He pulls back just enough to look at me.
His eyes are dark. Wrecked.
The pupils blown so wide the blue-hazel is just a thin ring around black.
He’s breathing hard—ragged, uncontrolled—and his hands are trembling against my skin.
“Bex.”
“Don’t stop.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Low. Wrecked. The voice of a woman who has been lit on fire and does not want to be put out. “Lee. Don’t stop.”
Something in his face fractures.
The last wall. The last restraint.
I watch it fall—the exact moment he stops fighting himself and surrenders to the thing that’s been pulling us together sinceI walked into a feed store and saw a man I had no business wanting.
His hands go to the hem of my shirt and pull it over my head.
Not slow. Not careful.
A single, decisive motion that leaves me bare from the waist up except for the plain cotton bra I wore because I’m a farrier, not a seductress, and I didn’t plan for this.
I didn’t plan for any of this.
He looks at me.
My body. The body that is not Rose’s—not slim, not willowy, not delicate.
Full breasts. Soft stomach.
The broad shoulders and muscled arms of a woman who bends iron for a living.
Scars on my hands. Calluses on my palms. Sun-dark skin.
Everything about me is heavy and strong and built for function rather than beauty, and he’s looking at me like I’m the most devastating thing he’s ever seen.
“Christ.” The word leaves him on an exhale.
Reverent. Wrecked.
His hands come back to my waist and this time they’re shaking openly, his fingers tracing the curve of my hips, the swell of my stomach, moving upward to cup my breasts through the cotton.
His thumbs sweep across the peaks and my head falls back against the wall and a sound comes out of me that I will deny making until the day I die.
I pull at his shirt.
He reaches back with one hand and drags it over his head and now it’s my turn to look and my turn to lose the ability to form coherent thoughts.
He’s lean and hard, the body of a man who works with his hands and rides horses and doesn’t sit still long enough to soften.
Tattoos. MC ink across his chest and down his arms—I can’t process the details, I’ll map them later. Right now all I register is skin and heat and the ridges of muscle across his stomach and the trail of dark hair that disappears below his belt.
I put my hands on him.
Flat palms on his chest.
He hisses—a sharp intake of breath through his teeth, like my touch is a brand.
