My jaw tightened. “I want to forget it happened.”
Something flashed in her eyes. Hurt, maybe. Or anger. Probably both.
She marched toward me, and before I could react, her hand shot out and cupped my cock through my pajama bottoms.
I sucked in a sharp breath. I was already hard just from being near her, and her touch sent more blood rushing south so fast it made me dizzy.
“Stop lying to me,” she hissed, her fingers squeezing just enough to make my vision blur. “You want this. You wantme. So why are you pushing me away?”
I grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand off me, even though every cell in my body screamed at me to press her palm harder against my aching cock so she could feel exactly what she was doing to me.
“You deserve someone more civilized than me,” I growled out. “I’mnogood. I’m not the right man for you, Cassidy.”
Then I stalked past her, out onto the back deck, desperate to put distance between us before I did something I couldn’t take back.
The morning air was cool and crisp, still damp from last night’s storm. I gripped the railing and stared down at her farmhouse in the valley below. From up here it looked so small and far away.
I was messing everything up. Just like I always did.
It had been simpler when I was just watching her from a distance. When she was just a light in the darkness, a fantasy I could never touch.
Now she was real and warm andhere, and I had no idea what to do with that.
I didn’t know how to talk to a woman, how to open up. How to let her see the complicated, broken parts of me hiding deep inside.
If only I’d had someone in my life to teach me about this shit. But my family had all been quiet. My father spoke in grunts and nods, and my mother showed love through food and clean laundry, never words.
We’d never talked about feelings or about much at all.
I’d only known they loved each other through the loud, out-of-control sounds that had come through my bedroom wall every night after they went to bed.
Everything I’d learned about women, I’d learned from my dad.
And now here I was, forty-one years old, completely unable to tell a woman that I was falling for her and that I was terrified of wanting her this much.
That I was scared she’d see the real me and decide to run.
The real me who wanted to fuck her until she screamed my name. Who wanted to claim her, keep her, and never let her go.
The real me who was too much. Always too much.
Chapter 11
Cassidy
I stood in the kitchen, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.
Hecaredabout me. I’d seen it in the way he’d acted with his friend Amos. He’d stepped between us, blocking his friend’s view of me as if I were something precious worth protecting.
And I’d caught him looking at me like that too many times over the past few days. Like I was something he wanted but couldn’t let himself have.
Well, I was done letting him push me away.
I tugged down the neckline of my nightgown, pulling it low enough that the tops of my breasts swelled above the fabric. Then I pushed them up, creating a deep valley of cleavage that I knew would catch his eye.
My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking. But I marched out onto the deck anyway.
Hall stood at the railing with his back to me, his broad shoulders tense as he stared down into the valley. The morninglight caught the muscles of his bare back, all that golden skin stretched over raw power.
