Page 35 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

And he laughed. Enticing. Husky. He made her feel like maybe she was wicked too.

And for the first time in a very long time, she didn’t feel like somebody’s wife or housekeeper or household manager. She didn’t feel like somebody’s mother. She just felt like her. Her, if she hadn’t been raised to fear everything, to hoard good things and be afraid of what might come tomorrow.

Just who she might’ve been. Who she wanted to be.

A woman. A woman with the capacity to desire perfection. A woman with the capacity to let herself hope.

All because of Boone Carson’s gloriously naked body.

And if that wasn’t a testament to the wonder of a perfect penis, she didn’t know what was.

And she hadn’t even touched him yet.

She put her hands on the hem of her T-shirt, fully expecting to undress herself, until his eyes met hers. “No.” The command, the denial, was rough and hard.

“That’s for me,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, her voice trembling slightly.

But she loved the command in his voice, and she didn’t want it to go away.

He took her hand and encouraged her into a standing position, and then he grabbed hold of the edge of her shirt and pulled it up over her head.

His nostrils flared, his eyes going hot. “You’re so beautiful. And I’m gonna tell you right now, I’m not going to have any pretty words for you. Just dirty ones. Rough. I’m not gonna write you poetry, because I just want you so damned bad. And that is the most flowery, beautiful speech I have. Everything else is going to get a lot harder. You okay with that?”

“Yes.”

Because it was poetry to her since it was said in his voice. Because the heat in his eyes might as well be a sonnet, and the music he called up within her a symphony.

He could say whatever he wanted. He could do whatever he wanted. It wouldn’t be wrong. It couldn’t be.

And he made good on his word. As the layers of her clothes came off, he affirmed her with rough, coarse speech that made goose bumps break out on her skin. Her husband was a cowboy. He’d used all manner of rough language. He wasn’t delicate when it came to words surrounding sex, but it was different from Boone. Because it was about her.

Because his language spoke to a level of desperation that healed something inside of her she hadn’t even realized had hurt.

This idea that she hadn’t been enough. That giving a man her body hadn’t been enough. That loving that man hadn’t been enough. That keeping his house, raising his children, managing his money hadn’t been enough. That if doing all that wasn’t enough to satisfy him, it meant there was a deep shortcoming within her she was never going to fix.

Boone made that laughable. He made it clear, so very clear, even to her, that the issue was Daniel.

Because if Boone could be reduced to trembling over the sight of her bare breasts, then maybe she was beautiful after all.

Then perhaps she wasn’t wrong. Then perhaps her husband was just a bad husband.

And she had been a good wife. It just hadn’t mattered to him. And never would, no matter what she did.

And so this weight that had been resting in the pit of her stomach from the moment she had found out about Daniel’s infidelities evaporated. And then Boone took her pants off. Her underwear. And she was naked in front of him. This man she had wanted for so long, for whom her desiring had become as natural as breathing, so much so that she had managed to carry it around all these years, some days barely noticing it.

And now she could feel it. The way that it made her want to be wanted.

The cascade of all those years was suddenly pouring down over her, amplifying her desire. Her need.

She wasn’t embarrassed to be naked in front of him, because she knew she had been thousands of times in his mind, and she could see from the heat in his eyes he wasn’t disappointed. Far from it. And then he began to tell her. Just how satisfied he was.

And he was wrong. It was poetry. A field of dark desire dotted with bright, explicit daisies. And it was more than beautiful to her.

Because it was real. Because it was nothing held back. Because it was as honest a moment as she’d ever had in her life, and honesty was perhaps the biggest aphrodisiac of all right now.

Truth.

---