I told her about competing with Rhett and Cade. About the circuit. About being young and stupid and thinking I was invincible. She laughed when I told her about Cade getting thrown by a bull named Sweet Revenge. The sound hit me straight in the chest—warm and genuine and so damn unexpected that I stopped mid-sentence.
“What?” she asked, a smile still playing at her lips.
“Nothing.” I looked away, jaw tight. “Just... Cade will never let me hear the end of it if he knows I told you that story.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” Her smile turned soft. Intimate. Like we were sharing something.
I didn’t know what to do with that. With her. With this.
“What made you stop?” she asked.
“I injured my knee and came home to heal. Our dad died a month after that, so I stayed. Someone had to run the ranch.”
“And that someone was you.”
“It wasn’t really a choice. It was my responsibility.” I looked at the fire. “Cade kept competing for about another six months, then came home.”
“Because you needed him.”
“Because he’s loyal to a fault.”
She was quiet for a moment. “What about you? What do you want?”
No one had asked me that in years. No one had cared enough to ask.
I turned to look at her, and found her closer than she’d been before. When had she moved? Or had I moved toward her without realizing it?
If I stretched out my arm, I could touch her. Wrap a strand of that silky brown hair around my fist and pull her to me. And then I could find out if she tasted as good as she smelled.
That thought should have sent me running back out into the cold.
It didn’t.
“Right now?” My voice was dark, deep. “I want things I shouldn’t want.”
Her breath caught, her lips parting slightly. “Like what?”
The logical side of my brain, the one that had drawn the circles around the date on the calendar, warned me to say something else. To end this before it started.
“Like you.”
The words hung between us, raw and honest and impossible to take back.
She didn’t pull away. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t tell me I was out of line.
She leaned closer, and I watched her do it. I watched those brown eyes go dark with want. Her tongue darted out to wet her bottom lip and I snapped.
One second there was distance between us. The next, my hand was fisted in her hair and I was dragging her toward me.
“Tell me to stop.” The command tore out of me, rough and bare, like if I didn’t say it now, I never would.
“No.” She breathed the word against my mouth. A refusal. An invitation.
That was all it took.
I kissed her like a man who hadn’t kissed a woman in five years. Like I’d been thinking about doing this—about kissing her—every damn day since she’d walked into my life.
She made a sound—surprise or need, I couldn’t tell—and kissed me back. Her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me closer.
