by Maisey Yates
“Careful, Kit,” he said, his voice low and scratchy, rough and deep.
She stopped before him and tipped her head back. Then did what she wanted to do, not what she thought she ought to do.
Without analyzing the oughts and the shoulds, she threw herself at him.
Browning caught her, easily. And then it was all wet skin and his hard, gorgeous body. His arms went around her and his hands gripped her as she wrapped herself around him.
Just the way she had on the bike, except this time, from the front.
And it was...better.
“I don’t want to be careful,” she told him.
Then she tilted her face up and tugged his head toward hers with one hand. She was kissing Browning West at last.
He did not hesitate.
There was nothing tentative, nothing pointy-wristed, about the way he kissed her. She was the one holding on to his head, but there was no doubt about it when he instantly took control.
Everything inside her hummed, loudly, then melted straight through.
His arms tightened around her and he pulled her closer, so that her breasts were pressed against his chest, and he kissed her.
Again and again.
Kit could feel how much he wanted her, that unmistakable length of steel against her belly.
But he didn’t hurry them along. He didn’t catapult them into something more.
He just kissed her.
Not lazily and not like he had an agenda.
But as if he was perfectly content to taste her like this forever.
She knew when that kiss shifted from a noun to a verb, because then it became a tasting. A deep, necessary tasting. As if they were trying out each other’s shape and need and longing, discovering the contours of all that heat.
And all the while the water moved around them, the sky arched above, and she was sure that they were flying together. Flying or swimming or both, over and over and over, until it was all part of the same thing.
It was so beautiful it hurt.
She pulled back right at the critical moment when she thought she might never pull back at all. Ever. He rested his forehead against hers while they both panted, out there in the middle of this marvelous nowhere that felt like theirs.
“You taste even better than you look,” he said, there against her mouth. “I would’ve sworn that was impossible.”
“You taste like magic,” she whispered back.
He shifted her in his arms so he could move one arm and slide her hair back from her face. Then, while she tried to keep her heart from exploding, he leaned closer and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
Then, while she frowned to make her heart ache less, he pressed another one between her brows.
Kit was laughing a little, though she couldn’t have said what was funny, when he kissed her on the tip of her nose too.
Browning West, known for his sexual exploits, who was huge and hard and pressed against her, was kissing her.
Sweetly.
That shaking inside of her was a wrecking ball, she was sure of it. There was nothing left of her but wishes in smithereens.
And the mad notion that she’d fallen off a cliff without realizing it.
Her feet weren’t even on the ground, and still she felt the world fall out from beneath her.
His hand moved, running over her slicked-back hair.
“Hey,” he said, quiet and low, even as his gaze seemed to burn with the same fire that raged in her. “This is supposed to be fun.”
“Fun. Right.”
Kit thought it might actually wound her, to the point of scarring, but she pushed herself off that impossibly perfect body of his and swam back a foot or two, still holding his gaze as if they were both free falling off the edge of that same cliff. As if they’d both lost something that they knew there was no unknowing.
She slapped her open palm on the surface of the lake and splashed him.
When he stood there, staring back at her in astonishment, she did it again.
“This is supposed to be fun, Browning,” she managed to say.
Then she had to dodge when he splashed back at her.
And she lost herself as best she could in the splashing back and forth until both of them were laughing again.
Laughing almost too much.
Because you know, now, something told her, feeling more like a prophecy than it should, and you can’t go back from that.
Kit shook that off and laughed.
Because that was better than crying over the ache inside her that grew and grew and that she knew, somehow, was never going to get any better.
CHAPTER SIX
LATER, BROWNING SAFELY delivered Kit back to the old Gable farmhouse outside of town.
It was tipping over into evening. The sun was less fierce, spilling gold all over the green hills and bright fields. He rolled up near a pretty dogwood tree and took the helmet Kit handed him once she climbed off.
He watched the way her hips moved in those ridiculous shoes as she walked toward the porch, her hatbox still dangling from one wrist.
He enjoyed the view a good long while.
Then he lifted his gaze to where all three of her friends were waiting, poker-faced, on the porch. He nodded at them with only slightly exaggerated courtesy.
“Ladies,” he drawled.
He grinned all the way home.
But, starting that day, anytime he finished a book, he took her to his lake.
Sometimes they swam. Sometimes they didn’t.
Browning was becoming addicted to the feel of her wet skin beneath his hands. He dreamed about kissing her like that, deep and wild and thrilling, because the last time he’d just made out with someone had been so long ago he couldn’t remember who it was or when. He dreamed about it, then he did it, and all that kissing was making him feel half-drunk.
But then, Kit made him feel a little blurry whether they were kissing or not.
It was taking him over.
Nights he would normally spend throwing back a beer or two with his brothers and friends, he found he would much rather spend with her. He finished the bookshelves in her shop, then took it upon himself to excavate the apartment that sat above the bookstore and had been, as far as he could tell, little more than a storeroom for the past decade. One night she’d gone off with her friends and he’d told her he was going to finish up, then go meet his.
“I guess you need a key then,” she said, with studied indifference.
“I guess I do,” he replied. With a grin.
And when she slid an extra key off her key ring and handed it to him, neither one of them had commented on the fact that she’d clearly anticipated the moment and gone to get a duplicate made. No need for commentary when Kit was blazing red, telling him everything he needed to know.
Browning never made it to the bar. He stayed in the shop all night, working on the plumbing in the apartment bathroom upstairs so it would work perfectly when Kit arrived the next morning. Because that was perfectly normal. That was what all volunteer handymen did.
“Missed you last night,” his brother Parker said the next morning while they were heading out into the upper pastures. “All the usual suspects were there, but you weren’t.”
Browning shrugged. “I’m very mysterious, Parker.”
“Since when?” Parker retorted, with a laugh. Browning aimed the pickup truck for the biggest pothole in the dirt road, just to jostle him for that. “There’s nothing mysterious about a man-whore.”
“I’ll thank you not to slut shame your older brother, Parker,” Browning said, and grinned the way he normally would have.
But that grin was starting to feel more like a prison sentence and less like his favorite expression of the carefree charm that seemed to be deserting him these days.
; He made sure to take the rest of the dirt road a little too fast, so Parker had to hold on and curse him, which was a whole lot better than him talking about Browning’s man-whore ways.
Man-whore ways that had deserted him since he’d met Kit Hall.
But before he could think a little too much on that particular topic, he stopped himself. Decisively.
Because no good could come of it. He knew that.
And still, there he was in the apartment above her bookstore day after day, fixing it up for God knows what purpose. Today he’d arrived to find her surrounded by boxes of books in the back office, looking so happy and edible it should have been illegal.
He’d grunted something even he found unintelligible and had removed himself. Before he couldn’t.
Now he heard her footsteps on the stairs and looked up from where he’d just finished painting one of the walls.
“Are you looking for a place to live?” Kit asked, leaning against the door that opened onto the small landing and the spiral stair that led down into the bookstore’s small, cozy office. “Is that why you’re renovating this apartment?”
“Aren’t you looking for a place to live?” Browning squatted back on his heels and peered at her. He told himself there was no reason he should feel it like a kick to the gut when she stared back at him like she didn’t understand what he was saying. “You’re opening a shop, Kit. In Jasper Creek. Or are you planning to run it from New York?”
“Of course not.” She blinked, then scowled. “We’re all staying in the farmhouse for the summer.”
“Funny thing about seasons,” Browning drawled, flashing that grin again, and again felt trapped by it. “They don’t last forever.”
Kit looked like she wanted to argue, but she didn’t. Today she was wearing pearls and a pretty black dress—one that was not seventeen sizes too big for her body. It had cute little sleeves, a rounded neckline, and skimmed over her gently rounded belly that he could almost always now feel pressed against him, even when it wasn’t. Not to mention the acres and acres of those legs of hers that he already knew felt great wrapped around his back.
Browning wanted to experiment with that position in a more horizontal fashion.
Not here, dumbass, he growled at himself. Not now.
She had told him loftily that she liked to take her time and had frowned at him, clearly expecting an argument. He figured he could probably change her mind, and easily, but he knew he didn’t want her commentary on his man-whoring ways, thank you.
He concentrated instead on the elbow-length gloves she was also wearing today. Another in a long line of strange things this woman did that he should have seen as evidence of the fact she was unhinged.
Instead he thought it was cute.
Disastrously cute.
“I guess I haven’t really thought much beyond the farmhouse,” she said after a moment. “Everything happened so fast.”
He’d finished painting the wall, so he busied himself with the mess of brushes and paint cans while she drifted further into the big room and looked around as if she was seeing it for the first time. The fireplace at one end, the big bay windows at the other, like the ones in the store below. There was a kitchen and a dining space, high ceilings, and hardwood everywhere. But what he was really focused on was that strange feeling inside him, standing there in an empty apartment with this woman because it felt a lot like they were sizing it up themselves.
A notion that would have had him running for the hills, historically.
But this was Kit.
You need to stop, he ordered himself.
He was having trouble with that. Browning was having trouble all around, as a matter of fact, and it had Kit’s name written all over it.
“It’s been almost a month and a half,” he pointed out. “Not exactly the speed of light.”
“It still seems too fast to me,” she said, laughing a little as she drifted over to the bay windows and looked down at the pretty street below. The sun was setting, or thinking about it, and all the brick buildings were lit up in preparation for a long summer night. “At the end of May I had an entire life I would’ve told you I was happy with. Delighted with. New York City, interesting books to edit; everything was in its place.”
“Can’t have been too much in its place if you came back anyway.”
She took her time turning to face him; this was happening more and more lately. That same feeling that had about taken him to his knees when he’d held her in the lake that first time, naked and connected. When they looked at each other, it was almost as if—
Stop, he ordered himself again.
“It was for Hope,” Kit said softly. She was wearing her usual compass necklace beneath the pearls and she toyed with it as she spoke. “We made a pact when we were kids that we would all come back here when we were thirty if our lives weren’t going according to plan. Then Hope’s wedding blew up and it was obvious we needed to uphold that pact. It felt good to be able to tell ourselves we were doing it for her. Concentrating on Hope made it easier to ignore the fact that we were all doing it for ourselves too. I know I never would have done it on my own. I’m not that brave.”
A month and a half ago, Browning would’ve shrugged that off. He liked his life. Always had. He had fun, he liked his work, he had no complaints.
But these days he wanted things. And he wanted them now.
He wanted that house out by the lake. He wanted something more than the usual suspects Parker had mentioned.
He wanted a woman who looked at him like he was the only thing in the world while he was looking at her the exact same way.
A lot like this, he thought now, facing Kit across an empty room that smelled like paint and turpentine and already seemed to be full up with the life she was going to live right here.
Because she had to live right here.
Because the only woman Browning could picture any longer was her.
“I guess it’s been easier not to think too far ahead,” she said.
He felt that like a slap. Like she was reading his mind when he knew that though Kit Hall was good at a great many things, telepathy wasn’t likely one of them.
“You might want to think about drawing up a business plan,” he offered dryly. “I hear they’re all the rage.”
“It’s a really nice apartment.” She looked around again, shaking her head slightly like she was dazed. “I didn’t even think about the fact that it was here and I could use it. I don’t know what I was thinking, to be honest. We can’t all live together in a rented farmhouse forever, can we?”
But she wasn’t looking at him when she asked that. It felt like she was deliberately not looking at him.
“Kit...” Browning said quietly.
Too quietly.
It was like this too often these days, as July waned toward August. Ripe and almost painful and he was sure that this would be the time—
But down below, the bell she’d put on the shop’s front door jingled. Kit jumped as if someone had slapped her.
“Oh,” she breathed, while her whole body turned red. His red, Browning liked to call it. She cleared her throat. “I thought I locked the door.”
He had a powerful urge to catch her by the waist as she brushed past him, but he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to seduce her. Not her. Not Kit.
He didn’t want to play a game.
Browning wanted her, fully and totally. He accepted that. But most of all, he wanted her to want him in the same incapacitating, life-altering way.
He wanted that so much it hurt.
He took his time following her downstairs, washing his hands, getting a grip, then getting a better grip when the first one failed. Only when he was in control of himself again did he head down that spiral staircase that was almost laughable for a man his size. He would be better off with a ladder, he som
etimes thought. Something he’d think about changing—
But he didn’t have any reason to change things in this building, he reminded himself harshly. He was lending a hand to his sister-in-law’s tenant. No more, no less.
If there was anything more than that, he needed to view it as a happy summer gift then let it go.
Why couldn’t he get that through his head?
He could hear Kit talking when he made it down into the office, though there was a strange note in her voice. He moved to the door, looking out to see Kit standing in the middle of the store.
His shelves looked fantastic, if he did say so himself, but they looked even better with all the books she’d put on them. She’d divided the shelves into different sections to honor the different romance subgenres, which she’d lectured him about extensively, and which he could now discuss fairly knowledgeably because of those adorable lectures.
But what he liked best about them was how cheerful they were—all those brightly colored covers giving the bricks and the hardwood floor a kind of glow.
Just like the books would give their readers the same glow.
That’s the entire point, Kit had said, grinning widely at him, when he’d said something like that to her.
And as he was on record as liking the way she glowed when she was in this building, doing her thing, he noticed real quick that tonight, she wasn’t.
He studied the man who stood there, taking Kit’s glow away, and it took him a moment to place him. Older. Bearded, in that particularly Pacific Northwest way. And with a long-suffering look on his face.
Then it clicked, and Browning liked it even less.
It was her father.
Lawrence Hall, editor of the local paper, the valley’s greatest intellect according to himself, and all-around snob, according to Browning’s mother.
It’s not a question of liking or not liking Lawrence, his mother had told him when Browning had oh-so-casually brought him up after a family dinner a week or so ago. She’d given him an amused, considering sort of look, but hadn’t pressed him to tell her why he was suddenly interested in the local paper’s infamous editor. It’s a nonissue with someone like Lawrence. He either deigns to acknowledge you or he doesn’t, but he makes the determination based on how smart he thinks you are. And he isn’t shy about telling you. Imagine how I feel about that.