Sun shining off wild blonde hair.
Blue eyes like a frozen lake.
A short, tight body with all the right curves packed in a pair of cutoff jeans.
Tanned thighs. Calf-high cowboy boots. Ass like a peach.
Flannel shirt tied up around her midriff and barely holding in those tits, her chest straining tight against the red-and-black checker squares until I pity what those buttons are dealing with.
That goes double for the horse, who just might be the luckiest bastard in the world.
My reaction to seeing a pretty girl with her legs wrapped around a few hundred pounds of solid muscle, her hips bobbing with every stride?
Fucking primal.
I might kill a man in cold blood to trade places with that horse.
And damn, when she swings her legs so wide, the muscles in her inner thighs rippling as she dismounts, her hair trailing behind her like a splash of liquid gold…go ahead and shoot me now.
Sure, it’s been a while.
I haven’t looked at a woman naked since I left New York City.
Sierra even tried to chat me up a little right in front of a sneering Declan, playing on my old reputation as the hotshot panty ripper of Heart’s Edge who’ll do you dirty in the streets and in the sheets.
I didn’t even glance her way.
But I’d sure as hell love to do more than window shopping with the younger Potter girl right now.
And I realize how far I’ve got my head up my ass when she’s standing close enough to hit me.
I can smell the sweat beading on her slender, suntanned neck.
Yeah. I think she’s been yelling at me for a good sixty seconds without me processing a single word.
Shaking my head, I remind myself where the hell her eyes are, and focus on them.
Nah, at second glance, they’re not winter ice.
More like pure blue lasers, and I think she’s trying to burn me to a crisp with her hell-stare.
I blink. “Sorry, what did you just say?”
She eyes me up and down, then rolls her eyes.
“You heard me,” she snaps, though I honestly didn’t. “I said I know I don’t keep cattle, so I don’t get how a piece of crap this big wound up on my property.”
The fuck?
I scowl, wondering if I forgot I made a pit stop in her coffee maker.
She’s definitely not one of the girls in Heart’s Edge with plenty of good reason to hate me.
She’s too young. Gotta be mid-twenties at most.
With me pushing forty, by the time she’d have been legal to join my trail of broken hearts, I’d have been long gone out of town.
So.
Either she hates me on my reputation alone.
Or she’s just pissed at the guy in the nice suit coming out here to talk to her about the land.
When Sierra said difficult, she’d been sugarcoating complete and utter hellion.
“Okay, look,” I say, holding my hands up. “I get that you don’t trespass on a cougar’s territory without getting scratched. But you don’t even know m—”
“I know exactly who you are,” she snaps. “And I know exactly what you think you’re doing. I’m not the kinda girl who falls for your bull, playboy. Your shitty tongue won’t work on me.”
I arch a brow. “No intention of using my tongue on you.”
Only, I’m damn well thinking about it now.
About that gap between her thighs, and how that suntanned, velvety skin would taste as I lick my way higher, higher, and higher still.
Rein it in, cowboy, I tell myself.
Especially when it just makes her glare at me harder.
Her little red mouth twists up in a furious rosebud, her cheeks flushed. She’s got amazing cheekbones, and that blush—I want it to be a real blush, not just a hot rush of anger—highlights how graceful they are.
She’s got the face of an angel and the mouth of a trucker.
“That’d make a first fucking time,” she says scathingly. “I hear you’ve used your tongue to get your way in just about everything else, and I don’t mean by talking, Holt Silverton.”
“Glad to hear I need no introduction.” I smirk. “You must’ve been thinking about my reputation pretty hard to remember my name so well.” I’m trying to play nice, so I hold my hand out. “It’s Libby Potter, right? Haven’t seen you since you were knee-high to a rattlesnake. Sorry to hear about your old man.”
Her dagger eyes just sharpen with the cold way she looks at me.
And pointedly doesn’t take my hand.
Okay, then.
I’m here on business. Not to let this pint-sized firecracker get under my skin, and I plan to keep it that way.
So I let my hand drop but hold my smile. I let my gaze roam over the ranch, taking it in.
It’s a tidy little place; a low, sprawling ranch house made out of timber set far back from the main fence. A few well-kept, freshly painted barns loom on the horizon, scattered around.