the dark on a big, scary night.
She knew lightning wasn’t going to come snaking inside the rock overhang and get her. It wasn’t chasing after her.
But an irrational fear was just that—an irrational fear.
And she’d been battling this one since she was a little girl and had gotten caught in her tree house during a big storm. No one had known she was there, and she’d stayed well hidden inside of it, huddled into a little ball, shaking and crying like she never had in her life. Her mother’s face had gone absolutely white when she realized her daughter had been in a tree during a lightning storm. To Paige, it had seemed like it had gone on forever, like no one would ever come and save her, that the lightning would surely reach out and get her at any moment.
“I was playing outside when I was five or six, and a storm came, and I took shelter at the closest spot, which turned out to be my tree house,” she finally admitted.
“Oooh,” her cowboy sympathized.
“Yeah, not the best place to be during a storm. It was awful, and it seemed like forever before anyone found me.”
He held her tight as she lay draped over him, bracing for the next boom of thunder. His hands moved gently over her shoulders, trying to soothe and work out some of the tension there. She snuggled closer, her face pressed as far into the curve of his neck as she could get it, the reassuring rise and fall of his chest beneath her, the beat of his heart, steady as could be, thumping against one of her ears.
“I could tell you a story,” he whispered.
And she grinned despite her fears. “Thank you, but I’m not five years old anymore. Besides, I never got bedtime stories. I got songs. My mother used to sing us to sleep.”
“Okay, I’m definitely not singing. You don’t want me to sing.”
“Then…I guess there’s not much else you could do,” she said, thinking it came out sounding like an invitation more than anything else.
Oops.
She didn’t mean it that way.
Honestly, she didn’t.
So what if he was here? She was here. The storm was here. And it was going to be a long night.
He took her face in his hand, eased back away from her, just enough that he could look her in the eye and said, “Let’s just try one kiss, Red. Okay? One. And we’ll see how it goes from there.”
Well, if he thought she was going to fight him off…
No, he knew she wasn’t going to do that.
Just let go, she told herself. It’s just one night, just one kiss.
He let his mouth settle over hers, firm and sure, insistent and yet moving like a man who had all the time in the world. She opened herself up to the kiss, to him. To the heat and the pleasure, falling into it.
Some men just knew how to touch a woman, when to linger, when to blaze forward, when to tease and when to take.
He knew.
He devoured her, and she let him, helped him as best she could, with long, hungry kisses and hands that roamed restlessly across his chest, his shoulders, his back, into his hair, trying to get even closer.
She wasn’t altogether sure how she got there, but she ended up straddling his lap, her hips in his hands, her breasts crushed against his chest, wishing she didn’t have a stitch on.
And it all happened as fast as a fire roaring out of control.
“Damn, Red,” he said, lifting his mouth from hers long enough to catch a ragged breath.
“I know.”
Maybe she’d just been alone too long, gotten too caught up with her work and her family and all of its craziness. Had forgotten to make time for Paige, the woman, with all a woman’s needs.
Because this felt very much like need.
He kissed her again, used his hands on her hips to draw her into a rhythm against him that was both arousing and maddening through their clothes.
If he’d laid her down on the hard ground right then and started stripping her clothes off, she didn’t think she could have stopped him. She was so aroused already he might not even have to take her clothes off her. If he just kept doing what he was doing, which now included a hand slipping beneath her sweater and her shirt and that little nothing camisole of a bra to her breast, his mouth on her neck…
Her whole body gave a shudder.
The things he was doing to her neck…
He laid her back against that hard ground, settled himself heavily, but still fully clothed, on top of her, pushed up her clothes and took her nipple into his mouth and sucked hard.
“Trust me, Red,” he muttered. “Just trust me. Everything will be fine.”
Chapter Four
Paige slept like a baby.
Blissfully, heavily, completely unaware of anything, until she woke to the same sound of pounding rain and howling wind of the night before. If anything, it might just be worse.
And she was alone.
She sat up, wiped her hair from her face. It was flying around everywhere this morning, escaping from her braid. Her shirt and her camisole were bunched up under her sweater, and she straightened those, her cheeks filling with heat at just how that had all happened. And her jeans were unbuttoned, unzipped.
And she couldn’t say she was sorry at all.
They hadn’t actually had sex.
Not quite.
But he certainly had taken care of her.
She’d felt like the whole world exploded quite happily inside of her, with nothing but his mouth and his hands, and felt bad that he hadn’t let her do the same for him.
But he’d said he wanted her in a nice, soft, warm bed, in a nice, warm bedroom with all the time in the world to do this right. He didn’t want to be rushed. He didn’t want to be worried about the storm or a flood, and he kind of liked the idea of her owing him.
So there it was.
She owed him.
And planned on happily making good.
Lord, what a man!
Then she remembered the money thing. Paige’s family had serious money. And clout. And history.
Men could get weird about it.
She hoped her cute cowboy didn’t get too weird about it. Ranch hands lived simply, most of them on very little, and usually had a healthy disdain for the world in which Paige’s family lived.
She
