She hadn’t looked away and neither had he, and he steeled himself not to. He wanted to understand her, wanted to break down her barriers, wanted to prolong the connection with her, her pulse, her scent, her heat. His heartbeat thudded against his chest as they stayed locked into one another. She was out of breath, her chest rising and falling, and emotions swirled in her eyes before she finally, carefully, hid them.
He could lose himself to her so easily, especially after the intensity of what they had just shared. His hand came up and smoothed her hair back behind a pink-tipped ear, wanting to memorize this moment before it was gone.
“You are so beautiful when you come,” he murmured, and with that, she closed her eyes and leaned forward, tucking her head. He circled his arms around her, kissing her shoulder as her arms went around him.
“You say the sweetest things,” she muffled into his neck. “But I’m cold now. Bed.”
They separated, and he lifted her up before she could walk away, carrying her down the hall to her bedroom, sliding her onto the bed and chucking the used condom at the wastebasket before climbing in beside her. He didn’t want to go yet, even though the exhaustion in his bones was almost rendering him useless.
It had been a long, wild, impossible day. But being here, with her, was making it all seem like a dream. He pulled the covers up as she let out a sigh and stretched, fitting herself in beside him.
“Was that good?” he asked quietly, and she nodded into his chest, an almost catlike purr rumbling out of her.
“Totally a great way to end today,” she replied. “Makes up for all the chaos.”
“Today was nuts,” he supplied. She tensed briefly, then relaxed again, running her hand up his chest, stopping over his heart.
“I was scared. I never—” she blurted, and he shifted so he could look at her.
He saw it again, the emotion she battled with, the vulnerability she was trying to hide. He didn’t want to rock the boat, so he pulled her back down to lie against him, sliding down onto the pillow beside her. They had opened up to one another tonight, comfortable with each other’s bodies. Maybe now she’d open up to him this way too.
“It’s okay to be scared. I was terrified. I’ve faced muggers and drunk assholes in bars that were less dangerous than what I waded into today,” he offered, looking up at the ceiling. It was true. He’d been held at gunpoint, knifepoint, all kinds of shit. But it had been a different kind of feeling when he’d launched himself off his horse today toward the men who were stealing the West Line cattle.
His family’s cattle.
“I wondered—how in hell did you learn to punch like that?” she asked. “It was wild to watch. You dropped that first guy like he was a bag of feathers.”
“I started boxing about ten years ago, maybe more, I can’t remember when exactly,” he replied. “I needed an outlet when shit got real.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked, her body shaking with a suppressed giggle. “How does ‘shit’ get real in New York City?”
He caught that she would find it funny, taking the saying literally, and he smiled, enjoying the moment.
“We lived in some crappy places when I was younger, which meant I had to learn to throw a punch to stay on the good side of people. I didn’t do that very well. Got my ass handed to me a lot.”
“Oof. But you were likely a big kid. Tanner was. I imagine when you got bigger it stopped?”
“You’d think. But I was a scrawny kid with a short fuse, and I had a huge target on my back until I was a bit older. There were good people in all the places we lived, New York has some great communities, but some of them could be pretty rough,” he said, wishing he could soften the image of the city. Truthfully, ithadbeen rough. He had a brief thought as he lay there, that he would love to take her to New York and show her everything he loved about it, show her who he was away from here.
Which would send her screaming in the other direction.She’d been so tense in Calgary; he’d seen the distaste for the busy traffic and people everywhere.
He missed New York and his friends for a brief moment but let it go. He could wallow later.
“So boxing kept you safe,” she said, her thumb moving over his skin. She was making it easy to talk about his past tonight, and he let out a big breath, trying to shake off the twist in his chest that remembering his childhood raised.
“I started when I was in my late teens, maybe nineteen? I had a lot of attitude I didn’t know what to do with. I was a bouncer while I paid for school, and working both at a bar and as a prep cook meant I got used to shady shit happening at the back door every night no matter where I was. I picked up boxing at a local place to give myself an edge to handle what it threw at me. Byproduct was it made me less angry.”
“Shady. Like drugs and stuff?” she asked, sitting up a bit. “Did you do that stuff?”
“No. My mom was, no,isan alcoholic and a drug addict. I’ve never touched any drugs. Saw what it did to people,” he replied as lightly as possible, even though his chest was tight as he said it. He hadn’t talked much about his mother to anyone here; it had felt disrespectful to Peony. It had only come up tonight in the study when he saw her blanket.
“Oh,” Liz breathed, and settled back down. Her hand wrapped over his neck, and she shifted to kiss him softly on the cheek, her fingers digging into the hair at his nape.
The gesture undid him, and he turned toward her, giving in to the moment to just feel. Intimacy was one thing she didn’t want, but here they were, instinctively comforting each other as he threaded his arms around her.
He didn’t want tonight to be heavy; he wanted to lose himself in her body and let today’s stress go. But here she was filling a need for more. More connection. More healing. This was more than just sex with a willing woman, and he felt powerless to stop what he was feeling as they locked eyes in the semidarkness.
Liz gently slid her hand over his cheek, running her thumb over his cheekbone. The emotion was back in her eyes, and he swallowed the lump forming in his throat as he knew that she was seeing the same damned thing in his.
