I shifted the rest of the way around and pressed into him, my body moving against his. I wasn’t thinking anymore. I was past thinking. My hips found his thigh and I ground against him, and the sound that came out of my throat had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with a woman who needed to get out of her own body before it shook itself apart.
He read me.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how a man I’d known for three weeks could understand in the space of a breath what I needed, but he shifted underneath me, lying back. His hand moved to my hip, firm and steadying, and the other pressed against the small of my back.
He wasn’t leading. He was giving me something solid to move against, and he was letting me set every single term.
I buried my face in his neck, my hips rocked against his thigh, and the friction cut through everything else. The denim between us and the heat beneath it and the hard muscle of his leg pressed exactly where I needed it. My breath left me in a sound I didn’t recognize.
His hand on my hip tightened. He shifted his thigh higher, angled it, and the pressure changed. I heard myself gasp against his skin.
He knew. He knew exactly what I was doing, and he was making it easier, tilting his body to give me more of what I was chasing without once trying to take it somewhere else.
I ground against him harder. My hands fisted in his shirt, and my hips found a rhythm that had nothing to do with grace and everything to do with the tight, building ache between my legs that was the only thing louder than the panic. I pressed my mouth against his neck and tasted salt and rain, and I could feel it climbing, the tension winding tighter with every roll of my hips, every point of contact where his body met mine.
He didn’t rush me. When I moved faster, he was there. When I gripped his shirt so hard I heard a seam pop, he let me. He slid his hand from my hip to the curve of my ass and pressed me closer, and I stopped breathing entirely.
The release caught me off guard, breaking through me. My whole body went rigid, every muscle locked, and the sound that tore out of me came from somewhere below my chest and cracked open on the way out.
Then I went loose against him all at once, boneless, shaking for an entirely different reason, my forehead pressed hard against his collarbone and my breath coming in wet, ragged pulls against his skin.
The fire popped and settled behind us. The rain outside the overhang had gone from pounding to a murmur. His handmoved to my hair, slow, and I felt the weight of it against the back of my skull. Neither of us spoke.
My heartbeat was everywhere. In my throat, my fingertips, the places where my body was still pressed against his. His heartbeat lived under my ear, faster than I’d expected from a man who seemed incapable of being rattled, and that detail lodged somewhere in my chest and stayed.
He pushed wet hair off my forehead. His thumb traced my jaw once, careful, and then his hand settled warm and still at the back of my neck.
He didn’t ask if I was okay. If he had, I would have had to answer, and I didn’t have a single lie left in me.
The awareness crept in. What I’d done. I’d kissed him. I’d ground myself against his leg in a cave and come apart against his body and made a sound that I was going to hear in my own head every time I looked at him for the rest of my natural life.
I’d let this man see me completely unraveled in the space of one afternoon.
I pulled back. Put a few inches of cold air between us. My body missed the warmth immediately, which was a piece of information I planned to deal with later. Or never.
“Well,” I said. “That was probably not in the ranch hand job description.”
His eyes held mine. “I’d have to check the fine print.”
“There is no fine print. There’s barely a job description. I wrote it on a flyer in my kitchen at four in the morning with a marker that was almost out of ink.”
“Sounds about right.”
I almost laughed. What came out was closer to a breath, the shape of a laugh without the sound. The deflection was tissue-thin. We both knew I was building scaffolding over an open wound, and we both knew he was letting me do it.
Chapter 11
Lark
The cold found me fast once I’d put space between us. My wet clothes pressed against my skin, and the fire had burned down to embers that barely held the dark back. I wrapped my arms around myself and turned toward the open side of the overhang.
The rain had eased. I looked past his shoulder and saw the valley below us, the brown water lower than it had been, pulling back from the ground and leaving mud and broken branches behind.
“Water’s dropping,” I said. “It’s probably safe to go down.”
Logan stood first and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up, and for a second, we were standing close enough that I could feel heat radiating off him through his wet shirt. My fingers stayed in his a beat longer than the mechanics of standing required.
What the hell was I doing? As if this weren’t already awkward enough.
