Untamed Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  “What the hell, Kaylee?”

  “You’re not opposed to it,” she said, hoping that she wasn’t deluding herself. “If you hadn’t ever thought about it then the whole kiss thing... It wouldn’t have made things weird. It made things weird, because it made us both think about it.”

  “Kaylee...”

  “Leave with me,” she repeated, the words firm. Undeniable. There was no pretending she’d meant something else. No pretending he’d misunderstood. They both knew what she’d said.

  They both knew what she wanted.

  Her heart thundered erratically, her throat scraped raw. And she just waited. Waited for him to respond. Waited for that hard expression of his to shift. For him to turn away. Lean closer. Something.

  It seemed like forever.

  And then, just like that, it was all lightning again. A flash of something in his eyes. Want. Just for a moment she could see it. Just for a moment it was clear.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, flinging a couple dollar bills on the table and grabbing hold of her arm, dragging her toward the exit of the saloon.

  “I didn’t say I was ready to go,” she said, panic suddenly rising up to strangle her.

  “We need to talk,” he bit out.

  He propelled her forward until they were outside, on the street in front of the saloon. “Get in my truck,” he said.

  That bossy, alpha tone should have made her mad, but instead, it set off some chain reaction through her body. Made her squeeze her thighs together.

  “Why can’t we talk in there?”

  “Because I cannot have a conversation about possibly having sex with my best friend in a room full of people.”

  “I don’t want to have a conversation. I thought I made that perfectly clear.”

  “Get in the truck.”

  “I drove myself,” she protested feebly.

  “I’m driving you home,” he said.

  There was something about the way that he held his jaw, granite and uncompromising, that made her stop arguing.

  They got in the truck, and Bennett turned the engine over. Her heart was pounding hard, her stomach queasy. She had made it completely clear what she wanted. He wanted it too. She saw it in his eyes. He might be angry. He might want to talk them both out of it. But she had seen the truth.

  They started to drive out of town, leaving the main street, and all the buildings behind them. Headed into the darkness, where there were no streetlights. Where there was nothing but trees to stand witness.

  It all flooded up inside her then. Fear. Need. Desire. She was about to climb out of her skin, or out of her clothes and onto him. It was crazy. But she’d said the words and there was no going back. She didn’t even want to try.

  “Pull over,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “We don’t. We’ve spent the last seventeen years talking, Bennett. I don’t want to talk anymore. That’s not what tonight is about.” She took a deep breath and curled her hands into fists, her nails digging into her palms. “You said you wanted to take care of me. Well...this is how you can take care of me.”

  He kept driving for a moment, and then they came to one of the many dirt roads that wound around up into the mountains. He turned suddenly sharply. And said nothing as he drove on, the gravel crunching beneath the truck tires. He pulled off at the first turn out, well off the main road. Isolated.

  He turned the key. She sat for a moment, staring straight out the windshield, listening to the residual pop and sizzle of the engine as the truck began to cool down.

  Then she turned toward him, pressed her fingertips against his cheek. She didn’t move closer. Didn’t undo her seat belt. She just...touched him.

  She was startled when his iron grip captured her wrist, pulled her closer, the shoulder strap on her seat belt biting into her collarbone.

  “Are you just going to tease me?” There was something tortured in his voice. Something deep and intense she had never heard before. At least, never directed at her.

  “N-no.”

  “That seems like a tease, Kaylee. Seems like barely more than talking.”

  She wished that she could see his face. But it was too dark. The trees rose up tall, blocking the light from the moon. She could make out the stars, but just barely. Nothing more than gold dust in the sky.

  “If you’re going to start it,” he said. “We might as well finish it.”

  He was right. It was acknowledged. That this electric, thick air that had been growing between them recently was attraction. That she wanted him. The damage was done at that point. More than done.

  It was the thing she’d always been afraid of. Making a change that couldn’t be taken back.

  But she was shaking. She didn’t know if she could do it. Didn’t know if she could take this step.

  She had tried. She had tried to be good for so long. Had tried to keep this relationship in its own category. Friendship. Hell, he was almost family. At least, that was what she had told herself. And the attraction stuff... Understandable. Because he was a handsome man and she was just a woman, after all. Because she liked him so much, and all that liking was a hairbreadth away from being sexual anyway with men and women. At least, as long as there was any seed of attraction there.

  She had told herself he didn’t feel it. But now she knew he did. Even if it was recent on his end, the fact that he did feel it now changed everything.

  The fact that they were here changed everything already.

  Still, she was scared. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring herself to close the distance between them when she had done it already in the past few days. When she had been the one to commit all the unpardonable sins. The one who had kissed him. The one who’d said he could break his celibacy with her.

  It had all been her. She couldn’t bring herself to be the instigator again.

  But then, she didn’t have to be. Because he was the one who closed that distance. He was the one who pressed his mouth to hers.

  The sound he made when their lips touched wasn’t one of pleasure. It was one of pain.

  Like he was a man enduring the worst kind of torture, rather than a man kissing a woman in a darkened truck.

  For a moment it was like the kiss they had shared at the ranch. Closemouthed. Simple.

  Still.

  But then, it was like something broke between them. Whether it was him or her, she didn’t know. But suddenly she found herself flush up against him, her breasts pressed against his chest, his hand on the back of her head, holding her hard against him. She, for her part, was clinging to his shoulders, and they both angled in, parting their lips. When his tongue touched hers it was more than a lightning strike. It was one that touched down to earth and lit the ground on fire. Left it scorched. Left everything singed in its wake.

  She was finally tasting him. Really tasting him. She moved her hands around from his shoulders, down to the front of his chest. To those muscles that she had admired for so long, but never touched like this. She was greedy, desperate suddenly. Because this was the chance. Her opportunity to experience all of these fantasies. And she felt like it was too much. Like there were too many things to want, and not enough time to have them. Maybe not enough time in the whole of her life.

  Yes, she had wanted to kiss him for years. But also, she had wanted to touch him. She needed him. She needed him so badly. Under her palms, against her skin. Every inch of his body.

  He had been forbidden for so long. This had been forbidden for so long. But it was happening now. She couldn’t get enough of it.

  She’d had hints of it over the years. The familiarity of his scent, brushes of his fingertips against hers. Friendly hugs.

  But not this feast. This all
-consuming sense of being surrounded by him. The smell of his skin all encompassing, filling her lungs. She slipped her hands up from his chest, loath to stop touching those incredible muscles, but she needed his skin.

  She dragged her fingertips over his face, feeling that glorious stubble beneath her palms as she cupped him. It was so masculine. So innately sexual because it was so very different from her.

  Except none of the other men she had kissed had impacted her this way. She had never once thought of stubble as being intimate, borderline filthy. But with him it felt like it. Because she had never been allowed to touch him like this, and now she was. So it made the smallest of things, things that would have been innocuous with any other man, seem so deep and raw and wrong. So wonderful and intense.

  Between her thighs, a pulse beat steady and hard, that ache stretching from deep inside her core. She was ready for him now. If he unfastened his jeans, and pushed her skirt up he could be inside of her in seconds. Just that very thought had her on the edge. Had her ready to explode.

  She had never felt like this when kissing a man. She had felt less during sex.

  His hands were stationary, holding her still as he tasted her, as he swept his tongue along her lower lip, sending a sharp shock through her body, an electrical jolt that made her internal muscles pulse.

  She was ready to come. Just from this. From a kiss. He hadn’t even touched her anywhere but her head, and she was ready.

  “I need...” She moved her hands from his face, down to the hem of his T-shirt, plucking at it desperately. “More.”

  He swore and drew away from her. “I have blankets in the back.”

  It took her a while to register what that might mean, but then he moved away from her, and she protested, feeling muddled and hypersensitized.

  “Bennett, don’t stop.” She couldn’t disguise the needy thread in her voice. She didn’t even want to.

  “Can’t,” he bit out.

  He reached behind the bench seat and grabbed hold of a folded-up flannel blanket, then got out of truck.

  She just sat there for a moment, unsure of what she was supposed to do. Her brain wasn’t working right. Her thoughts were thick and strange, and she couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Then, the passenger-side door opened, and he was there, one hand braced on the open door, the other pressed against the frame. Filling the space.

  She unbuckled, then turned toward him, her knees hanging outside the truck. And he wrapped his arms around her again, pulling her up against him. This time, he settled between her legs, the kiss deep and intense. And she could feel him. Hard and insistent between her legs. Pressed up against that place where she was so needy for him.

  She saw stars.

  She tilted her pelvis forward, letting her head fall back as he kissed her neck, as he rocked his hips up against her. Unconsciously, she wrapped her legs around his waist. Her skirt slid up her thighs, baring her legs entirely. She shifted, capturing his mouth again. He rolled his hips forward, the seam on his jeans biting through the flimsy fabric on her panties.

  Suddenly, she saw the merit of skirts. It would be so easy. So easy for him to be inside of her.

  Bennett. Inside of her.

  She shivered. A full-body response to this madness that was threatening to consume her completely.

  Then, he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up out of the truck. The open door left the light on, casting a very faint glow into the bed of the truck. And she could see what he had been talking about. Blankets. There had apparently been some in the bed already, and they were spread out now, the one from the inside of the truck over the top of them.

  He didn’t want to stop.

  He lifted her up over the tailgate, depositing her on the makeshift bed. He lifted her like she was nothing. He made her feel small, feminine. Almost laughable for a woman who was nearly six feet tall and made entirely of lean muscle with very little in the way of hourglass curves.

  But he made her feel beautiful. Cherished.

  And that ache in her throat was back. She needed it to go away. An ache between her legs was one thing, because she knew how he could fix that.

  It was all the rest. The other feelings that he gave her...that she didn’t know what to do with.

  But she didn’t have to think about it. She couldn’t think about it. Because then Bennett joined her in the back of the truck, on his knees down by her feet. He grabbed hold of the hem of his T-shirt and ripped it up over his head.

  She couldn’t see him well, but what she could see...

  The light from the cab of the truck threw his muscles into relief. The shadows showing the dips and hollows on that sculpted body.

  She’d seen Bennett without his shirt before. And it was always a whole thing.

  Always fuel for her fantasies late at night when she couldn’t sleep. When she was lonely and desperate for some kind of release, and could picture only one man.

  It was always followed by shame. Shame and feeling weird about him the next day when she saw him.

  Because she had always felt like it was a violation of some kind. That his body wasn’t there for her.

  But now it was. Right now, it was.

  She scrambled up onto her knees, moving closer to him. Then she pressed her palm flat against his bare chest.

  “Bennett,” she whispered, the word like a prayer.

  Finally, she was touching him. Bennett. His body. Naked under hands.

  She rocked her hips forward, squeezing her thighs together slightly, trying to do something to ease the intensity of the need between them.

  Then she swallowed hard, her throat like the inside of a pincushion. She let her fingertips drip down across his nipple, and he sucked in a sharp breath. Then down farther to his abs, to the waistband of his jeans.

  He was beautiful. Built tough and strong, the results of years of hard work. The evidence that he was rancher stock down to his bones. One of the few men in the world tough enough to stand up to her.

  To make her feel delicate.

  Like she could be the girl in that lace bedroom she’d wanted as a kid. Like she could wear sky-high heels and still be feminine.

  Not helpless or powerless. Not a bad feeling at all. It was...it was intensely heady and sexual. To feel like he could overpower her easily. To be so conscious of another person’s strength. To have it underneath her fingertips like this, barely leashed and there for her pleasure.

  She didn’t think she had it in her to say those words. To share like that. But she could show him. With her body. Show him what he made her feel.

  “Your turn, Kay,” he said, his words tortured, falling back on her nickname from high school. Which just made it seem all the more real.

  He was the only person who called her that ever. Which made her all the more aware that this could only be him.

  But then, the intensity of the arousal thrumming through her body made certain that she was aware of that too. The fact that she was sitting on a knife’s edge, so close to release it was almost embarrassing.

  She had never come with a man before. She just could never get herself all the way into it. Could never stop feeling self-conscious. About where to put her hands, about whether or not he was enjoying it. About whether or not she was enjoying it enough. But she had always told herself it was nice to be close to someone. And that she would never be able to have a real relationship if they didn’t have physical intimacy.

  But now she knew what utter bullcrap that was.

  She had tried so hard to make it happen with the small number of other men she’d gone to bed with. And with Bennett...she didn’t have to try at all.

  She was still up on her knees, frozen, her palm pressed flat to his stomach. And then his warm, rough hands were brushing against the tender skin on her stomach as he began to lift her shirt up over her head. She lifted he
r arms, allowed him to remove her top.

  He swore, slowly dragging the edge of his thumb across that place where her bra met her skin. And she moaned. She couldn’t hold it back. Didn’t even want to.

  “Let me see,” he said, the word tortured.

  With shaking fingers, she reached behind her and unhooked that push-up bra, the push-up bra she was regretting now, because she felt like it was promising him things that she couldn’t deliver.

  She would have said something, warned him, but her tongue wasn’t working. She pulled it off and threw it down into the bed of the truck. The cold night air and her arousal making her nipples impossibly tight.

  “Kaylee,” he said, her name reverent on his lips as he pressed his palms against her breasts, teasing her nipples.

  She had to brace herself, holding on to the side of the truck bed, to keep herself from falling back as pleasure coursed through her, with each pass of his calloused thumbs over her sensitized body.

  He moved his hands down to her waist, his large hands nearly spanning her slim midsection, then he moved them down farther tracing a line beneath her belly button, that point of contact so strangely intimate somehow. Because he was her friend. Because he had never, ever touched her like this before.

  It was weird to think she had known him for seventeen years, had even fantasized about him, but that she didn’t really know him. Not really.

  Because there was this. All this, that she had never really witnessed before.

  The expression in his eyes when he was turned on, the way that he held himself in check, even though she could sense that he wanted to push her down onto the blankets and devour her completely.

  She was ready for that. But she also didn’t want it to end. Wanted it to go on forever. She was caught and held firmly between those two desires. And so, she just let him continue the slow exploration. Let him undo the snap on her skirt, draw down the zipper and slowly push the denim down her thighs, leaving her in nothing but a pair of lace panties.

  “Well, hell,” he breathed.