by Maisey Yates
It didn’t take long for her to wrap her arms around his neck, for her to push her fingers through his hair and kiss him back. Hard and deep and with all the anger he knew she felt. The anger and the desire.
“You’re a fool,” she hissed when they parted. “How could you think that I wanted him? Did you think this was just a game? That it was advanced-level Make Bennett Jealous stuff?”
“You’ve been convinced that you loved him for a long time,” Luke said. “And convinced that you didn’t like me very much for even longer.”
Her expression softened then, those dark eyes going liquid and touching something inside him that he wished wasn’t touched at all. “I do like you, you idiot.”
“Is that a term of affection now?”
“It is when the man that you...” She cleared her throat. “The man that you’re sleeping with is being an idiot.” She softened her words, then pressed her fingers against his lips and traced the outline of them. “I didn’t know what it meant to want somebody until you. That matters. You matter.”
“That’s it,” he said. “We have to go now.”
“We do?”
He picked her up, and she squeaked again. He unlocked the bathroom door and held her against his chest while they stood there in front of it. “Unless you want to do it in here.”
“Not especially.”
He cracked open the bathroom door and she held on to him more tightly. “Luke,” she whispered. “Everyone will know.”
He looked at her, and out at the room full of people. People who knew them. Knew him and that he was from nowhere, knew her and that she was town royalty. And he was fine with that. “Good.”
And then he took them out of the bathroom, and carried her across the saloon. People were craning their necks watching them, and a few men stood up from their chairs like they were thinking of rescuing her. But he didn’t stop. He took her straight out the front door.
“My parents are going to get phone calls,” she said, throwing her arm over her eyes.
“Good,” he said again.
She uncovered her face. Their eyes clashed. Then held. And it was like something broke between them. She kissed him then, on the street, where anyone could see them. Where everyone in the bar most certainly saw them, as they were definitely looking.
Then he carried her to his truck and deposited her in the passenger seat. “We’ll get your car tomorrow.”
She didn’t even argue. He started the engine and began to drive out toward her place. “Why are you at the bar in the first place?”
She ducked her head. “I was upset with you. I was trying not to be. I figured that you needed space.”
“I was giving you space,” he said.
She waved a hand. “Sure. But that was crap. You knew I didn’t need space. You needed space.”
Her words, her confidence, hit him like a slap. “I never need space.”
“You need all the space, all the time,” she said, scoffing. “And you know it.”
“What exactly does that mean, Liv?”
“Your entire life is you building space between yourself and others. With that ridiculous, smart-ass smile of yours. That one that makes my stomach flip over. Because it makes me want to jump on you and slap you in the face all at the same time.”
“You could try slapping me in the face while you jump on me,” he said, keeping his tone light. “It might be fun. I might like it. Maybe I’m kinky.”
“That. That kind of thing,” she said. “You were so upset just a few minutes ago, and now you’re joking.”
“What do you want from me? You want me to keep raging? Do you want me to tell you how I about put my fist through your ex-boyfriend’s face just for talking to you? You make me feel like a caveman? Like someone I don’t even know?”
“Yes,” she responded. “I would like you to tell me that. Tell me that you almost put your fist through his face. Because let me tell you, Luke, no man has ever wanted me like that before.”
“Olivia...” He shook his head. “You make me crazy, do you know that?”
“Good.”
“Not good,” he said. “It’s very unenlightened.”
“I didn’t ask you for enlightenment. I’m sick of obligations and doing the right thing, Luke. I don’t want to be a thing you’re protecting. I would rather have feelings.”
He huffed out a laugh. “You’ve got ’em, babe.”
They drove on in silence, and Luke sighed heavily, feeling the tension in the cab of the truck like a band across his chest.
“Olivia...”
“We don’t have to talk,” she said, reaching across and brushing her fingertips against his thigh. He liked that. There was something almost routine about this. Her riding in his truck. Touching his leg. Like there was real intimacy between them. Like maybe she owned part of him, and he owned her, too.
He didn’t understand this thing inside of him, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He just wanted to be in it. That was how he liked to do things. To jump right in with both feet, to just revel in it. It was better than thinking ahead. When things would inevitably fall apart. To when they would end. He didn’t want to think about those things, so he didn’t.
He looked out at the highway and focused on the way the road cut a winding path through the thick trees, focused on the way her fingertips felt against his thigh. If the world was only this, it wouldn’t be so bad.
When they arrived at the house, they got out of the truck and he took her hand, and they walked into her house together.
“Aren’t you worried that your mom is going to see?” he asked.
“I’m much more worried my mom is going to come over, having heard that some Neanderthal carried her daughter out of the Gold Valley Saloon. Possibly after shagging her senseless in the bathroom.”
“Darlin’, I haven’t begun to shag you senseless.”
“I hope you begin soon,” she said, treating him to a smile that was vixenish, but still every inch Olivia. She was such a funny creature, his girl. It was the thing about her that had captivated him from the beginning.
That she was so utterly unique. Not like anyone or anything else. There was no peer pressuring Olivia Logan. She was who she was. She did absolutely everything the way that she wanted it done. Except for him. He seemed to be the one thing that ruffled her. That disrupted her calm. And damned if he didn’t like that. He liked it a hell of a lot.
He took a moment to look around Olivia’s house, which he hadn’t done yet. It was very her. White and pristine, neatly in order. As if the various knickknacks on the shelves would never dare to collect dust, not as long as Olivia Logan was present.
There was a little cupboard with plates on display, plates that looked like they had never been used, which was exactly the kind of thing he expected to see in a little cottage like this. There were doilies and frilly things laid across every surface, blankets on each couch and chair.
Imagining her curled up beneath those made him smile. Maybe on a rainy day, with her legs curled up to her chest, with a cup of coffee. He wanted to see her like that, but somehow wanted also to not be there, so he wouldn’t interrupt the moment. The moment that wasn’t even real. He’d lost his mind, and he wasn’t sure he cared.
He walked through the living area and into her little kitchen, compelled to see more of the place. More of Olivia.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking around,” he responded. Then he looked at the counter and saw a metal tin with a plastic lid over the top. He took a step closer. “Cinnamon rolls.”
“I had a craving,” she said, sounding defensive.
There were two cinnamon rolls gone, and he assumed that she had eaten them. In the middle of the day.
“Cinnamon rolls without me,” he said, making his tone faintly disapproving. “That’s
no good, honey.”
“You corrupted me,” she admonished.
“I wish I could say I was sorry,” he said.
“No you don’t,” she said.
“No I don’t,” he returned cheerfully.
He didn’t wait for her to come to him. Instead, he closed the distance between them, kissed her, pressed her back against the edge of her counter and braced his hands on the surface of it, taking the kiss deep, hard. He needed her. It was more than want. It was more than anything he had ever experienced in his whole life. In his mind, he replayed every moment that he had seen Olivia with Bennett over the course of the past year.
What shocked him the most was that so many images of the two of them were burned into his brain. That he remembered them so clearly. And what stood out the most was his own position in those memories. Him standing there watching them, hands curled into fists. Because he had cared. He had cared even then. Had wanted to wrench her out of Bennett’s arms and take her in his. What had happened today was just him letting that come forward.
She was everything. Absolutely everything.
His life had revolved around places for years. When he’d come to Gold Valley and made it his home it had been about the place. About Get Out of Dodge. About land and livestock. About work.
The first sixteen years of his life had been different. It had revolved around a person.
But apparently, it revolved around one again. Olivia.
How had this happened? How long had it been her?
The answer was suddenly clear.
Always.
From the moment he had first seen her as a woman. Always.
He kissed her with that word on repeat in the back of his mind. Joining the one that had echoed there from the first moment her lips had touched his. Finally. Finally Olivia. Always Olivia.
She looped her arms around his neck, held on to him tightly and kissed him back. It was sweet, like always. But there was more bite to the kiss this time. More intensity. He was already changing her. Teaching her. Corrupting her, as she’d said. And he knew he should feel some regret over that.
Well, he did. Some. Not a lot. It was hard to regret anything when he was kissing her like this.
“Please tell me,” he rasped, kissing her neck, down to her collarbone, “that you have a frilly little princess bed that I get to demolish.”
She laughed. “Yes. I absolutely do.”
“Thank God,” he said, hauling her up against him and lifting her feet up off the ground.
“You have a bad habit of picking me up.”
“You have a bad habit of being very pickupable.”
“You can’t have a habit of that,” she pointed out as he scooped her into his arms. “And you don’t know where my bedroom is.”
“I think I can find it.”
He looked out of the kitchen, and down the narrow hall. “Let me guess—it’s at the end.”
“I’m not sure that I like what that says about you,” she said as he carried her toward her room. “That you’re able to guess the location of women’s bedrooms in charming cottages so unerringly.”
“It says that I’m a very, very bad man,” he responded. “But you already knew that. Because you know me.”
“I do,” she said, placing her hand on the side of his face and kissing him as he continued to walk down the hall. She didn’t quite get his lips; she moved to his neck, his cheek and on down.
“Olivia,” he groaned as she scraped her teeth down his tendon.
“What?” she asked, blinking wide eyes at him.
“You are not that innocent. A fact I can attest to. You know exactly what you’re doing to me.”
“I suppose I do,” she said. “But do you know what you’re doing to me?”
“I hope it’s the same thing.”
He opened the door to her room, and indeed, she had a frilly little princess bed. Replete with layers of white bedding, like a snowdrift made from lace.
He set her down at the center, ran his fingers through her hair. “You have to take your clothes off,” he said, “because I have to see this.”
They had made love once in his cabin, and then again on the floor of a barn. And not any one of those times had he felt that she had something that suited her. That was worthy of her. This was it. This soft, pure setting. For the softest, most elegant woman he had ever known.
He wanted to see her naked against this bed. Wanted to see her as she was, beautiful and too good for the likes of him. But his all the same.
She quickly stripped her top off, followed by her jeans, leaving her in a pair of pale pink underwear that he thought made a nice contrast to the white bedding.
But not nice enough for him to want to keep them on her. He leaned forward, hooking his fingers in the sides of her panties and pulling them down her thighs, then he reached behind her and unhooked her bra, pulling it off quickly with one hand and discarding it on the floor. He looked his fill, her pale skin against the white bed, her nipples tight and pink, perfect. Edible. He let his eyes wander down to that dark touch of curls between her legs, that he knew was so delicious, and already wet for him.
And he felt... It wasn’t like anything he had ever known before; it was an excitement. It wasn’t entitlement or the kind of masculine satisfaction he expected to feel when he looked at a naked woman.
It was humility. Awe. It was something bigger than both of those things combined.
He had never felt anything like he did right now. Like he was cracking open. Like he would die if he didn’t have her, and die if he did.
“Hey,” she said, “my turn.”
“I’m looking,” he growled. “Give me a minute.”
“How long does it take for you to look?”
“There will never be enough time,” he said, the words slipping out before he could stop them.
There wouldn’t be. There would never be enough hours in the day, in a year, in a lifetime for him to look at Olivia Logan.
“Luke?” Her expression became vulnerable, her gaze questioning. And that did something to him. Reached inside his chest and twisted hard. He didn’t want her to ever worry again. Not about anything. He never wanted her to be hurt. He never wanted her to be unsure. He wanted to hold up the sky for her if it threatened to fall. And he didn’t know what in the hell to do with those feelings. He already knew that if the sky needed holding up he wouldn’t be able to do it. That it would all crumble and break around them, the world falling to pieces. He wasn’t a savior. He never had been.
She made him want to be.
But wanting wasn’t enough. He knew that. He knew that better than he knew anything else in the whole world.
He stripped his shirt off, watching as she looked at him, taking satisfaction in her open appraisal. There was something incredible about the fact that he was the only man she had seen naked.
But right about then he had the feeling she might be the only woman who had ever seen him. At least in any way that mattered.
She knew him. Knew where he had been weak when he should have been strong. Knew about his darker moments, knew about his pain.
She knew him. Every scar, in a way that no one else ever had.
And he didn’t feel any more like he knew what he was doing than she did. Didn’t feel any more experienced. He wanted to give her something more than sex, and sex was all he knew. Intimacy was something else, and he didn’t know it.
This was all new to him. This feeling. This feeling that told him he wasn’t enough, while desperately making him desire to be more.
It was easier to smile. It was easier to make a joke.
It was easier to let the object of your desire walk off with another man because it would be better for her if he would let her.
He unfastened his jeans, pushed them down his hips, stood naked before
her, enjoying the avid way that she visually explored him from her perch. Then he reached down and grabbed his wallet out of his jeans, taking care of protection before joining her on the bed. He held her. Pressing her bare chest to his, her stomach to his. Hips locked together, legs woven within each other. He sifted her hair through his fingers, kissed her on the mouth. And he could have done it all night, with no thought to his own satisfaction. Because just tasting her, the slow, languid movements of their mouths, was more, was deeper, than the best sex he’d ever had before this.
She began to thrust her hips gently against his, urging him to give her more, the silent demand something that he couldn’t refuse. Not her. Not Olivia. Right then, he didn’t want to refuse her anything.
He couldn’t deny himself. The immediacy of his need to be inside of her shocked him, but it was almost that same feeling he’d had when he had walked into the saloon and seen her standing there with Bennett. It was beyond logic. It was beyond familiar. It was something new and elemental that lived in a place inside of him he hadn’t known existed. Something reserved just for her. A space that he hadn’t realized was there. Waiting. All this time.
This wasn’t desire. It was need. Pure and simple.
The need to be inside of her. To possess her. The need for her to belong to him. Olivia. His Olivia.
He shifted, parted her thighs and slipped between them, pressing into her slowly, gritting his teeth as he did, trying to keep hold of his control. Of his sanity.
There was precious little of it left. He had lost most of it when he had walked into that bar tonight. Or maybe, he had lost it before then. Maybe she had laid claim to it years ago; he was coming to collect now.
But then, he didn’t have the ability to worry about it anymore. Because he had nothing left in him but need. But feeling. He wanted more. Needed more. Deeper. Harder. All of him and all of her. And maybe if it were possible, her inside of him a little bit. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t know what would be. That terrified him. That feeling that he would always want her. That there would be no end to it. That this was what he was, for the rest of his life. This mountain of need and unsatisfied longing.