Page 15

Her eyes drop to my mouth. Mine drop to hers.

"Carson," she says.

"Yeah?"

She reaches for the front of my shirt and pulls me the last few inches.

Her mouth hits mine softly at first, then harder when I kiss her back. I slide a hand into her hair and find sand tangled through it. She makes a quiet sound against my mouth and grips my shirt.

I step closer. She backs into the arm of the sofa and takes me with her, her breath turning uneven against my mouth.

Then she stops and looks up at me, and her eyes are steady. Whatever she's deciding, she decided it before she got in the car.

"This sofa is too small," I tell her.

"What?"

"Can I take you to my room?"

"By all means."

I get an arm under her knees and one across her back and pick her up, and she makes a sound that's half startle and half laugh and gets her arms around my neck. I carry her down the short hall. The tree throws its light after us and lays a stripe of it across the bedroom floor and up the side of the bed I slept in until I was eighteen.

I set her down on the quilt. She goes at my buttons and gets three of them undone before she quits and hauls the whole shirt over my head, and then she stops with both hands flat on my chest.

"Okay. You're two different colors."

"I work outside."

"No, I know what it is." She runs her thumb along the line on my arm where the brown quits and the white starts. "I've just never seen it in person."

Then she puts her mouth on it.

I get her sweatshirt and her shirt off together, and there's sand across her collarbone and down between her breasts. It's fine and pale against her dewy skin. I brush at it with my thumb.

She's small. I knew that from across a room, but it's a different piece of information with her under my hands. Her waist fits easily between them, but there is nothing narrow about her hips. My palms fill with the curve of them when I get her shorts open.

My hands are wrong for this. Split at two knuckles, hard through the palms from a winter of wire and haystring, and she doesn't flinch away from them once. She turns into them.

She talks the entire time she's working me out of my jeans, telling me this bed is a crime against a man my size. Tells me she's been thinking about my hands since the punch bowl and asks me a question that she answers herself before I've got my mouth open.

Then I get my hand between her legs, and she stops talking.

Her breath goes ragged over my shoulder, and her fingers shut hard around my wrist. She's soaked, and she rolls up into my hand and says my name once on an exhale. I would stand in a feedlot in February for the rest of my life to hear that again.

My wallet's in my jeans on the floor. There's one condom in it from God knows when. It's always there for an emergency situation. This calls for it.

She watches me get it on with her bottom lip caught in her teeth, and then she reaches down and puts me where she wants me herself. The sound she makes when I push in goes all the way through me.

She's hot and tight, and she moves with me, hips coming up to take every stroke, one hand fisted in the sheet and the other flat on my back with her nails set into it.

My feet hang off the end of the bed, but Mackie has one leg wrapped around mine, and I couldn't move farther away from her if I wanted to. She's got a good grip on me, and the possessiveness drills into me as hard as her tight center.

"Right there."

I keep the same pace.

"Carson."