Cowboy in Colorado (Fifty States of Love)

by Jasinda Wilder

  I finally have to fix my eyes on his. “You’re not built to survive without me?”

  “I don’t know how else to put it.”

  “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.” I shake my head, try to breathe normally. “You can’t put your survival on me, Will.”

  He just shrugs. “Like I’ve said, I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  “How can you even…think that? Feel that? We were together barely twenty-four hours.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And you think you…” I almost laugh, trying to get the words past my teeth. “You think you love me.”

  “Tell me you haven’t been struggling with the same thing.”

  I breathe another giggling laugh. “I’ve been struggling with something, yes.”

  “And you’ve been calling it hating me.”

  I sigh. “I wish it was that simple. Hating you requires strong enough feelings and a connection to that hatred, and I don’t feel that way.”

  “You don’t want to have any feelings for me.”

  “No, I don’t,” I agree. “I want to forget everything that happened.”

  “But you can’t.”

  I shake my head. “No. I can’t forget any of it. I can’t pretend the whole experience on your stupid ranch didn’t…change me, somehow.” I suck in a breath. “I’ve been all over the world, hobnobbed with celebrities and the world’s most powerful politicians, bought and sold and developed hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate. I’ve seen and done a lot of crazy, weird, scary things in the name of business. None of it has ever affected me the way that day on your ranch did. And I don’t know why. Or, rather, I want to pretend I don’t know why.”

  “But you do know.” Will’s voice is soft, quiet, gentle.

  I nod. “Yeah. It makes no sense.” I can’t breathe as I force words out of my mouth that have been percolating in my soul for months. “I mean, how does it work? What caused it? Was it the near-death experiences? Was it riding through the storm? We barely spoke to each other, and when we did most of it wasn’t even all that cordial. Was it the sex? Amazing, yes, I admit it. Just from a purely physical standpoint, that was the best sex I’ve ever had, and it was one quick fuck. I’ve had foreplay last longer than the whole experience, but something about it was just…I don’t even know.” I laugh again, another hysterical cackle. “What was it? Why are you so fucking stuck in my head? Why can’t I forget you? I can’t even masturbate, Will! I’m going crazy, absolutely nuts. Since that night with you I haven’t been able to find any kind of release. I couldn’t even begin to think about picking up a guy for some random dick, because it’s just—I just flat out know it won’t happen, I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with anyone.” My voice drops below a whisper. “Because he wouldn’t be you, and there’s something about you that’s just…stuck inside me, head and heart and body, that I can’t dislodge.”

  “I have no explanations, Brooklyn,” Will says. “I just know I’m tired of fighting it.”

  “Me too.” I turn my eyes up to his. “So what do we do?”

  He stares down at me, and his big deep wild blue eyes are as filled with conflict as I feel. “This,” he murmurs.

  His huge rough hands cup my cheeks, and he kisses me.

  14

  The kiss tears me apart.

  It’s not a rough, demanding kiss. It’s not a sexual kiss, it’s not fervor ridden.

  It’s soft and sweet and slow and sensual, beginning with a touch of his lips on mine, damp and warm and feathering against my mouth with skittering fragility. It builds gradually, as I get over the surprise of it, and slowly accept that he is in fact kissing me, and that I do in fact like the way his mouth feels, the way his lips taste. His tongue slithers into my mouth, and I have to accept that this, too, it is good and right and exactly what I need. Because, as the kiss builds, I find I do need it. It’s precisely what I’ve been craving this whole time—before the sex, even. A kiss, just like this.

  My whole life, I’ve been craving this very kiss.

  His body is around me, over me, surrounding me. His hands cup my cheeks and make me know that I am held, that I am treasured. That I am his. Ludicrous, I know. But there it is—a truth I fear, a truth whose veracity I cannot deny. He takes ownership of me with the kiss. When I open my mouth to his, it’s a surrender. I melt against him. I sink against his body and surrender to the delicacy of my soul, and accept the fact that under my ice and armor I’m made of porcelain. I could have lived my entire life without this kiss, without this man—I am strong, and I would have been okay. I do not NEED him. But…

  I need him.

  I don’t know how to explain how you need someone without needing them—that I’m complete on my own, but incomplete without him.

  I don’t know how to explain that it happened at first sight, overnight—instantly.

  That it took months of loneliness and frustration and waking up aching with need and burning with a secret—that I missed him, that I wanted him, that I craved him.

  How to put it all into a kiss? I couldn’t have done it, but Will found a way.

  All that I can’t explain, he explains without using a single word, with his lips on mine, with his hands on my cheeks, with his breath tangling in mine, with his body pressed against me.

  When neither of us could breathe any longer, could last another second without combusting, without pausing for breath, Will rips his mouth from mine and stares panting into my eyes.

  The fire in his wild blue gaze is the spark that ignites the conflagration. The match in a room full of dynamite.

  I snarl, a wordless noise somewhere between a scream and a moan—a sound of pure sexuality. I feel something snap inside me, something integral to my emotional objectivity shatters.

  Will’s eyes widen, and his hands slide down from my jaw, his thumbs coursing over my throat, the pad of one thumb pausing on my frantic pulse, and then down, down, to the tender flesh at the base of my throat, and then he’s clutching my shoulders and pulling me against him, and now this kiss, this meeting our mouths—this one is purely sexual.

  The first kiss was him telling me how he felt in a way he never could in words, and me finally accepting in myself that I feel the same, and that it will take us a both a very, very long time to figure out…

  But, in the meantime, something far more urgent crackles and sparks between us—

  The pent-up, denied, repressed need between us, the violence of our need for each other can be ignored no longer.

  I slam my mouth slantwise across his and inhale his scent, suck his tongue in my mouth, and moan at the frenzy of his desperation in return. His fingers claw into the fabric of my blouse, and mine tangle in the cotton of his shirt. He kisses me, and I fight to take over, to prove that I’m kissing him. The battle which ensues is one of teeth on lips and tongue against tongue, breath for breath. I care for nothing but the ravenous desperation to feel his skin, and so my fingers, knotted in his white shirt, do the work of my need without being told: I rip his shirt open. Bared, his skin is hot under my hands and his muscles shift like those of a prowling predator. I paw at him, seeking more and more, palms roaming his shoulders and back, abs and waist, reaching his belt. While he’s fumbling at my blouse, seeking the buttons, I yank the giant silver buckle open and whip the belt off with a loud thwack, tossing it aside. I find the zipper of his jeans, the button of his fly, then yank his jeans open, and freed of the imprisoning denim, his manhood springs upright. I break the kiss and stare down at it, laughing under my breath at the beautiful sight of the massive thing. Straight and thick, pink and lovely with vibrant pulsing purple veins, bulbous head bulging, sac heavy and tight against him, it strains toward me, begging me to touch.

  To hold, to stroke, to pet—

  To kiss.

  To devour as thoroughly as I have his mouth.

  He’s still fumbling with obvious irritation at the buttons on my blouse, and with a growl, he does as
I did—rips it open, sending buttons flying. I say nothing of the fact that it was a custom blouse worth over a thousand dollars, because I simply don’t care. Instead, I arch my shoulders forward and let my arms dangle so the ripped-open garment slides off and flutters to the floor at our feet. He makes much shorter work of my bra, and this he has no need to ruin—he simply yanks it upwards, ignoring the clasps, and just tears it up and off with abrupt force, leaving my breasts jouncing painfully.

  It’s going to be a battle for supremacy, I think, this encounter. He won the last one, and I’m not giving up so easily, this time. I have desires that go beyond letting him have his filthy, beautiful way with me. I have no clue how this is going to help our situation, and I don’t care. So what if he thinks he’s in love with me? So what if I’m in love with him? The denial preventing me from admitting to myself that I am in love with him broke when we kissed the second time, and now I can’t ignore the truth of it. I don’t know how to love a man; I don’t have time in my life for love, for a man, for monogamy or a relationship or any of that bullshit. Never needed it, never wanted it, yet here it is live and in the flesh. Will is putting his mouth to my nipple, licking and flicking and swirling his tongue, and I gasp at the wet warmth on the sensitive, erect nub of nerves.

  Love.

  What the hell am I supposed to do with being in love?

  Hell if I know.

  I don’t even care, not at this moment. I’ll care later, I know. The bill I’m racking up right now will come due, and I know it.

  Right now, all I care about is sating the furious, frantic, throat-clogging, heart-stopping, core-shivering desperation I’m feeling for everything that is Will Auden—specifically, Will Auden’s body.

  More specifically yet, his cock. The big beautiful organ standing hard in the V of his open jeans. I wrap one hand around it, exhaling in pure unadulterated delight.

  “I’ve been dreaming about this,” I whisper.

  “You have no idea,” he rumbles. “Haven’t slept for shit, because every moment of sleep is nothing but visions of you.”

  “Same here,” I whisper. “I fought it for so long, trying not to think about you, trying to pretend I’m not crazy aroused by the mere thought of you, but I couldn’t. When I finally gave in and tried to touch myself while thinking about you, I couldn’t reach climax. Because thinking about you, fantasizing about you—it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be. Nothing will ever make me come again.” I have to look at him, have to meet his eyes as I force the admission out. “Nothing except you.” I slide my greedy fist down his length. “Except this.”

  His eyes close, seemingly against his will. “God, Brooklyn.”

  “That’s what scares the absolute shit out me, Will.” I rest my forehead against his bare, panting chest. “One of the many things that scares me stupid—that I’m suddenly and entirely dependent on you for something so simple and so necessary as an orgasm.”

  “Necessary, huh?”

  I laugh breathlessly. “You don’t even know, Will.” I rub my thumb over the tip, and he shudders. “I need so many orgasms.”

  “How many?”

  “Per day?”

  He laughs, eyes opening, but when he meets my eyes, he realizes I’m not kidding. “Wait, you’re serious?”

  I bite my lip and nod. “I don’t have sex every day, because who the hell has time for that? And I don’t even masturbate every single day.”

  “You don’t?”

  I shake my head. “No, I tend to go a few days until things have built up to a problem, and then I’ll just—two, three times in a day, sometimes more, if I haven’t had actual sex recently.”

  “Don’t talk about having sex with other guys while you’re touching me.”

  “The problem was always that no one could ever hold my interest longer than a few hours,” I say. “No one ever has. That’s why being so—so obsessed, it feels like, with you over the past few months has been so freaking impossible to handle.”

  “That I understand entirely.”

  “You know what’s weird?” I say, still slowly and somewhat distractedly stroking him.

  “What?”

  “How we tend to have more conversation while engaged in sexual activity than not.”

  He laughs, a strained huff. “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe because when we’re not doing anything, we’re too tensed up to think straight. And then when we are doing things, we’re loosened up enough to actually talk, but we’re still trying to distract ourselves from thinking about how…how intense things are, or are going to be, or…” he trails off.

  I pause, my hand wrapped around the base of his erection. “So you think I’m making conversation to distract myself? For what? To avoid something?”

  He nods. “Something like that.”

  “What would I be avoiding?”

  “What you really want, deep down, that you’re scared of letting yourself have.” His eyes are honest, brutally honest with their emotional conflict. “Same reason I ran after we had sex that first time. I wanted you again the second we were done, and I wanted to fuck you face to face, no looking away, no avoiding the intensity of it. I wanted to…to stay in that cabin with you forever, or at least until we got tired of fucking.”

  “I don’t know if that’s possible, given the way I feel right now,” I whisper.

  “Same,” he says. “I think that’s what we’re both scared of. Giving in, all the way, to this thing, and…”

  “Never getting out, and never wanting to get out of it, and then losing it, somehow?” I suggest.

  “Yeah.” His eyes drop from mine. “That’s why I ran. Rather fuck it up before it was anything instead of letting it happen and fucking it up later, when losing you would destroy me.”

  “So…for this to work, we’d just have to trust each other.” I let him go, because as much as I want to feel him and touch him and explore him and taste him and make him growl my name and lose control, this was deeper than sex. “We’d have to believe that no matter what happens, there’s no way to lose each other. Nothing we could do would fuck it up so bad that we lose everything.”

  He nods. His eyes are rife, fraught, bared. “I’m not an emotional guy. I’m not good with words, most of the time. I’m selfish. I’m stubborn. I’m blockheaded and I don’t look at the big picture, or consider how my shit affects others. I’m more than a little obsessed with horses, and I’m a workaholic.” He stops, swallows hard. “But goddamn if I’m not the most loyal man you’ll ever meet. Once I’m yours, I’d be yours come hell or high water, Brooklyn, and there wouldn’t be a thing on this planet that could tear me away from your side.”

  I choke. “And you say you’re not good with words?”

  “What? I’m just telling you the truth.” His brow is furrowed; I doubt he realizes how beautiful and poetic that was.

  “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. And I’m not big on romance.” I feel something wet dribble down my cheek. “Why the hell are you so damned good at making me cry?”

  He reaches up, brushes my cheek with a thumb. “I’m not trying to,” he whispers softly.

  I tilt my head backward and blow out a breath. “Dammit.”

  He pinches my chin and tugs my face down so I’m looking at him. “Don’t hide it from me, Brooklyn. This won’t work if we hide, if we let fear win.”

  “I don’t know if it’ll work anyway,” I admit. “I don’t know how to be in love.”

  “Me either.” He shrugs, shakes his head. “We just have to be real. Give me the truth, good or bad, and don’t hold back.”

  “I don’t know how to hold back,” I say. “I’m…um, kind of hotheaded.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he says, smirking. “You’re a tiger. No taming you.”

  I shake my head. “No. There’s no taming me. The worst thing you could do would be to try.”

  “Absolutely the same. I have to have
room to be me. Ask my parents or my sister about that.”

  Silence, for a moment.

  “Where do we go from here?” I ask.

  He lets out a breath. “I can’t go another damned second without you. Only reason we’re having this conversation right now is because it’s the one thing in existence that could take precedence over getting inside you as fast as possible.”

  “We’re in my office,” I point out.

  “I don’t care. I’ll muffle you when you scream.”

  “I don’t have condoms,” I say, “and, for the first time that I can remember in my adult life, I’ve lapsed on my birth control.”

  “I’ll pull out and come on your belly.” He slides a hand over my belly, tracing lines on the flesh around my navel, painting a picture of where his seed would go.

  “That never works.” I swallow hard. I want him, need him, cannot go another second without him any more than he can go another moment without me.

  “Then what do you suggest?” He reaches for the zipper of my skirt. “Because going somewhere ain’t happening. I can’t wait that long, and I don’t think either of us are exhibitionists.”

  I reach past him and open a desk drawer, and withdraw a small black remote. I press a button and the windows of the office darken to an opaque tint.

  He laughs. “Neat trick. Probably cost a mint.”

  I shrug a yes; his eyes follow the subtle sway of my breasts at the movement. “No idea actually. My dad built this building.”

  He looks around—you can still see outside, but it’s darkened inside to nearly midnight blackness. “No one can see in?”

  “Nope.”

  He sighs, his eyes hungrily raking over my bare chest, hands scraping up to greedily caress my breasts. “I fucking need you, Brooklyn.”

  “No condoms, no birth control, and pulling out is too risky.” I shake my head. “I need you too, but we can’t have sex.”

  He growls. “I won’t last long enough to pull out,” he admits. “Need you too much, been dreaming and fantasizing about this for too long.” He meets my eyes. “So what do we do?”