“I’m ready.”
Chase wasn’t convinced. He stepped around the front tension spring so that he was at the barrel’s head. If she fell once the last pins were removed, it would be forward, ass over head. He pulled the pins.
She squealed.
He loved every fucking note of pleasure in it.
To Gretchen’s credit, she was a natural—at first: hips moving in an exaggerated arc, absorbing the push and pull of the coils; free hand relaxed and centered; hell, her thighs even gripped the barrel, giving her some real estate under her ass like the pros. But one motion off balance magnified to two then three. Pretty soon her steering-wheel arm veered sharply off center, and she overcorrected forward. She vaulted off the fake beast, straight into Chase’s arms.
Her landing was more like a bug splattered on a windshield: one knee hooked above his elbow, the other dangerously close to his nuts; chest slung over his shoulder; the crotch of the overalls at a proximity to his face that would have sent Mayor de Havilland scrambling down the front plane of his body in a rapid return to decorum. But the woman who landed in his arms was not the mayor. She was Gretchen, and she was shaking shitless. She body-gripped him as if he were the only thing between her and shark-infested prairie grass.
His nine-thousand-dollar hat lay in the dirt ten feet away. Chase didn’t give a damn. He would have backed over it with his tires if he thought it would keep her gripping him like a life preserver.
He slid her lower, into a more natural hug. Near his ear, he heard her shuddering exhale, felt it press her chest against his repeatedly like the quake from a jackhammer.
“Breathe, chief,” he whispered against her ear. God, she smelled like expensive flowers and his laundry soap and everything in the moment that was right with the world. She still had a death-grip around his neck, so he buried his face in her velvety hair and decided, right then and there, if she choked him, he would die a satisfied man.
With each reach for breath, her breasts swelled against him. This time, he didn’t fight his erection. He owned it. His hand slid beneath her bottom, altruistically, to support her weight, selfishly because his cock hurt so fucking much he needed her body, right there, right then, to counter the ache.
Gretchen’s lips began a slow, skimming path from his ear—half exhaling, half stalled kisses—along his cheek, toward his lips. Her wild tangle of russet strands snagged on his late-day beard growth, a little like walking into a spider web to kiss someone, but she deftly scooped the offending hair free before reaching his lips. Once she did, it was an all-out, chute-open, prairie wildfire mixture of bucking tongues and ragged breaths and hot, hot slashes of lips. Forget chief of propriety. When properly lit, Gretchen was eight-point-one seconds of heaven.
She loosened her choke hold. Her fingernails parted his hair to his scalp, raising gooseflesh all over his head and chest and weakening his knees. The kiss softened and settled into a hungry exploration. Neither of them wanted to end it; when he thought his adrenaline might not settle for a kiss, when she was likely questioning the civility of devouring her enemy, who happened to have an erection the size of an oil derrick, the other flicked another new probing switch of lust. His control threatened to shatter.
The last thing he needed was to get involved—really involved, the kind of involved that a woman of principle entertained—with a woman who held the deciding vote on his entire future.
Whistle blown. Rider bucked.
“Gretchen,” he whispered past her lips.
She mewed against his tongue, somewhere between a whimper and an articulate answer that revved his libido to the verge of saying fuck it and carrying her over to his truck bed.
Two days ago, he would have used sex to get his way. But that was when Gretchen was a pageant-ready, dragon-woman politician who ate little boys who littered in her town park for dinner. Not now, after she had reminded him of this special place that he had almost forgotten. Not after he found her to be a do-gooder, in government and life, right down to her inability to curse. And certainly not after she’d listened to him, closely enough to write down all his ideas about the event, to cross her arms in that thoughtful way of hers and consider everything he had to say about the distillery.
He extracted himself from her kiss, a little like an old rodeo star mourning his final ride. “It’s getting late.”
Gretchen’s gaze skittered to the grass, not daring to meet his. She blinked as if awakening from an intoxicating haze. Her fingertips brushed their glistening mix of saliva from her swollen bottom lip.
And her cheeks turned Chase red.
Chase felt like a heel for pumping the brakes. It wasn’t at all what she must have thought—that after all the women he must have had, she didn’t measure up. Nothing was further from the truth. When she turned to walk away, he snagged her hand and pulled her close.
“Don’t misunderstand this. I want nothing more than to spend the entire night convincing you that I was lying about bull riding, that it isn’t better than sex, and teasing your senses so mindless that you’ll have to list it in your journal to remember it all. But you know as well as me, one more complication between us might just ruin us both.”
She nodded and pressed her lips together as if she didn’t trust herself to speak.
“Besides, you’re the first politician I’ve ever respected. I can’t go ruining that by allowing you to grope me naked.”
A smile threatened but never quite materialized on her beautiful face.
He pulled her into a sweet embrace and kissed her forehead. “Come on, I’ll take you home so you don’t show up at Tanner’s in my overalls.”
“Would be in tomorrow’s paper for sure.”
“You do look pretty cute. I think I have a crush on you.”
Finally, a laugh.
They walked back to his truck, his arm around her, stopping only long enough to swipe his hat from the field. Come sun up, he’d still be the whiskey rebel with the fuck-off reputation, and she’d be the one trying to run him out of town.