Page 17 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

“Zack?” I tried again.

He pushed my cardigan sleeve up to my elbow and sucked his bottom lip between his teeth with a sharp intake of breath. I looked down at our hands, perplexed. What the heck was he looking at? It was just a wrist. There were a million others exactly like it.

“It’s been a while for me. I haven’t done this since the accident.” His thumb traced the blue veins in my forearm, then rubbed feather-light over the tendons of my wrist before nestling in the notch of my palm.

“It’s all right.” The words came out all wispy. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, and all he had done so far was play with my wrist. Mywrist. “I’ll be gentle.”

He made a sound like I had amused him, but then he brought my palm to his mouth and scraped his teeth over the sensitized skin there, and when his eyes met mine over our joined hands, all I saw was fire.

“I wasn’t asking you to be gentle, Hannah,” he said. “I was warning you that I wouldn’t be.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh?—”

But then his mouth was on mine and who needed words, anyway.

I had long ago accepted that romance books took a lot of liberties with things like kissing. The world didn’treallycatch fire or melt away. Kissing was…fine. I liked it well enough, but if it went on too long, my mind drifted to things like work or my grocery list.

Right now, I couldn’t have found my way to the library with a map. But I had never been kissed like this before, like he needed my mouth more than his next breath. He kissed me like it wasn’t a precursor to anything, like it was the meal itself.

This wasn’t kissing the way I knew it. This was a devouring.

He backed me up, using his hips and legs to guide me while his hands unbuttoned my cardigan and slid it off my shoulders. The wall met my shoulder blades. I couldn’t get my bearings. We might have been in the living room or the hallway, I didn’t know. Everything was hot and liquid: his tongue sliding against mine, the swishy feeling in my belly, the sudden wetness between my thighs.

It was going to happen. This time, it was really going to happen.

But somehow just the thought of it, of orgasming with a man when I had never done that before, made the feeling recede like the tide pulling back the ocean. Frustrated, I balled my hands into fists and thumped them against his chest.

Instantly his mouth left mine.

He was breathing hard as he looked down at me, his mouth damp and swollen. “Do you want me to stop?”

That was the last thing I wanted. “No, I want—” I broke off on a huff. Explaining wouldn’t do any good and would put too much pressure on both of us. I didn’t need an orgasm, anyway. Not from him. I could take care of that myself. “I want to look at you. I want to touch you.”

“Yeah?” He raised an eyebrow and gave me that cocky little smirk of his. “Go on, then.”

I dragged my fingers down the front of his torso, feeling the curve and indent of each muscle beneath the thin fabric of his T-shirt as I went. When I got to the hem, I fiddled with it a moment, my knuckles ghosting against his skin above the waistband of his jeans. His breathing shallowed, his muscles fluttered, and it made me want to touch him even more.

“Hannah,” he gritted out.

“Hush,” I said. “Be a good boy and let me look at you.” With that, I pushed his shirt up and over his head.

Good lord.

I blinked, adjusted my glasses, and blinked again. I had seen him naked before, but the bunny slippers had distracted me, and he had been too far away for me to see the scars that crisscrossed his torso. Now he was right in front of me and I could see every violent, magnificent line. Most of his scars were silver from age, but a couple were still pink. The largest one curved under his left pec in a red swoop.

“My goodness, you’re beautiful.” I glanced up at him to find him staring down at me with an odd expression on his face. “Is something wrong?”

“Something is all kinds of wrong, Hannah,” he said on a half-laugh, half-groan. “Do you know what you’ve done to me? I see a lifetime of inappropriate wood in my future. Someone will betalking to a dog or a small child and saygood boy, and that’s it. I’ll be hard. Fuck.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He looked so perplexed and…god, I wanted my hands on him. “Will it hurt if I touch you? The scars?”

He made a strangled sound. “It can’t hurt any worse than younottouching me.”

I took him at his word and let my hands roam wherever I liked. Scars, muscles, the short, sparse hair that covered his chest, then picked up again below his belly button. I bit my lip as I trailed my index finger down the happy trail that disappeared into his jeans.

“Hannah,” he said roughly. “That lip ismine.”

He captured both my wrists in one large hand and pinned my arms to the wall above my head. His other hand dove into my hair, scattering the bobby pins that held my bun intact. His mouth came down on mine with a savage intensity that made me gasp. And then he bit my lip, just as I had done a second ago.

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