The sound of a man’s control snapping.
And then his hands are on me.
Both hands. My hips.
Gripping—not gently, not carefully, not the tender, tentative touch of a man testing the waters.
This is a man who’s been drowning and just found something solid.
His fingers dig into the curves of my hips—my full hips, the wide, heavy hips of a woman built for labor and endurance—and he pulls me into him with a force that knocks the breath out of both of us.
His mouth finds mine.
Not like the first kiss.
Not electric and brief and severed by guilt.
This is a flood. A dam breaking.
His mouth opens against mine and he kisses me like he’s trying to consume me, like the hunger he’s been starving for years has finally been given permission to feed and it wants everything.
His tongue slides against mine, and I grab the front of his shirt with both fists and haul him closer because closer isn’t close enough, nothing is close enough. I want to climb inside him and live there.
He walks me backward.
My boots scuffing the concrete, his boots driving, his hands on my hips steering me without breaking the kiss.
My back hits the wall of the tack room—the same tack room where he bandaged my hand, the same small warm space that smells like leather and saddle soap—and the solid surface behind me means he can press forward without restraint.
He presses forward without restraint.
His body against mine.
The full length of him—chest, hips, thighs—pinning me to the wall with a pressure that is possession, that is claiming, that is a man who has decided he is done fighting and is now taking.
I can feel him. All of him.
The hard planes of his chest through his shirt, the belt buckle pressing my stomach, and lower—the unmistakable evidence that Lee has wanted this as badly as I have, pressed against my hip, hard and insistent and sending a bolt of heat through my core that makes my knees melt.
His hands move. From my hips upward, sliding under my shirt, and the contact of his palms on my bare skin—rough, calloused, burning—makes me gasp into his mouth.
His hands spread wide across my waist, my ribs, mapping territory with a desperate urgency that says he’s been imagining this.
His thumbs press into the soft skin below my ribs and I arch into him because the touch is electric, because his hands are everywhere and it’s not enough, because I have been starving for this man since the moment he wrapped my hand in a tack room and I felt his ring against my pulse.
His ring.
I feel it now.
Cool gold against the heated skin of my ribs as his hand slides higher. Rose’s ring. On Rose’s husband’s hand. Touching me.
I don’t stop. I don’t want to stop.
The wrongness and the rightness are so tangled together I can’t separate them, and I’ve stopped trying.
His ring is on my skin and his mouth is on my neck and it’s like Rose is in the room, and I am choosing this anyway.
I’m choosing him.
