Page 91 of Wild Sanctuary

My heart feels like it’s about to beat clean out of my chest as his other hand releases my wrist and reaches up to palm my cheek. “Christ help me, you’re all I see.”

And then his mouth is on mine.

The kiss isn’t gentle. It isn’t careful. It isn’t polite. His teeth catch my bottom lip and I gasp and he swallows the sound, pulling me closer. One hand fists in my hair as the other arm bands around my waist so tight my feet leave the porch. I grab his shirt with both hands because it’s that or fall, and I kiss him back with everything I’ve been carrying since I was twenty years old and stupid enough to wear a red dress to a Christmas party and think he might notice.

Holy shit, he noticed!

He kisses me like he’s starving. My back hits the cabin door and his hips pin me there. His heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through his chest.

He pulls back just far enough to breathe, our breaths tangling as his forehead drops against mine. His hand is still in my hair, his arm is still around my waist and he’s shaking. Wyatt Hartley, who has never once lost his composure in front of another living soul, is shaking against me.

“I wasn’t with Shelby.” His voice is rough, barely held together. “Never was.”

“Okay,” I breathe.

He lifts his head, and his eyes find mine in the porch light. I inhale sharply as the intensity in those green eyes makes my chest ache.

“And I have been tryin’ not to do that since you were twenty goddamn years old.”

I close my eyes and lean into him.

“So yeah, Daisy-girl.” He says it differently now. Soft and warm and nothing like a wall. “It meant somethin’.”

His thumb traces my jaw and I open my eyes. All the air leaves my lungs when I see he’s looking at me the way he looked at me in the orchard. The way I thought I’d imagined.

“It meant everything.”

22

WYATT

She’s looking up at me like I just rearranged the stars. And maybe I did. Maybe I rearranged my own while I was at it, because I have no idea how to get them back where they were, and the terrifying part is I don’t want to.

It meant everything.

I said that. Out loud. To Tom Monroe’s daughter, who is pressed against a cabin door with her hands fisted in my shirt, her mouth still swollen from mine and those brown eyes blown wide in the porch light.

Six years of carefully constructed walls, and she tore them down in a single speech on the guest cabin porch.

I should step back. Put some air between us. Start the long, painful process of pretending this didn’t just happen.

Instead, I kiss her again.

This one is slower. Not because I’ve got control of myself but because I want to know what she tastes like when I’m paying attention. And the answer is warm and sweet and so goddamn addictive that I go back for more before I’ve even finished the first taste.

I could live on this, on her. I could skip meals, sleep, and every other thing my body needs, and just do this.

My hand is still in her hair and the other is spread wide across her lower back, and I tilt her head and take my time with her mouth the way I couldn’t thirty seconds ago when I was drowning in six years of sheer desperation. I lick into her mouth slow and deep and she opens for me like she’s been waiting for me to do exactly that, and my chest cracks clean in half.

She whimpers softly against my mouth, and, Christ, my whole goddamn body locks up.

“Wyatt.” My name falls from her lips, breathed against mine, and I feel it everywhere.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you dare stop.”

I tear my mouth from hers long enough to look at her. Her eyes are half-closed, lips swollen, and the sight of her nearly buckles my knees.