It’s a good mouth. Firm, serious. I know it smiles, rarely, but when it does, it hits hard as the first warm day after winter.
Stop.
I shift my weight, but instead of easing the tension, it just makes me more aware of how close we are. My shoulder almost brushes his chest when I breathe. If I reach out, I could touch the front of his shirt, feel the heat of him through the cotton, feel the hard plane of muscle underneath.
I don’t reach out.
Barely.
His hand flexes at his side, fingers curling, fighting the same instinct.
“Boone,” I whisper, not even sure what I’m trying to say.
“Yeah?” he murmurs.
“You’re my boss,” I choke the words out. “This is… complicated.”
His jaw works.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It is.”
He doesn’t move away.
Neither do I.
Everything feels charged, the split second before a storm breaks. Every nerve in my body is suddenly tuned to him. His breath, the subtle rise and fall of his chest, the way his eyes keep dropping to my mouth and dragging back up.
I’m aware of my own body in a way I haven’t been in months. The flutter in my stomach, the tight pull low in my belly, the way my skin feels too hot and too sensitive everywhere at once.
This is Boone,I think wildly. Sadie’s dad. The man who hired you. The man who trusts you with his kid. The man who runs this ranch you’re supposed to make a new life on.
He is off limits.
Off.
Limits.
But he’s standing inches from me in a tiny pantry, looking at me like I’m fragile and fierce and worth holding onto, and the part of me that’s been starving for that look doesn’t give a damn about limits.
His hand lifts just a little. Like he might touch my arm. My cheek. My hair. He hesitates, fingers hovering in the space between us.
“Delaney,” he says again, and this time it’s rougher, scraped over gravel. “I?—”
“Daddy!”
We jerk apart as if we’ve been slapped.
I stumble back into a shelf. A box of cereal rattles, nearly topples. Boone moves fast, planting a palm on the edge to steady it, the other hand braced briefly against my hip to keep me from falling.
That brief contact, his palm hot and big through the thin fabric of my shirt, the solid muscle of his forearm pinning me gently in place, sends a bolt of heat through me so intense I forget how to inhale.
Then his hands vanish. He steps out of the pantry like it’s on fire, shoulders squared, expression snapping back into something more neutral.
I press myself to the shelves, heart thundering.
“Daddy, where are you?” Sadie calls again from the hall, feet thumping against the floor. “Moose stepped on my sock, and now it’s crunchy!”
Boone scrubs a hand over his face once, then steps fully into the doorway. “In here, Sadie.”
