Page 98 of The Vet from Snowy River
She eased her head back. ‘Is that what inmates do in prison? Make licence plates?’
‘That and throw bundles of burning toilet paper out of their windows.’
She took a sip of her wine, and his heart eased a little as some of the worry left her face. ‘I see movies have formed the basis of your vast knowledge of the Australian prison system. You do know Wentworth hasn’t homed prisoners since the 1920s?’
‘Come closer.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t deserve this, Josh. I don’t deserveyou.’
‘I’m not some stuffed koala that you just won at the fair, Vera. I’m making my own choices, here. And I’m choosing you.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
He kissed her again, on the corner of her mouth, beneath the tiny red stone she had clipped to her ear, in the groove of her throat where her pulse beat.
‘It doesn’t have to be simple, Vera. It just has to be real. Kiss me, and you tell me if what we have feels real to you or not.’
‘God help me,’ he heard her mutter and then her lips were on his, and it took less than a second to work out he hadn’t been imagining anything back at the waterhole. Being kissed by Vera was like being doused in hot sauce and set on the grill.
She moaned and he hauled her in closer so he could wrap his arms around her and let himself feel every inch of her pressed against him.
‘So soft,’ he murmured, feeling the curve of her back, the swell of hip beneath her woollen dress.
Vera was vulnerable. Everything she’d told him—her dying aunt, her dobber boss—warned him to go slow, slower than pitch. But when her breathy little moan reached his ears, he forgot his good intentions.
She moved above him, twisted, her mouth fused to his, sending sparks of lightning into his brain.
‘Vera,’ he said, her name like a prayer.
Her hands slid beneath his shirt and swept up his back and the tide of lust that swept with it nearly blinded him.
He pulled back until her eyes, green and glittering, met his. ‘Is this real for you, Vera? Because if it’s not, if you want me to stop, now’s the time to say so, sweetheart.’
‘Don’t stop, Josh Cody.’
He bit his lip. Heaven here on Vera’s couch, his for the taking, but darn it, he wanted more. He wanted trust, and confetti, and oval-faced sons who aced cooking classes at school.
‘I’m not a one-night stand, Vera. Don’t use me to scratch your itch. If we’re doing this, we’re really doing this. Sex. Coffee dates. Holding hands in public. Listening to gossip about us until our ears bleed and promising each other to see this thing through.’
Those green eyes didn’t waver. ‘I still don’t want you to stop.’
So he didn’t. He dived back in, his heart in his mouth, and the future he’d hoped for finally within his grasp.
If heaven was a moonlit bed with a naked Josh sprawled across it, and her tucked snugly into the furnace of his musclebound chest, then she’d died happy.
Happy and full and soft.
She pressed a hand to her chest, to where the great icy chunk of worry usually lived, and it wasn’t there. All that sunshine and optimism and strength of his had somehow chiselled into her breastbone and released all the angst she’d had stored up like permafrost.
Bits of him had chiselled in elsewhere, too, she thought with a smirk.
Deliciously.
More delicious than anything she could whip up in a month of Sunday baking. How had she been so dense to not let this man into her life sooner? He’d been supportive when she’d told him her great shameful secret, not horrified. He hadn’t tried to distance himself or back out.
He’d embraced herandher shady past.
She burrowed her face into the smooth curve of his shoulder while hot tears of relief leaked from her eyes. She hadn’t known relief could feel so overwhelming. So necessary.
