by Maisey Yates
“I figured as much,” he said.
“I might be bad at sex.”
He chuckled, and the warmth that spread through her body sent tingles all the way from her scalp down to her toes. “You will not be bad at it.”
“How do you know? Maybe I am inept when it comes to handling penises.”
“There’s no way that you could be inept when it comes to handling me.”
And he was the one that closed the space between them, and she was grateful. He came right where she stood and wrapped his arm around her waist, and the air rushed from her lungs.
And there were words that hovered on her lips that terrified her, so she swallowed them. Didn’t say them. She looked up in his brown eyes.
She suddenly wanted to cry. Because it felt like fate. Because it felt like the answer to a thousand prayers that she had never been brave enough to say. Because she felt like a new woman in a way that she hadn’t, when she had decided to leave Dylan at the altar.
That woman had been afraid. She’d been numb. And she hadn’t known what the next step was. Hadn’t known what she wanted or what she was going to do.
And all right, she still didn’t know the answers to all that, not in a broader sense. But she wanted him. She really, really wanted him.
And she felt like if she could be this brave, brave enough to reveal the secret part of herself. Brave enough to expose just how deep her desire for him ran...
Then maybe she could be brave enough for anything.
She put her hands on his face, finally touching him the way that she wanted. She smoothed her fingertips over his stubble-roughened jaw, and ran her thumbs beneath his bottom lip. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she whispered.
The fire in his eyes burned brighter, and he didn’t let her speak again. Instead, he lowered his head, kissing her, hard and deep. Stealing her breath. Stealing her reservations.
It was a revelation, this kiss. And any concerns she had about being bad at sex or undesirable were burned away by the heat in it.
Because she realized then that it actually didn’t matter what kind of experience she had. Because there were kisses, and then there was kissing Laz.
Because there was sex, and then there was just the act of wanting him, which touched somewhere deeper than any other sort of desire ever had.
He was big and muscular, and when he held her in his arms she felt small. Delicate, fragile but sheltered.
She had been given shelter before. By a wonderful family who had taken her in and showed her how to change the shape of herself so that she could fit. But that wasn’t what Laz was doing. Not now. She was in a shelter made from his strength, and it fit around her. In a profound and deep way, and whether or not it was supposed to mean something like that. Whether or not she was supposed to feel it so deep... She did. He kissed her all the way down the hall, taking her into the bedroom she’d been sleeping in, and removing her clothes from her body. And she wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t self-conscious. It wasn’t time or inevitability that made her feel attractive, it was the way that he looked at her. Like she was the most precious thing he had ever seen.
“Now you,” she said.
He took his shirt off slowly, revealing acres of dark, smooth skin. Well muscled and strong.
She put her hand on his chest, thrilling at the feel of him. Because she had certainly never seen such a gloriously masculine man in the flesh before.
Not so close that she could touch.
And maybe it was a little bit petty and a little bit mean to compare pale, thin Dylan to Laz, but she did. In the moment, she did.
Maybe he’s fate, or maybe he’s just hotter, a voice whispered.
Maybe he’s both. Because she wasn’t going to enter into the business of doubting herself. Not now. Because it wasn’t just about him being hotter. It was about the way he’d been there for her. All this time.
Then his hands went to his belt buckle and her throat went tight. Her entire body seizing up in anticipation. He pushed his jeans and underwear slowly down his lean hips, and kicked his boots off along with them.
His thighs were muscular, sexy. Indicative of all the hard work that he did on his ranch.
That was what the man did. He worked. Whether it was at the bar or on his land, and he wore the evidence of that in every hard, chiseled line on his body. And then there was... Well, him. That most masculine part of him, thick and proud and so much more than she had ever dared imagine.
If she were going to engage in comparisons again—and she was—Laz came out ahead there too. By a lot.
She swallowed hard.
And then she decided there was no point being a coward. Not about anything. Because this was what she wanted. Plain and simple. And she was going to take it.
She reached her hand down, wrapped it around his hard length, soft and hot and hard all at once. She squeezed him, watched as his face went pained. A tortured look there.
She moved her hand up and down his length, until he caught at her wrist with his hand. “Careful,” he bit out.
“Why? I’m tired of being careful. I’m tired of being what I’m supposed to be. I’m tired of being whatever he thinks I should be. All I have done for all these years is tried to... Tried to stop myself from turning into a monster. I almost committed myself to a life that was going to make me nothing but miserable. Because I was such a coward. Because I wasn’t brave. So now I want to be brave. I want to be brave as I can be. I want to do whatever I want.”
“Well, I am here for being your playground, Jordan, but I don’t want this to end too quickly.”
And that was how she found herself being picked up off the floor and deposited on the bed.
Flat on her back on the soft mattress. And he lifted her thighs, draping them over his shoulders and lowered his head to the heart of her. That part that was slick and wet with desire for him. And she gasped.
She grabbed the back of his head as he tormented her. Pleasuring her with his tongue and his hands.
She writhed against him, arching up off the bed as she found her release, shuddering out his name.
“That’s right,” he said, moving up her body, gazing down into her eyes. “Don’t forget who’s with you.”
“No chance,” she said, her voice weak and shaky.
He took a condom from his nightstand, and sheathed himself quickly as he positioned himself at the entrance of her body.
“Laz,” she whispered, bracketing his face with her hands. And then he thrust inside of her, and she lost her breath.
Because it was him. Finally.
He was something she hadn’t let herself want. This was something she hadn’t let herself want. And it wasn’t until she had stripped away all those other people in her life that had had so many expectations of her that she was free. Free to feel what she did. Free to want what she did.
And she wanted him.
And as he established a steady rhythm that drove them both to the heights, as he thrust into her body, over and over again, he forged in them a bond that she didn’t think could ever be broken.
She felt utterly devastated by it. By him.
And she was glad of it.
Him. And only him.
She broke open, right there with him, pleasure a torrent that poured over, and he growled out his own release too, trembling, this big, sexy man. Trembling because of her.
And the words that she had held back on her lips echoed inside of her, reverberated inside her soul, joining up with that mystical sense of fate, and it all made sense.
It was more than fate. It had felt like it in that first moment. But over a decade of friendship and conversations, of building something genuine and real, had transformed this.
She loved him.
She was certain.
It felt nothing like loving Dylan. Nothin
g at all. It was its own thing, unique and wild.
And she was terrified with it. But maybe... Maybe the thing about loving Laz was that she had to accept that her future would look different than the one she had imagined with Dylan. Because she had been married to an idea of domesticity. Of having what his parents had. Of having that magical, normal sort of thing that she had never gotten to see in her childhood.
But maybe loving Laz meant being his friend. Sharing his bed. And letting him have his own life. Would that be so bad? She could be herself with him. More herself than she had been all this time. And maybe that was good enough?
Maybe it would be good enough.
Maybe she could accept that. Because she couldn’t imagine going back to not having this. To not having him.
So maybe accepting what was on the table wasn’t a bad thing.
Maybe the problem was that what she wanted was never going to fit her.
And she could take more in terms of what she felt, but less...
Checks and balances. It was reasonable. And as she lay there in his arms, safe and sheltered, buzzing with pleasure after what had just occurred, she decided that it was okay.
More than okay.
Friends with benefits with Laz was better than the promise of marriage and forever had ever been with Dylan.
And for the first time she could remember, without pacing herself to exhaustion, driving across half a state or tossing and turning for hours, Jordan fell effortlessly, deeply asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN LAZ WOKE UP the next morning, he could smell bacon. And he still felt sated and satisfied after a night spent in Jordan’s arms. That sex... The woman had blown his head off.
And now she was cooking for him.
He shook his head.
Yeah, it was what she had been hired to do, but this felt different.
It just did.
He had to wonder why.
Guilt crept over him. Guilt at the speech he’d given her. At what he told her about how he intended to keep his life separate.
It was true, though.
It was all he had to give. All he had.
But he got up, and had breakfast with her, and instead of going out to his wood shop, he ended up taking her back to bed.
And when she got down on her knees and took him into her mouth, her blue eyes a wild spark as she looked up at him while she pleasured him, he figured it was all right that for now, this was all he wanted to do.
He called his bar manager and told her that he wouldn’t be in tonight.
Instead, he made dinner for himself and Jordan, and she baked a cake. Then they made love on the floor of his house in such a way that he almost felt like he needed to apologize to the portrait of his grandmother that hung at the end of the hallway.
And it went on like that. For days.
Because he felt like he’d found something in her that he never anticipated. She made him want to disrupt his schedule. She made him not care so much about being at the bar every night.
He didn’t feel quite so compelled to go out and check on the ranch personally every afternoon. He just let his foreman handle it.
What he wanted had been reduced to his little house. What he wanted had been reduced to Jordan’s arms.
And what surprised him was how okay that seemed.
He had consciously gone out of his way to never wind his life around another person’s.
To never need them. And he was skating perilously close to something he had always vowed he never would. He felt guilty about the things he’d said to Jordan when they’d first gone to bed together, but he stood by them too.
There were just some people that were better off solitary.
Some people who didn’t bend that well because they would just break.
And he was one of them.
He finally gave in and went to work after about a week of being at his place with Jordan, and it was a good thing. Because she was going to have to leave soon. She was going to have to go back to her job. Or maybe not. Maybe not. They hadn’t really talked about it.
But that will amount to her basically living with you.
He gritted his teeth. Sure. That wasn’t going to work. He did know that.
But one afternoon when he ventured down into town, he walked into the Western wear store and perused the stock. And inside he found a black suitcase.
Inside, the suitcase was lined with loud, retro cowboy art. Horses and men with six-shooters held high in the air. And it was funny. A little bit of hidden strangeness inside a sedate-looking bag. And it reminded him so much of Jordan he had to get it.
Which was how he found himself hauling a suitcase up to the house that night while he blew off his regular shift.
When he walked into the house, Jordan was standing at the stove, stirring a pot.
“Oh,” she said when he walked in. “I didn’t expect you for dinner. I have a cake in the oven but...”
A cake. She baked him a cake.
All over his house little touches of care were evident. All these things that she’d done for him.
You paid her to do them. Don’t go making it sentimental.
“I brought you this,” he said, shoving the bag toward her.
She blinked. “You... You brought me a suitcase.”
“Because the flowered one is all wrong. This is what you like. You don’t want anything as loud as that flowered thing.”
“You’re right,” she said, staring at him, wide-eyed. “I don’t.”
“It’s got... I mean it’s got cowboys inside of it.”
She blinked. “You shoved a couple cowboys in there for me? That was thoughtful of you, Laz, but you’re about the only cowboy I can handle.”
He unzipped it, and showed her the lining. “It’s just... It’s interesting inside. But you have to work hard to find that out. Like you.”
It was very strange, and he was pretty sure he was hovering around the edge of a romantic gesture, but having never actually done one before, he didn’t really know.
“Laz,” she said. “That is... The nicest thing. And... And you’re right. It is exactly what I want. It’s exactly what I would choose.” She let out a hard breath. “I love you. I just... I’m not expecting anything back. But I love you. And I needed to say it.”
Something went tight inside of him and twisted.
It was like the world had gone still and his heart along with it. Jordan. Beautiful Jordan who had turned his world upside down the first day she’d walked into his bar, loved him.
Not another man, but him.
And he had no response to it. There wasn’t one.
Not in the whole, dark well of pain inside of him.
“Right. Well. When do you start work back up again?”
She blinked, looking as if she’d been slapped. “I... Next week.”
“Are you any closer to finding yourself a place to stay?”
“No,” she said.
“How about above the bar. There’s a place up there you...you helped me use it one night. I can have it cleaned and it would be ready for you quickly.”
“You don’t... You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
And he realized that he was basically offering her a position as his kept woman. And he could have offered her that apartment from the beginning and he hadn’t. He had kept her close to him. Kept her with him, and now she was saying that she loved him.
And it didn’t escape him that he was keeping her close so that he could still access her. Because he was an absolute dick, and even while he realized that, he couldn’t stop himself from making the offer.
And he knew that she wouldn’t be able to refuse.
“I... All right,” she said. And she blinked furiously, trying to hide her hurt.
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He would never reject Jordan’s love. He couldn’t do that. But he couldn’t have her living in his house and he couldn’t make her promises that he didn’t want to keep.
That he couldn’t keep.
Except he kept feeling like didn’t want to was closer to the truth, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise.
He didn’t want to hurt her. Not for anything.
But he wanted things to keep working the way that he wanted them to. “I’ll help you move in as soon as it’s clean.”
“Well, thanks. You gave me a suitcase.”
And he remembered the words from an old movie, twisted to suit the moment. She’d given him her heart and he’d given her a suitcase.
And he didn’t do anything to fix it.
“What kind of cake is it?”
“Chocolate,” she answered.
“Great. You need help with anything?”
“No. I’m fine.” She swallowed hard and nodded, and he felt a cloud of guilt. And he didn’t do anything about it.
And that was how things changed between them again. Not with shouting or screaming or anything like that. Just with a suitcase and the throat full of unspoken words.
And that was when Laz realized that he really was his parents.
And he knew there was no way that he could explain that to her. Because that wasn’t something he did. He wasn’t the one who shared.
He gave advice. And that was it. And he didn’t quite know what to do with being at a loss.
Except keep on down that road.
So that was what he did.
CHAPTER SIX
JORDAN HAD BEEN wrestling with feeling like she’d been gutted alive for the last few days. All the while that Laz had that apartment fixed up for her. And all the way up to moving day.
But she didn’t say anything. Even though she should have. Even though she wanted to. She didn’t say anything when she packed up that suitcase that he brought her, that brief, shining evidence of the fact that he knew her, followed by a devastating strange sort of half rejection.
