by Maisey Yates
He’d always wanted her, no matter what he’d told himself. And the first moment he’d seen her, she’d been with another man. And if it had been any man other than Clint he’d have said to hell with it and seduced her right into his bed.
But it had been Clint, so he hadn’t.
So he’d pushed it down. He’d crushed it.
And for the past near five years he’d crushed his whole damn libido. For Clint, he’d done that. He’d do it a thousand times over.
But not for someone else.
And now it would be someone else. She’d been desperate enough to throw her proposition out to him, so there would damn well be someone.
Being a security blanket, safety. Easy. That was all unacceptable.
Her being with another man was unlivable.
He’d walked away last night.
He wouldn’t walk away now.
He took a step forward, and he wrapped his arm around her waist, his blood roaring hot through his veins, his heart thundering hard. And he couldn’t believe that he was doing it. That he was holding her in his arms.
This was no lapse of control on his part. His control was made of iron. And he had proved it more times than she would ever know. So many times that the moments faded into memory, had become nothing more than a dull pain, a downpour beating against the tin roof. Dull, continuous. And he had learned to let it wash away into the background.
Not now.
Now it was sharp. Hard.
It wouldn’t be denied and neither would he.
It wasn’t for her. Not anymore. All that mental dancing he’d done a moment before was a lie. This was for him.
Because he’d damn well earned it.
He was going to kiss Ellie Bell.
And he wouldn’t be rushed.
Her eyes were wide, her lips parted slightly, and she was looking at him like he was a stranger. But maybe that was for the best.
For his part, he couldn’t pretend that she was. Not now. Not now that he held her in his arms like he had wanted to for so long.
She was soft. Even now with his hand resting on the small of her back, he could tell that. He raised his hand and cupped her face; the lightning conducted between that space where his palm met her cheek, and immobilized him for a moment.
Then he let his thumb drift over her skin there, looked at the faint freckles that scattered across her nose. And he let his eyes drop to her lips. Pale pink and full, turning down slightly at the ends like a little pout, and he’d always found it unbearably sexy. He had the shape of her mouth memorized, and he’d never touched it. Never pressed his lips to it, no matter how much he wanted to.
The need to do it now was like a prowling, insistent beast. Clawing at its cage. Demanding to be let out.
So he did.
He leaned in, closed the distance between them.
And his world became fire. Nothing could have prepared him for this. Not a decade of anticipation, not charts and graphs, nothing.
Because this went beyond a kiss, deeper than how she tasted, more than how soft her skin was against his, more than the sigh that she made when he parted those lips with his own and slid his tongue against hers.
His knees nearly buckled. It was more than the blood roaring through his veins like a lion, more than the instantaneous hardening of his body. It was something beneath his skin, something in his bones. In his veins.
In him.
In the way that he breathed. The way that he was knit together. From the beginning of time, maybe. As if he had been created for the purpose of kissing Ellie.
And she kissed him back.
She raised a trembling hand and pressed her fingertips to his chest, the move causing a feral growl to rise up inside him. It was intimate, that touch. As much as her lips against his.
She let her fingertips drift down slowly, and he lowered his hand from her face, grabbed her wrist and propelled her back, pinning her hand to the doorway of the barn. Because God knew if she pushed it too hard he was going to lose control. Absolutely. Completely.
He pressed himself to her, his chest against hers, and he could feel those high, firm breasts against him, and it was nearly his undoing. Holding her hand steady was hardly going to keep him from losing it. Not now.
This was how it would be between them. This.
Heat and fire.
It wouldn’t be soft. It wouldn’t be easy, and he did his best to communicate that with every pass of his tongue over hers. This wasn’t safe. It wouldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Because it was years of denied need—years—poured into one moment, and it could never be something as benign as safe.
When he pulled away, they were both breathing hard. Ellie looked stunned, like she had been electrocuted by a live wire.
“There’s number three on your list for you,” he said, his voice like gravel. “And let me tell you, if you want to move on to those other items you wrote down, we need to get a few things straight. You’re not in charge. I am. I can’t guarantee you it’s going to be nice. I can’t guarantee you it’s going to be easy. You don’t get to say when, you don’t get to say how. You want something more than a sex toy, that’s what you’re going to get.”
She said nothing. She only stared at him with shocked blue eyes. Eyes that had never looked at him like this before.
Like she was scared of him. Betrayed by him.
Like she wanted him.
“You know how sex toys work, Ellie? You control them. They don’t have a say. You hold them in your hand, and you use them how you want. That’s not me. You want a man, that’s damn well what you’re gonna get. On my terms. My way.” He pressed his thumb to the indent in her chin, just beneath her lip, and tilted her face up so she was looking at him. “Do you think you can handle that, baby?”
He didn’t know what he expected. But he did not expect her lip to tremble. And he did not expect her to turn and run away.
But that was exactly what she did. And she left him standing there with a raging hard-on and a gut full of regret.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ELLIE FELT LIKE a kid on a sugar high for the rest of the day and into the next. A constant, sustained kick of energy that left her light-headed and with shaking hands.
Over a kiss.
One that she’d asked for.
But it was her first kiss in four years. And her first first kiss in more than ten.
Her first kiss with Caleb.
Without thinking, she put her hands up and touched her mouth, and was then thankful that her classroom was empty, and that school was done for the day, because if she was going to sit there pressing her fingers to her lips like a giddy schoolgirl, she didn’t need an audience of schoolboys.
She had successfully managed to avoid Caleb for the rest of yesterday and today. Although, given the fact that she was largely stationary in her classroom throughout the day, it was probably Caleb who was avoiding her.
But then, she had run away from him.
He had kissed her, and she had run away. But she hadn’t... She hadn’t known it would be like that.
She hadn’t known he would be like that.
The way that he had advanced on her, the way that he had kissed her.
She had been expecting something sweet when their mouths came together, in the very limited amount of time that she had allowed herself to imagine it, but this had not been sweet.
She swore she could still feel the burn from his whiskers on her cheeks, and if she thought about that too hard she could definitely still feel a pulse throbbing between her legs.
That was what had scared her the most.
In those crazy, heady moments when she had allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to sleep with Caleb, her imagination had gone soft and fuzzy.
She’d imagined feeling close. Warm. Had imagined b
eing held in those strong arms of his in a different way.
She loved those arms. She loved the feeling of being pressed up against his chest, and she had loved it in both good and bad times.
But it had never been sexual, and she had been fascinated by the idea of that sense of warmth and caring, of safety, being translated to something sexual.
But this hadn’t been a translation of that hug. It had been like an entirely new language.
The most disturbing thing was, it hadn’t been like any contact she’d known from Caleb before, and it also didn’t feel much like any kiss she’d ever had before.
There had been a wildness in it, an intensity, and she had felt something begin to stir inside her that she’d never really felt before.
And that was why she’d run.
The creature of her own creation had turned into a monster that she didn’t think she could control.
And hadn’t Caleb said as much? That if she did this, if they did this, it wasn’t going to be all about her. And she wasn’t going to be able to control what he did when he did it.
That, she didn’t like very much.
She looked at the clock inside. She needed to go get Amelia from Tammy. Maybe Caleb had gone home. Although, she didn’t imagine he had. It was early still, and the two of them usually lingered around the ranch until sometime after four.
Which meant that she could still run into him, and she didn’t know what to do or say.
She had made an idiot out of herself. Making demands of him, and then... Well, and then when he gave her what she asked for she’d run away like a baby.
He did not give you what you asked for. You asked for nice.
She imagined the way it had felt again, his lips sliding over hers, his tongue...
Pleasure cut through her midsection like a knife. No, it wasn’t nice. Nothing about it was nice.
It was too sharp and too bright for that. It hurt. She pressed her hand to her stomach and gathered her things, shrugging her coat on as she walked outside, then putting her purse over her shoulder. She shoved her hands in her pockets and began to walk across the property, toward Hank and Tammy Dalton’s house. The grounds were beautiful, well manicured and restrained.
The house itself was...like a museum of Western kitsch dipped in gold.
Hank and Tammy were proud of their redneck roots, and proud to call themselves gold-plated white trash. They didn’t even try to pretend they were sophisticated, old money or restrained in any way, and that was something that Ellie really liked about them.
When she had been growing up, that sense of feeling different, of being the poor girl with no father, one winter coat—three years old and too short in the sleeves—and a pair of boots with a hole in them, had made her an oddity. An outsider.
And she had learned to be ashamed of that feeling.
Hank and Tammy seemed to own that. To take what was different about them and make it bigger, make it brighter.
Of course, they had money, so they might have kept that sense of being low-class, but they didn’t have any of the precariousness that came with being poor anymore.
She and Clint had always been okay. They both worked and during their marriage hadn’t had any children. They’d been in a stable position by the time she’d gotten pregnant. Everything so much more planned than life had been when she was a child.
She had been able to stay home with Amelia for the first four years of her life. While she got on her feet, while she found her strength again.
Because the last gift that Clint had given her was a life insurance policy he had been responsible enough to go out and get, and then there had been the settlement with the helicopter company.
It was a terrible thing to think of, the money.
Because money was terribly cold comfort when you lost the man you loved.
But Clint had known how much she’d wanted their children to have stability. How important it had been to her that there would be no uncertainty about where the next meal was coming from or where they would live if they got evicted.
The security that she had all around her—the house, the clothes that Amelia had, the winter coat that she had just put on to keep warm that did its job so well—was him keeping his promises to her even though he wasn’t here.
She blinked, her eyes feeling scratchy. It felt weird to be thinking about him so much. But then, he was never far from her thoughts. He was such a huge part of the foundation of the life she lived even now. Even though he wasn’t here, he was a cornerstone, and he always would be.
He was Amelia’s father, and nothing would change that.
She frowned, standing there on the front porch of the house, waiting to knock.
Was she going over all of this because of the kiss with Caleb?
She thought she had sorted through all of this before she had even gotten to a place where she wanted to go out and be with another man. But maybe because it was Caleb it made it...
She’d always been with Clint while she’d known Caleb, until Clint had died.
But he was gone. He wasn’t her husband anymore. She didn’t have a husband.
He mattered. So much. She would always see him when she looked at Amelia, sparkling through her eyes. He would always be the man who had taught her how to smile. To have a little bit of fun. Not treat everything like it was so grave.
But he couldn’t be her husband.
He couldn’t hold her at night. He couldn’t kiss her.
She really needed to be kissed.
Right now kissing only made her think of Caleb. And that brought her right back full circle to where she didn’t know what to do, and she was still standing on the front porch like an idiot.
The door opened, and of course, it was the devil himself.
“Have you been standing out there for like five minutes?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling awkward. She looked over his shoulder and didn’t see anyone else. “Should we talk? Or...”
“I don’t have anything to say,” he said. “Leastways not more than I already did.”
“But I...”
His jaw turned to granite. “Ellie,” he said slowly. “I’m not having this discussion with you. Because it won’t be a discussion. Don’t play with me. You have two choices. You go back and forget that ever happened, or you put your hands on me. But once you do, that’s it. So you better choose. I’m not going to do it for you.”
She felt the air go out of her in a gust, like sails on a ship losing their wind. It left her flat. Listless. And vulnerable.
Because she realized that she had, in fact, wanted him to make that choice for her. Part of her had been avoiding him because she had been certain that he would. That he would rail at her and tell her she was an awful friend and that anything happening between them was off the table forever.
Or that he would grab her and pull her into his arms and say this was his show now and she had started on the path that it was too late to go back.
“I...”
“It’s your list, Ellie. Not mine.”
She nodded and pushed past him, careful not to make any contact with him, and made her way into the kitchen, where Tammy and Amelia were washing their hands, having just finished mixing what looked like biscuit dough.
Tammy smiled. “Just getting ready for dinner,” she said. “Do you want to wait around and take some biscuits home, Ellie?”
Tammy reminded her a bit of Dolly Parton mixed together with Miranda Lambert. A little glitter, a little gunpowder and a whole lot of fight. Ellie had liked her instantly.
And she knew that right now Tammy was between a rock and a hard place in her marriage and family. The fact that she had concealed the existence of three of Hank’s children, paid off the women who had come seeking out money and kept all of it from Hank had opinions divided in the family.
But in a way Ellie could understand.
She could understand defending your turf. Could understand protecting what was yours.
She felt a kinship to Tammy in that way.
She knew what it was like to be poor. To have nothing. And this house, this family, her boys... That was Tammy’s kingdom.
You would defend it at all costs. And sometimes there were casualties. But what wouldn’t you do for your own children?
On that same note, Ellie knew that if she’d had a child the way those other women had...she would have been camped out on the man’s doorstep herself. Making sure that she had the resources to raise her child in the way they deserved. Because there was no way in hell her baby should be poor, no way her baby should be living hand to mouth if its father and half siblings were living well.
Basically, she could see herself behaving as any of the women in the scenario had.
To her mind, the only person with true fault here was Hank. If he hadn’t cheated, there would never have been secret babies to deal with in the first place, and none of the women would have had to make these choices.
But what wouldn’t you do for your children?
Ellie knew that the answer was...nothing. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Amelia.
In all the things that had been confusing, difficult and awful over the past few years, that had always been clear.
She’d been gray for months after Clint had died. Her entire pregnancy had passed in a fog.
She’d cried when she felt Amelia move inside her for the first time, because Clint wasn’t there to feel it.
Because he never would.
Wouldn’t see his baby girl, not ever. The baby he’d wanted so much.
She resented the life inside her in so many ways because Clint’s life had been snuffed out. She hadn’t been able to connect to the joy of it, hadn’t been able to seize on to the hope.
New life meant nothing when she was mourning the passing of her old life.
Until Amelia was born. And in that moment Ellie had found purpose. A purpose that she would never take for granted. With that had come a whole gamut of emotions that she thought had been lost to her.