Page 40 of Parading the Cowboy Billionaire (Bluegrass Ranch 4)

“I think I’ve been wishing you’d kiss me every day for a month now,” she whispered, stepping into that space and putting her hands flat against his chest. “You’re feeling like you know me better now?”

“Yes,” he said. “A lot better.”

“You still like what you see?”

“It’s about more than liking what I see,” he said, frowning. “That’s the point of getting to know you. I know we have great chemistry. I want to feel like I know the woman I’m kissing, not that I just think she’s gorgeous.”

“I know,” she murmured. Her fingers curled up behind his head, weaving through his hair. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know you better too, Cay. The real you.”

“Yes,” he said, ducking his head but pausing with a couple of inches between his mouth and hers. His eyes drifted closed, and his pulse picked up. “The real you, and the real me. No masks. No pretending.”

“No pretending,” she murmured, and Cayden closed the distance between them and kissed her.

A wave of heat rolled over his shoulders, especially when she lifted up onto her toes trying to get closer to him. He dropped his hat and ran his fingers through her hair, every cell in his body firing exactly right with this woman in his arms.

The chemistry was definitely explosive between them, but Cayden slowed the kiss in the next moment, glad he’d slowed everything between them so he could have a truly meaningful kiss with the woman he was starting to fall for.

12

Ginny had been kissed passionately before. She’d been kissed by men who proclaimed to love her. She’d kissed men she’d said she loved.

None of those men or those kisses even held a candle to Cayden Chappell. There was simply something else about him that existed on a higher level. He kissed her with his hormones, then his head, and finally his heart.

When he pulled away, he immediately touched his mouth to her neck and said, “We’ll be late if we don’t go in the next sixty seconds.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice barely audible above the pounding heartbeat in her ears. So she wouldn’t be part of the problem—Cayden really didn’t like being late—she stepped out of his arms and bent to pick up his cowboy hat. It was a tough thing to do in those heels, but Ginny had decades of experience wearing such shoes, and she accomplished the task without too much difficulty.

She handed him his hat and asked, “Do you want to come back here for lunch today? I can whip us up something decent.”

“I’d love that,” he said.

“Your brothers won’t miss you?”

Something odd crossed his face, and then he shook his head. “It’ll be fine.”

“Okay.” She laced her arm through his as he passed, and she leaned on him to get down the steps without falling. “I want to hear all about your visit with your mom this morning.”

“I can do that,” he said. “I also have a list of contractors for you. I can bring that over.”

“Perfect,” she said, smiling at him as he opened her door and helped her into the truck. Nerves clawed at her during the fifteen-minute ride to the chapel, and Ginny had only felt like this on a handful of other occasions.

Once when her mother had transferred all the legal ownership and responsibility of Sweet Rose Whiskey onto her. Once when Phillip Carlson had proposed. A few times when she’d encountered her father in one of his drunken rages.

The feelings came from fear, and while Ginny had learned to tame them over the years, she also knew they couldn’t be boxed up and thrown away.

Fear had to be faced and dealt with.

“I’m scared,” she blurted out when Cayden pulled into the parking lot at the little white chapel. The steeple reached high into the sky, piercing the blueness of it with a gold-tipped top.

“Of what?” Cayden asked, and the question was so sincere that Ginny’s trust for him grew.

“I don’t go to church,” she said. “Everyone’s going to be looking at me. I’m going to have to talk to people I don’t know. I don’t know the songs, or how to pray, and—” She cut off, hearing the panic as it lodged in her own ears.

“Do you feel like you don’t belong here?” he asked, reaching over and taking both of her hands in his. They immediately stopped winding around one another, and she looked at him. If he was nervous, it certainly didn’t show.

“Yes,” she said. “I know I don’t belong here.”

He looked out the windshield at the church. “Everyone belongs here. Everyone belongs to the Lord.” He said it without a waver or a stutter, and Ginny had a hard time disbelieving him. “Everyone comes to the Lord on their own terms,” he added. “We’re all new once.”

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