Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

10

Clearly, Olive’s speechlessness wasn’t limited to George Langley.

“Say something. Please.”

She looked as if she had just been asked to sculpt a fifth face on Mount Rushmore. Her body moved back inside his orbit, within reach. He wanted to take her hand as she had taken his the night the snow flew, but he was driving one-sixty, here, at midnight with no headlamps. She sat beside him again.

“No one’s ever said that to me before.”

“Never?”

She shook her head. “Once, but he was talking about my work.”

“I haven’t seen your work.” Dismissing that possibility, he hoped his meaning was clear. It was her. All her.

“What about earlier? You said I’m everything you’re trying to forget.” Her words were soft, like a whisper between lovers.

“Not you. And not Daniel, either. It’s time I realized that.”

God Almighty, she wasn’t fighting it; she was trying to come to grips. His body was already at the end of that road, one-sixty, one-eighty, every part of him more alive than he had ever been, surpassing heavy fire, surpassing guilt that he wore every day like body armor.

“I shouldn’t have pried,” she said. “I needed to feel…something.”

He nuzzled her bangs, much as he had the time he tugged her scarf to bring her close and called her art and nearly took her inside the cab of the old truck and re-sculpted her body until her pleasured cries filled the barn. This time, a kiss on the forehead wasn’t enough. Not by miles.

“And now?” he said, closer to a thought than a whi

sper.

Her exhales warmed his neck, subtle puffs of shaky air.

She took off her glasses, as much an invitation to fuck her mindless as anything he could have imagined. His cock tensed. Still he waited. A woman like her, refined, worldly, but not as much as she led others to believe, deserved to drive this as far as she wanted.

“I feel everything.”

This time, when he corralled her lips, there was no modesty, no feather-touch, no slightest hint of her inner world. This time, it was a pedal-to-the-floorboard, eyes-closed leap of hearts and heads and intentions. All reserve drained from her body. She met the kiss with the same passion with which she inhaled art and binged on creation. Her mouth tasted sugary, a just-from-the-oven holiday cookie to a starving man.

With her first sweep of tongue past those firm, heart-shaped lips, his control shattered.

He scooped her onto him so she straddled his lap, the knees of her impossibly tight jeans at his hips while tongues fought to recapture leverage. Her denim was thin, stretchy, and humid at the crotch. The knowledge that she was ready for him, maybe had been since she had darkened the barn door—or, like him, clear back to the moment they exchanged looks on a moon-splashed street—was a rocket-propelled grenade to his libido. The athletic pants he had slipped on earlier were no match. His dick was in a crisp, precision salute faster than the time it took a lusty rasp to escape her throat.

Her spine lifted, arched, so statuesque atop him, he wondered if everything she touched turned to art. She broke the kiss long enough to cross her arms, grasp the sweater’s hem, and lift it over her head. Breasts, rounded in glorious, pert relief against the straining white cotton of an undershirt that was little more than a flimsy excuse for a tank top. Along the seams, the surprising intricacy of white satin loops and smoke-gray ribbon came into view. She was small, to match her slight physique, but what she lacked in size, she more than made up for in the glow of her skin. Set against her shiny black hair, the cotton-white shell of her body was flawless.

She pressed her forehead to his and reclaimed her breath.

“I’m sorry, Olive. I shouldn’t have pushed you away. I want to make it right.”

Her velvety lips and the rise and fall of her breasts mesmerized him. In his mindless state, she could have asked him to strip naked at the Knights of Columbus Hall on ladies’ canasta night, and he would have asked if she wanted a cowboy hat with the action.

“There is one way.”

“Name it. Anything.” Truly, anything.

She pulled away. Her lips pressed into a frown. “I’m afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Of what you’ll say.”