Chapter 22
WYATT
She’s looking up at me like I just rearranged the stars. And maybe I did. Maybe I rearranged my own while I was at it, because I have no idea how to get them back where they were, and the terrifying part is I don’t want to.
It meant everything.
I said that. Out loud. To Tom Monroe’s daughter, who is pressed against a cabin door with her hands fisted in my shirt, her mouth still swollen from mine and those brown eyes blown wide in the porch light.
Six years of carefully constructed walls, and she tore them down in a single speech on the guest cabin porch.
I should step back. Put some air between us. Start the long, painful process of pretending this didn’t just happen.
Instead, I kiss her again.
This one is slower. Not because I’ve got control of myself but because I want to know what she tastes like when I’m paying attention. And the answer is warm and sweet and so goddamn addictive that I go back for more before I’ve even finished the first taste.
I could live on this, on her. I could skip meals, sleep, and every other thing my body needs, and just do this.
My hand is still in her hair and the other is spread wide across her lower back, and I tilt her head and take my time with her mouth the way I couldn’t thirty seconds ago when I was drowning in six years of sheer desperation.
I lick into her mouth slow and deep and she opens for me like she’s been waiting for me to do exactly that, and my chest cracks clean in half.
She whimpers softly against my mouth, and, Christ, my whole goddamn body locks up.
“Wyatt.” My name falls from her lips, breathed against mine, and I feel it everywhere.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
I tear my mouth from hers long enough to look at her. Her eyes are half-closed, lips swollen, and the sight of her nearly buckles my knees.
“Wasn’t plannin’ on it, Daisy-girl.”
Then I’m back on her because I don’t know how not to be. Her bottom lip between my teeth, then the corner of her mouth, and every sound she gives me hits my system like a drug I’m going to spend the rest of my life chasing.
Her fingers leave my shirt and slide up my chest, over my shoulders, into the hair at the back of my neck. She tugs, and my hips press her harder into the door. The sound she makes this time isn’t soft. It’s the kind of sound that rewires a man’s brain.
I drop my mouth to her jaw. Her neck. That spot below her ear where her pulse is hammering so fast it feels like a hummingbird trapped under her skin.
She smells like that shampoo, the one that’s been slowly killing me since she got here.
Honey and warmth, and underneath it, just her.
I taste the hollow of her throat and she arches into me and I want more.
I want all of it.
“You’re shaking,” she whispers against my lips.
“I know.”
“Is that because you want this or because you’re fighting it?”
I pull back far enough to see her face. Her hair is a mess from my hands. Her lips are red and her cheeks are flushed and she’s so goddamn beautiful standing in my porch light that it physically hurts to look at her.
“I stopped fightin’ it about three sentences into that speech.”
Her mouth curves. “Which three sentences?”
“The ones where you said you were done pretending.”
Her breath hitches. “That was more than three sentences.”
“I stopped countin’.”
She inhales sharply. Her fingers tighten in my hair and she pulls me back down, and this kiss is different from the first two.
This is the one where we stop pretending we’re going to stop.
Her tongue slides against mine and I groan into her mouth and she arches into me and every single thought in my head goes quiet for the first time in years.
My hand slides from her back to her hip. The dress is thin enough that I can feel the heat of her through the fabric, and the noise I make when my thumb traces the curve of her waist would be embarrassing if I wasn’t too far gone to care.
She’s so small under my hands. So warm. So goddamn perfect for me.
Her fingers skim down my chest. Over my belt buckle. My hand catches her wrist before she gets any lower, and I pin it against the door beside her head, our fingers tangling together.
“Daisy.”
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t say my name like that and then tell me we should slow down.”
“I wasn’t gonna say slow down.” My voice is hoarse, and I barely recognize it. “I was gonna say I’m about thirty seconds from doin’ somethin’ I can’t take back. On this porch. Where anyone with a pair of headlights could see.”
She holds my gaze. Steady and sure without an ounce of hesitation.
“Good.”
Just like that, my restraint snaps, and the release of it is almost a relief.
I lift her. Both hands under her thighs, and she wraps her legs around my waist like she was built to fit there.
The height difference disappears, and for the first time tonight she’s looking down at me.
Her hair falls around both our faces like a curtain, blocking out the porch light, the ranch, the mountains, every single thing that isn’t this.
She cups my face in both hands and kisses me. Slow and deep and thorough, like she’s memorizing the shape of my mouth. I press her into the door and hold her there with my hips, and the sound she makes when she feels exactly how hard I am goes straight through me like an electric current.
“Been thinkin’ about this,” I murmur against her throat. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Longer than I should’ve been.”
“How long?”
“Christmas. The red dress. You walked in and I couldn’t breathe. And then you laughed at somethin’ Colt said and I knew I was in trouble.”
She pulls back far enough to see my face, and tips her head to one side, her expression soft and fierce and aching all at once.
“I was twenty.”
“I know.”
“You never said anything.”
“You were twenty.” Like that explains everything.
She leans in and presses a kiss to the underside of my jaw. Then to the corner of my mouth. Soft and deliberate, like she’s mapping me.
“I’ve wanted you for so long,” she whispers against my skin.
I tighten my grip on her thighs, pressing her harder into the door. My mouth finds the hollow of her throat, and I feel her pulse jump against my lips.
“Tell me what you want.” I don’t beg. I have never begged for a thing in my life, but those words sound dangerously close.
“Touch me.”
Two words. She says them simply, like asking me to pass the salt. Like she isn’t stripping every last defense I’ve got.
I shift her weight to one arm. She weighs nothing. A hundred pounds of sharp edges and warm skin and six years of wanting I couldn’t outrun. My free hand slides down between us. Over her ribs, her hip, to the hem of that black dress. My fingers find bare thigh and I stop. Look at her.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” No hesitation. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
The dress rides up under my hand. My fingers trace higher, past the edge of lace, and when I slide beneath it and find the heat of her, my forehead drops against hers because it’s that or my knees give out entirely.
She’s drenched. Slick and swollen and so warm against my fingers that my cock throbs hard enough to hurt. I gently drag my fingertips through the length of her, slow, learning the shape of her, and the sound I make doesn’t belong to a man who’s had control of himself for thirty-five years.
She gasps and her head falls back against the door.
“Christ, Daisy.” My voice is a hoarse rasp. “You feel like—fuck.”
I can’t finish the sentence because I don’t have the words. She’s silk and heat and everything I’ve spent six years pretending I didn’t want, and she’s dripping down my goddamn fingers.
“Don’t stop.” Her voice is thin as her fingers dig into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks, and I don’t care. I want the marks. I want proof tomorrow that this was real.
I find her entrance and press inside, one finger first, then two when she opens for me with a moan that I feel in the base of my spine.
She clenches around me already, and I haven’t even started.
My thumb finds her clit and I circle it slowly while my fingers curl inside her, searching for the spot that’ll take her apart.
I know I’ve found it when her whole body jolts.
“There, baby?” I murmur against her temple.
She just nods, fast, her mouth open, her breath coming in sharp little bursts that are doing catastrophic things to my self-control.
I press into that spot again, rubbing steadily with my fingertips while my thumb works her clit in slow, tight circles, and her hips start rolling against my hand in a rhythm that’s going to end me.
Every sound, every twitch, every time her teeth sink into her bottom lip goes straight to my cock. I’m so hard it’s agony, pinned between her thigh and my own body, and every time she grinds forward, I get friction I didn’t ask for and can’t afford.
“Look at me,” I rasp.
Her eyes open. Brown shot through with amber, and right now they’re barely focused, glazed and desperate and locked on mine.
And I know with certainty that I have never in my life seen anything as beautiful as Daisy Monroe falling apart in my arms.
I press harder with my thumb, quicken the curl of my fingers, and she cries out.
I swallow it with my mouth, kissing her through it, tasting every sound she gives me while my hand works her steady and relentless between her thighs.
She’s so wet I can hear it, the slick sound of my fingers moving inside her, and the knowledge that I did this to her, that her body is this desperate for mine, makes me dizzy.
Her whole body is tensing, her thighs tightening around my waist, her nails biting into the back of my neck.
I press my mouth to her ear. “Let go, Daisy-girl.”
She shatters. Her back arches off the door and her mouth opens on a sound she tries to muffle against my shoulder and her body clenches around my fingers so hard I groan heavily.
I hold her through it. Every pulse, every aftershock, my forehead pressed to her temple as I breathe her in.