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“I will throw you gently.”

I laughed, and he did too, a rough, broken thing that disappeared into a gasp when I touched him again.

When I finally moved behind him, he went very still.

“Okay?”

He nodded into his arm, but I kept one hand against his hip and watched him, giving him every chance to change his mind. He didn’t. If anything, the impatient movement backward was unmistakably Max.

We both stopped for a moment once there was no distance left between us.

I wasn’t sure how long we stayed like that, my hands on his hips and my chest pressed against his back where it could reach, the two of us breathing in the dusty quiet with a horse shifting somewhere on the other side of the wall. Long enough for my ribs to file another formal complaint, and long enough for Max to turn his head against his arm and look back at me, hazel eyes gone dark and unguarded and so open it hurt to meet them.

I thought of the clearing, of that first step I’d taken toward him and the way his whole enormous body had gone rigid while he waited to see if I’d keep coming.

He was doing it again.

Waiting.

“Still here,” I told him.

Then I moved.

Afterward, neither of us moved for a while.

My forehead rested between Max’s shoulder blades while I tried to remember how lungs worked, and judging by the way he was breathing, he wasn’t doing much better. Somewhere inside the barn, a horse shifted in its stall, and the ordinary sound was so completely at odds with what had just happened that I almost laughed.

Instead, I kissed the warm skin beneath my mouth.

“You okay?”

A laugh moved through him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing.”

Max turned carefully, and I moved with him because my ribs had apparently decided sex was acceptable but changing position afterward constituted reckless behavior. “I’m very okay,” he said.

“Good, because I’m not sure my ribs are up to doing that again immediately.”

His expression changed at once, and I pointed at him before he could open his mouth.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

“My face is concerned.”

“Your face is about thirty seconds away from telling me I shouldn’t have done that.”

Max grinned. “You probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“I knew it.”