Page 34 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
He laid her out before him, without a single scrap of clothes on her body. Then he found his way between her legs so he could hook her knees over his shoulders.
Then he settled down on his forearms, slid his hands under her butt, and proceeded to make her shatter.
Over and over and over again.
This was only one of the terrible things about Knox Carey.
There were many. But the utter, easy delight he took in licking into her, tasting her, indulging himself in her, was quite possibly the very worst.
No wonder she was addicted. No wonder she’d found the need to create sobriety programs to try to keep herself on the straight and narrow where he was concerned.
The man was dangerous. He seemed to know the things her own body could do whether she knew it herself or not. He used his mouth like it was a weapon and a love song, and he coaxed her over that edge again and again.
He used his talented fingers to play with her, to tease her. He thrust deep inside of her with one finger, then two, finding that spot there on the inside and then using it against her—deliberately making her scream.
And she knew better than to tell him she couldn’t take any more, because he always seemed to see that as a challenge.
A challenge he had yet to lose.
Tonight he proceeded to show her why and how he would always win. Until she was limp and half laughing, half sobbing there before the fire. He kissed his way up her torso, lavishing attention everywhere. From her inner thigh to her navel. From one hip bone to the other. This time, when he found her breasts, he kissed them and left her shivering, slightly, as sensation wound its way through her.
But when he got to her face again, he only smiled. He took his time kissing her, and then he rolled to his feet.
Then he simply picked her up off the floor, hoisting her up in his arms as if she weighed about as much as one of the throw pillows.
Ramona wasn’t a giant of a woman, but she’d hit five foot eight in the sixth grade. She wasn’t tiny, either.
Yet Knox always made her feel as if she was a precious little object he could tuck away in his pocket and keep safe, if she liked.
Ramona had always liked.
She snuggled into him as he carried her, breathing in that scent of his. No longer the cold night he’d brought with him when he’d come to her door, but his particular scent that she knew as well as she knew her own.
Now she also knew what it was like for her own body to smell entirely like him. When she’d taken a shower here in her own home, this morning, she’d felt a strange pang of something a lot like grief when she’d come out of the shower, dried herself off, and realized that she had washed away the spicy fragrance of his shampoo. The bold notes of his soap, like pine sap and rich earth.
She could smell that on him now, in the warm crook of his neck, but beneath that there was the scent that was just him. And something else that always made her think of towering mountains, braced against the endless sky. There was something expansive about inhaling this man.
It made her feel as if she was both tiny in his arms and at least a hundred times her own size inside.
He carried her into the bedroom, and, once again, she was so happy that she’d converted this upstairs space. When she’d arrived it had been little more than a few jumbled attic rooms someone had tried to throw together into an apartment for her grandfather’s carer in his last days.
It had been chilly and unwelcoming and, frankly, depressing. She didn’t know who had lived up here, but she doubted very much that they’d enjoyed it.
Now the main bedroom was a festival of soft, inviting ease. She had a king-size bed and thick rugs to keep her feet from being cold when she walked around. She had a cozy reading nook and an office area behind a glass door—a former closet—where she could do actual work if she liked. All this and a view of Dallas Lisle’s mountain lighthouse on the far ridge in front of her, rising up like a beacon of hope and folly at once.
The bed was piled high with softness. Layers of linens, comforters, pillows. The first time Knox had seen her bedroom, months after the first time they’d gotten together downstairs on an air mattress, he had actually stopped and stared.
I’m not sure men are allowed in a place like this, he’d said with a laugh. It feels like some kind of temple.
They shouldn’t be allowed, she’d agreed, but then she’d smiled. She’d taken his hands and pushed him back into the particular cloudlike softness of her specially selected mattress, and her previously most dangerous addiction, that being bedding that could give Michelin-rated resorts a run for their money.
He might have been a tough cowboy, but he’d been an immediate convert.
And now he lay her in the middle of all that frothy, airy featherdown sweetness. Knox didn’t move his gaze from her as he shrugged out of the flannel shirt he was wearing and the long-sleeved T-shirt beneath it. Then he shoved off the rest of his clothes like they were in his way, leaving his jeans and his long johns and his winter socks in a pile on the floor.
Then he crawled toward her, his eyes gold with intent. And he was so wired into her that she felt his gaze like a shower of sparks beneath her skin.
And Ramona thought about the vows she’d made—and had broken repeatedly already, out there in her living room. In her kitchen before that.
