Chapter Nine #2
He put his Coke can down on the table between them, though he kept his gaze trained on her.
“Trust and believe that I intend to have sex with you,” he said, and she didn’t understand how he could do that.
How one minute it could seem like they were laughing the way they always did and then the next minute he could say something like that—with that gleam in his eyes that made him like a stranger to her.
But a stranger that her body already knew so well.
That she trusted inherently.
No wonder all she could do was shudder.
“Okay,” Sierra said, though it was harder to breathe than it had been a moment ago.
“You can take me on dates. I’ll take you on dates, too, and we can go back and forth—”
“Absolutely not.”
“That’s what we always do,” she protested.
“In fact, it’s my turn.”
“That’s what friends do, Sierra.” Boone leaned in, and she didn’t realize how deeply she was longing for him to touch her again until he did.
He picked up her hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world and threaded their fingers together, so she was even more breathless, suddenly.
“I don’t want to be friends. I want to date you. With everything that entails. Which means no, you’re not picking up a check. All you have to do is be ready when I pick you up. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” she replied.
Then she scowled at him.
“I didn’t realize that nuclear Boone was so bossy.”
But when he grinned, it seemed to melt her all the way through.
“You have no idea,” he told her, in a low voice that made her more aware than she’d ever been in her entire life that she was a woman.
Soft and hot and perfectly happy to see exactly what it was he meant by that.
It turned out, he meant exactly what he said.
Every night, he picked her up.
Formally. At her door.
During the day, he would tell her what to wear—though never in the way Matty had.
He never made demands for specific looks or pieces.
It was more, you might want to wear a pretty dress .
Or, jeans are fine .
Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that Boone Carey was in no way fussy and overdone.
Every night, he took her out.
One night he drove her into Bozeman, so they could see a play.
They went mini golfing.
Bowling. They tried all the restaurants from Marietta to Livingston and no, he made no attempt to pretend they weren’t on a date.
There was always a meal either before or after the activity.
And at no point did he police what she ordered, what she was eating, or make faces if she actually made it clear that she was enjoying herself.
He always ordered dessert and expected her to, also.
He always picked up the check.
That wasn’t all. Boone pulled out her chair when she sat down.
He always got her car door.
He liked to walk with his hand on her back.
And when the evening was over, he would take her back to her apartment.
He would wait for her to invite him inside.
She always did. Once there, he would proceed to teach her one lesson after another.
The most important one was that she not only could come, but that he considered it a requirement.
At first, he insisted that only she got there—but as the days bled into each other, and the nights got hotter between them, he gradually relented.
And then, hotter still, he taught her exactly how to please him.
There was no mystery.
He had no problem talking, telling her exactly what felt good or what she should do more of.
She never felt as if it was a trap.
It was simply pleasure.
He taught her how to use her hands, especially that first time, when she was shellshocked by the size of him that she actually felt her jaw drop open.
She could wrap both of her hands around him and there was still room to spare, and when she thought about that—when she was alone, when she was driving, when she was supposed to be doing literally anything else—it made her shiver all over.
And get hot everywhere, too.
Sierra would have sworn that size didn’t matter.
It shouldn’t, surely.
Yet it turned out, it really did.
Boone taught her how to play with him.
How to use her mouth to drive him wild.
The first time he actually let her take him in her mouth and drive him over the edge, she came herself.
“My God,” he whispered, his voice raw.
“You’re perfect.”
That was the other thing about Boone.
He praised her, all the time.
She would have sworn that he was a man of precious few words, but it turned out that this new side of him was practically chatty.
There was nothing about her he didn’t notice.
If she changed her hair, he told her how pretty it was.
If she tried out a new outfit, he complimented it immediately.
After a few weeks of this, when all they’d done was eat and indulge themselves, Sierra realized that her clothes weren’t fitting as well as the used to.
She panicked.
She standing by her Jeep, pulling at the T-shirt that had fit loosely when she’d moved in here away from the belly it now clung to, frowning down at herself.
How had she not noticed this was happening?
How had he not noticed?
When she heard Boone come out of the barn, she had the panicked notion that she should just run for it.
But that would be worse, surely—
“What you doing?” he asked.
He had been wrestling with some of the equipment and he looked a little bit cranky, a little bit sweaty, and so beautiful it actually hurt.
Experience told her that it was always best to come clean quickly.
To make it clear that she knew how bad the situation was and to proactively advance the steps she intended to take to fix the problem.
She launched in as quickly as she could, her pulse battering at her.
“It’s been a strange summer and I realize I’ve put on a lot of weight, but don’t worry—”
“Good,” Boone grunted.
He moved closer to her then and he just…
touched her now. Whenever he liked, he put his hands on her and pulled her closer to him.
That was what he did now.
That was who they were now and the oddest part to Sierra was how natural it seemed.
How strange it felt to remember that they’d spent so long not like this.
He kissed her for a while and then he set her back on her feet again.
And while she was standing there, her head spinning, he looked down the length of her body.
He took his time doing it, and it set off those same old alarms inside of her—but Boone smiled.
Wide.
“You looked hunted when you moved up here. Like you’d been running for too long. You look better happy , Sierra.”
“But…” She felt off-balance.
Like an upset apple cart, and all the tossed-out apples were the things she’d been told her whole life.
About what men wanted.
About what was appropriate .
About the shame she ought to feel anytime her waistband expanded.
“But I…”
“Don’t ever make yourself small on my account.” Boone’s intense hazel eyes seemed to punch right into her.
He didn’t look away, so she couldn’t either.
“Whatever makes you happy is how I want you to look, do you understand me? I don’t care what size you are. If you do, I’ll support that. But if I can ask one thing of you, it’s that you stop thinking that there’s anything bad or shameful about this body of yours. There isn’t. You might have noticed that there’s not one part of you that doesn’t bring me intense pleasure. Not one single part, baby.”
Then he kissed her again, left her standing there, as if he hadn’t rocked her whole world.
And a few days after that, after one of their lovely dates that Sierra found she loved more than should have been possible, they ended up in her bed.
They often did, now.
But this time, things seemed different.
There was a different intensity.
A different kind of thrill.
Maybe it was just that something in her was different.
Or maybe it was that Boone had healed something in her she would have sworn would stay raw and tender forever.
“Boone,” she whispered, as she kissed her way down his chest—that miraculous chest of his that seemed to get more perfect every time she touched him—“I think if you don’t make love to me I might die.”
She felt him begin to laugh before she heard it, deep inside that chest of his.
He picked her up so easily and swung her around, and then she was on her back.
And he was there between her legs and she could feel the thick, hard length of him against her belly.
“Finally,” he rumbled at her.
“The magic words.”
“Were we waiting for that?” she asked, with an outrage that wasn’t entirely feigned.
“You could have told me that. Weeks ago.”
“No,” Boone said, very seriously.
“I couldn’t.”
Then he settled there between her legs and he let her feel his weight against her, pressing against her breasts and pressing her whole body into the mattress, so perfect and hot that she could feel that shimmering, shivery heat move all over her.
“I love you,” he told her as he kissed her, again and again, and then everything seemed to…
disappear into some kind of rolling inferno.
It was his mouth. And she knew it well by now, all over her body, but this was different.
Because as he kissed her, as he lowered that mouth of his to her neck and she arched her back to give him more of her, she could feel him between her legs, too.
There’d been a lot of this, too.
A lot of learning what it was like to hunger and shake as he played with her, moving himself between her legs until she was out of mind without ever actually thrusting inside her.
His hands moved down between them and his mouth moved to play with her breasts.
One and then the other, as if the hard peaks were marvels to him.
He traced patterns in that hot, soft part of her and then he began to use his fingers to thrust into her, one finger, then another.
And between the sharp tugging on her nipples and the heat that seemed to arrow straight down to where his fingers plunged inside of her, she felt herself shatter apart.
But this was Boone, so he wasn’t satisfied with one.
He kept going, until she came again, and then again.
Only then did he reach towards the bedside table, where she had ostentatiously placed a box of condoms weeks ago if you think you’ll ever get there , and sheathed himself.
“Finally,” she managed to say, even as tremor after tremor shook through her.
Boone grinned at her, that gleam in his eyes and his face gone darkly sensual.
“You better hold on, baby,” he told her, like he was warning her.
“This might be a little bit of a ride.”
Then he crawled back over her and settled into place between her legs once more.
He pulled her knees up high on either side of him and she expected him to thrust in hard, but he didn’t.
Instead, he kept his eyes on hers as he slowly, so slowly, guided himself to her entrance.
And then pressed inside.
And she was shattering all over again, because it was happening.
Boone— her Boone —was finally inside of her.
Inside of her and so big that she had to work to take him.
He was going slow, she realized, because he knew she needed the time to accommodate him.
And he was right.
He kept coming and coming, going deeper and inexorably deeper, filling her up until she felt as if there was no part of her that he wasn’t touching, that he wasn’t making his.
She thought maybe she broke apart then, too.
Sierra heard him mutter something under his breath as he paused there, his chest moving as if he was running hard, and his forehead against hers.
“You’re killing me,” he told her, in a low voice that barely sounded like his.
“Good,” she managed to say.
“Then we can match.”
“Not just yet,” he said.
And then he began to move.
God, how he moved .
Everything she thought she knew about him—not just from the whole of their lives before this, but over the past few weeks—disappeared.
Because this was pure magic.
He pulled all the way out and sunk back in and she had never felt sensation like this.
Ever. It went far beyond the simple fact of what they were doing.
It was cosmic.
It was beautiful, and it was impossible, and every thrust was better than the one before.
Sierra couldn’t tell where he began and she ended or if beginnings and endings even mattered any longer, not when there was this .
This rhythm unbroken, this white-hot communion.
She held onto him, or maybe she was clawing him, and she hadn’t known until now that beauty could be so fierce.
She wanted this to last forever.
She didn’t think she would survive it.
Sierra wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to survive it.
He threw her so hard over the edge that she thought she might never come back from it, that she would be lost out there like one more comet streaking off into eternity—and then she felt him explode inside of her, and shake against her, and whisper as he went.
“I love you, Sierra,” he told her.
Again and again.
She felt an answering emotion well up inside of her, and the words were on her tongue, but she pulled them back.
Because she trusted him, and she trusted this, and she couldn’t imagine that she would ever move on.
But she also knew that when it came to love, she had been a fool for far too long, so how could she trust herself now?
So she kissed him instead, and held him tight as they slowly—so exquisitely slowly—made their way back from the universe and into their separate bodies once again.
She kissed him again, and again, and hoped that he could taste in her all those things she couldn’t say.
All those things that he deserved to hear that were locked away, down deep inside her.