“Right there,” I gasped. “Don’t stop. Wade, don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t stop. His hand slid between us and pressed his thumb against my clit and I clenched around him so hard his rhythm broke.
“Come for me,” he said, and the command in his voice, low and strained, sent me over.
I came around his cock in waves, each one pulling tighter than the last. My back arched off the stone and I grabbed his shoulders and held on while my whole body seized and shook around him. He groaned, buried himself to the hilt, his hips stuttering hard against mine. He came with my name rough in his throat, his face pressed into my neck, and I held him while he shook apart.
We lay on the warm limestone, tangled and spent. His weight settled on me, heavy and real, and I held him there. His heart hammered against my ribs. The water lapped at the rock below us and the sky above was turning peach and rose at the edges, the sun dropping behind the ridge. A dragonfly hovered above the dock railing, caught the last of the light on its wings, and darted off across the water.
I started laughing. Quietly at first, then louder. I was lying naked on a rock in a lake on a dude ranch in Texas with a country music star on top of me. My hair appeared to have been processed through a blender by a hostile river. This was, objectively and without qualification, the most ridiculous afternoon of my entire life.
Wade lifted his head. His hair was drying in twelve different directions. “What.”
“Nothing. I’m just — I’m naked on a rock.”
“You are.”
“In public.”
“Technically this is ranch property.”
“There could be kayakers.”
“There are no kayakers.”
“There could BE kayakers, Wade. Future kayakers. Potential kayakers. People who might, at any moment, round that bend and discover the ranch photographer splayed across a limestone shelf, sunburned and sacrificial.”
He propped himself on one elbow and looked down at me, still grinning. “If it helps, you look incredible.”
“I am a wet cat right now.”
“You look like my favorite thing I’ve ever seen, and I have seen a lot of things.”
The warmth that spread through my chest had nothing to do with the sun. I reached up and pushed his damp hair off his forehead. He turned his head and kissed my palm.
We slid back into the water to cool off and rinse the limestone grit off our backs. The lake was still now, the light thick and honeyed on the surface. We floated and let the water hold us.
“Friday show tonight,” he said.
My stomach dropped. The Saloon. The crowd. The mic stand and the guitar and sixty strangers watching. The old fear crouched in my chest and spread its cold fingers.
“I know,” I said.
“You sang for horses. You sang for me. You sang for sixty people on Wednesday and they loved it.”
“Wednesday I didn’t have time to be scared. I went from the — from the Saloon to the stage in three hours. There wasn’t room for the panic to set up.”
“There’s room now.”
“There is a lot of room now.”
He swam closer and stood in the shallows, water at his waist, the fading day on his shoulders. “Then don’t give it the space. Come to sound check at four. Sing with the band. By the time the doors open you’ll have been on that stage for two hours and it’ll feel like yours.”
I looked at him. Wet hair. Blue eyes. No hat. Wade Bishop, standing in a lake, asking me to be brave for the second time this week.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
