Page 88 of Rancher's Return

He wanted to feel.

She clung to his shoulders, shouted out her climax, and he followed behind her. It wasn’t only physical pleasure, it was something more. Something deeper. Something that left him feeling scarred. Ravaged.

And he wanted to feel it. The pleasure, the pain, all of it.

He wanted this.

He wanted it. But he didn’t want to look too far ahead.

But he didn’t know what to do with any of it, so he just clung to her.

Chapter Seven

They got up and made dinner—an unholy combination of cheese, crackers and summer sausage.

They brought it into the living room and sat by the fire. All the lights were off, the only glow coming from the fire. The house felt quiet and dark. Empty. She’d never been here before without the whole family filling it up. Not without Reggie cracking jokes and Marcus quietly egging him on.

Without her little half siblings running around, their feet heavy on the floor and her mom and Buck talking and laughing together.

Her and Colton navigating around each other like ships dodging sharp rocks.

But their family wasn’t here.

And they were.

All of today had been a strange thing. Wonderful. But...sad in some ways.

She could feel something desperate coming from Colton, and she couldn’t quite get a read on what it was.

She was beginning to come to terms with the fact that they were going to have to deal with this. Deal with each other.

Deal with the fact that it was still love.

She had realized that in the shower, with him inside of her. And maybe that was ill-advised for a woman who had been a virgin until yesterday, to go calling sexlove, but for them, it had always been love.

From the day they had met.

It didn’t matter if anybody else would be able to see it. Nothing mattered except how they felt about each other.

But she could sense that there was real fear, turmoil, going on inside of him.

She also knew that just because you got something good, just because you had a good thing, didn’t mean you couldn’t sometimes profoundly miss what you might have had. She’d spent the first seventeen years of her life with her wonderful mother, and then her family had expanded, and still, she had gone looking for her father. Colton had been denied a family for so long. Of course he must feel... He must feel terribly incomplete in some ways still.

She looked down at her plate, and she tried to figure out what to say. But she realized she only really had one thing left to say.

“I love you,” she said.

He froze.

And she knew she had made a mistake. How was it that she always chose the wrong moment, the wrong words, with this man?

Was this her punishment? Her karmic debt that she had to pay? She had broken his heart, and so now he was going to break hers?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t. Don’t apologize.”

“Well, what else am I supposed to do when you look at me that way?”

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