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“You want to fight about a truck,” he said. “Fine. Fight.”

“I don’t want to fight about the truck.”

“Then what, Savannah?”

I turned around. Three years of it was right there in my throat, and I’d been swallowing it so long it had teeth.

“Was it because of your father? Was it some kind of twisted revenge?”

His jaw locked. It was the first time I’d seen anything land on him since he’d walked out of the dark and taken my horse’s bridle.

“Your dad buried, and the one McGuire in town who showed up to the funeral takes you home.” My voice was shaking. I let it. “Nice little payback, right? Screw Jack McGuire’s girl and walk out on her before breakfast, the way my family walked your father off this place. Tell me I’m wrong.”

He held my eyes a long time. The fridge hummed. He swallowed once.

“Think what you want,” he said.

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s all you’re getting.”

I’d have taken a lie. I’d have taken him yelling. I’d have taken almost anything over that flat, closed-off voice and his eyes on my face like he was watching me bleed and letting me.

“Fine,” I said. “Then I’ll take what I want. You can walk out after. You’re good at that.”

I crossed the kitchen and grabbed the front of his cut in both hands and kissed him.

He made a sound against my mouth, rough and low, like I’d hit him. For one second he didn’t move. Then his hands came up and caught my face and he kissed me back like a starving man, deep and hungry, his tongue sliding against mine, his thumbs pressing in at the hinge of my jaw. The back of my legs hit the kitchen table. The salt shaker went over.

“Savannah.” He dragged his mouth off mine. His chest was heaving. “You don’t want this.”

“Don’t tell me what I want.” I shoved his cut off his shoulders. It hit the floor. “This is me using you. Tonight, and that’s it. Tomorrow you’re back in the spare room.”

His eyes were black in the kitchen light. I watched him look for the argument and not find it.

“Sit down,” I said.

He sat. One of my kitchen chairs, the ladderback that creaked, and he was too big for it with his knees spread and his hands braced on his thighs. I pulled my shirt over my head and dropped it on his cut. Unhooked my bra. His breath left him in a rush, and his hands curled into fists on his jeans, but he kept them there.

That was what got me. That he’d stay where I put him.

I unbuckled his belt. Popped the button on his jeans and dragged the zipper down, and he lifted his hips so I could work denim and cotton down his thighs. His cock sprang free, thick and heavy and already hard, flushed dark at the head. I’d had my mouth on him once. I remembered the weight of him on my tongue, and heat went through me so fast my knees wanted to go.

I got my boots off. My jeans. My panties went with them, and I stood there in my kitchen naked in front of him with the porch light coming through the screen, and I let him look.

He looked. God, he looked. Up from my ankles, taking his time about it, and every place his eyes went, my skin went hot.

“Christ, Sav,” he said, low and wrecked.

“Don’t talk.”

I straddled him. The chair creaked under both of us. I wrapped my hand around his cock and felt him jerk in my grip, and I dragged the head of him through my slickness, once, twice, until he swore through his teeth and his head fell back against the chair rail.

“Hands,” I said.

He brought them up. I took his wrists and put them on my hips. “There. Nowhere else.”

Then I sank down on him.