I close the six inches.
His mouth is warm.
That’s the first thing—warm and firm and tasting like coffee and rain and five years of silence.
The kiss is a collision.
Brief, electric, the kind that sends a shock through your whole body and rewires something fundamental in the process.
My hand fists in his shirt.
His hand tightens on my back—fingers spreading, pressing, pulling me into him like his body and his brain are in two different conversations and his body is winning.
He kisses me like he’s starving.
Like the first breath after being underwater too long.
His mouth opens against mine and the sound he makes—low, involuntary, somewhere between a groan and something broken—hits me in the center of my chest and detonates.
I feel iteverywhere.
In my ribs, in my stomach, in the heat that blooms between my hips and spreads like wildfire through muscle and bone.
His hand slides from my back to my waist.
Fingers curling around the curve of me—my full waist, my wide hips, nothing narrow or delicate about the body he’s gripping and he’s gripping it anyway.
His thumb finds the strip of bare skin between my waistband and the hem of my shirt and presses into it and I gasp against his mouth because the contact—his callused thumb on my bare skin, hot and rough and deliberate—is a match head striking.
I push into him.
Both hands on his chest now, feeling the muscle shift under my palms, feeling the heat of him through the damp fabric, feeling everything I’ve been pretending I didn’t want to feel for three weeks.
He’s solid. Broad.
His body is nothing like what I imagined. I hate that I imagined it, and I love that the reality is better.
The wall is behind him and I press him into it and he lets me—his back against the boards, my body against his, his hand on my hip tightening with a pressure that says don’t stop.
His other hand comes up.
It cups the side of my face.
His fingers slide into my hair—my dark hair, loosened from the braid by the day’s work—and the touch is so tender, so at odds with the desperate grip on my hip, that I feel something crack open behind my sternum.
Rough and gentle at the same time.
Taking and careful at the same time.
Like he can’t decide which man to be and is being both.
The kiss deepens.
His tongue touches mine and my spine melts.
I am pressed against Lee in a horse stall during a thunderstorm, and I am kissing him with everything I have. He’s kissing me back with something that feels like grief and hunger and terror all tangled together, and the rain is hammering the roof and the horse is breathing in the corner and nothing outside this stall exists.
Then his ring touches my cheek.
