fair enough.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “You’re not going to forget this. Don’t pretend for one second that me leaving tonight means we can go back to the way things were tomorrow.”
She blinked, a sheen of tears in her eyes. He hated himself for that. But not enough to tell her to forget it. Not enough to make this easy. “That was what I was planning. That was why I drove you back here.” She laughed, a shaky sound. “I thought that if we could just...do it once we would maybe take care of it.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“So we do it. Until we don’t.”
He couldn’t imagine a time when he wouldn’t want to. But, there was no point in saying that. “Exactly.”
“And we’re friends first.”
“Always.”
She let out a sigh of relief and her body melted against his. “I’m so... I don’t know. Just relieved. All of this has been hard. Everything. Cord being on TV all the time. Everybody acting like he’s a god when I know for a fact he’s underwhelming if anything.”
Finn laughed, more than a little satisfied by that estimation of her ex.
“It will be nice to... To be with somebody who knows. And to not have to try so hard,” she said, putting her hand on his face. “To pretend that I feel normal. And not to pretend that I’m not attracted to you.”
That was the biggest source of relief as far as he was concerned. The fact that he didn’t have to channel all his restraint into resisting her, and resisting the attraction that had only grown more intense over the past few weeks.
“Yeah,” he said. “Now all we have to deal with is a lifetime of emotional scarring and issues.”
She laughed, and the sound did a lot to ease the tension still lingering inside him. “Well,” she said, “thank God for that.”
“But first,” he said, looking down at that freckle on her shoulder, “I need to taste your skin again.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING saw Finn doing the walk of shame up to his front door. Normally, there would be no one around to witness such an event, but this morning when he walked into his kitchen, hungover from sex and lack of sleep, he had three very attentive witnesses.
It would have been comical if he didn’t find it so annoying.
Liam, Alex and Cain were all sitting at the kitchen table, and paused with their coffee halfway between the table and their lips when Finn made his entrance.
“We were about to file a missing persons report,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair and slinging his arm across the back.
“We almost called search and rescue,” Liam added.
“I just went to sleep,” Cain said.
“Leave it to you assholes to be up early today without me to drag you out of bed.”
“Assholes are good for that,” Alex said. “By which I mean only doing the right thing when it might bother somebody.”
“Job well done,” Finn growled, walking across the room and making quick work of the remaining coffee in the pot.
“You disappeared last night before things got good,” Liam said.
“Somehow,” Alex said, “I doubt that. I have a feeling Finn went to a private party.”
“Are you guys twelve, or what? I’m a grown ass man. If I stay out all night I’m not going to blush and giggle about what went on.” He felt protective of what had happened between himself and Lane. They didn’t need to know the details, and they definitely didn’t need to know he’d been with her.
“I’d like to ruminate on it for a bit.” Alex smiled. “I would like to ruminate in detail. I was distracted when you left, so I didn’t get to see you go. But I want to know who you left with.”
“Excuse me while I change my earlier question. Are you women?”
Liam lifted his coffee mug. “That’s sort of sexist, Finn. I feel sullied by our association.”
“Feel free to make a sign and march in the streets then, jackass.”
“I think I’ll just finish drinking my coffee.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You might have responded to a text,” Liam said. “Just one. So that we knew you weren’t lying dead or mortally wounded somewhere.”
He hadn’t even checked his phone yet today. “And you care about that?”
He had meant the question to sound somewhat skeptical, but it came out legitimately curious.
Liam lifted a shoulder. “Who’d ride us hard during ranch chores and make us wish for death?”
“Great,” Cain said. “Finn got laid. That’s all we’re going to hear about it. Frankly, I don’t want to hear any more about it. I want to go milk some cows.”