Page 12 of My Cowboy Bodyguard

Leo

She tastes like summer and sunshine. Like a smile and blue skies. Like she was meant to be mine. I drink in the softness of her lips and I’m drowning in her heat, sparking, then burning.

My hand spreads across her lower back, pulling her into me. Her tits crush against my chest and still, it’s not close enough. I lower my hand to her firm ass and push her against me, against the throbbing hardness of my cock as I grind into her.

Amanda moans.

“You like the feel of me?”

“Yes.”

I grip her ass cheeks and pick her up from the floor.

She wraps her legs around me and I walk us toward my bed. “Wild and savage, the first time. That’s how I’ll take you. But if you don’t like it say the word and I’ll stop.”

“Take me that way and a dozen other ways,” she says.

“I’m so fucking hard for you that it hurts.” I drop her onto the mattress then strip my shirt off. I turn to toss it onto a chair.

Her eyes widen. “Your back,” she says with a cry torn from her.

I forgot the marks of survival that are there. The contact from steel-toed boots. The belt buckles. The scars from stitches I got from a broken beer bottle hurled at me.

I was the boy who hurt, the boy who bled, the boy who took the blows so the girl he draped himself over didn’t have to.

“What is this? What happened to you?”

“Nothing.” I straddle her on the bed, but she sits up, almost nose to nose with me, her eyes full of anxiety.

“Wait, Leo.”

“Did I move too fast?” I ask, backing down her legs.

“No…it’s… your scars…” She puts a hand on her forehead. “They look familiar. It would be too good to be if it were true.”

“What are you talking about?”

She dips her hand into her shirt and pulls out a necklace. “I might be mistaken, but do you recognize this?” She opens her hand.

A ladybug. No, not just any ladybug. One I recognize. The one I gave my broken angel years ago.

“How…” I run my fingers across the initials of the name I used to have. I don’t know what to think. What to feel. A wall ofemotions races toward me. Emotions I buried deep when I lost her.

“Are you….” I can’t even say that name out loud.

She’s sobbing, tapping the center of her chest with her open palm. “It’s Sammie. I’m Sammie. They changed my name.”

Grief. Anger. Love. Pain. Somuchgoddamn pain. My hand trembles when I reach to touch a strand of her hair. It’s her. I guess my heart knew even when my brain didn’t.

“You’re Alex, aren’t you?”

A name I haven’t heard since I left that place. A name I want to leave behind.

“You saved me,” she sobs and buries her head against my chest. “You kept me alive so many times. I didn’t get to say goodbye…I thought I lost you forever.”

I close my arms around her and let her cry.

I’ve spent years searching for her, hoping she was okay, losing weight and sleep wondering about her.

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