Page 112

"Owen Royston, I swear⁠—"

He kissed her and she quit swearing.

Duke put his head over the stall door about eight inches from Owen's ear and blew.

"Take me in the house," she said, laughing at both of them.

"No."

She got her head back and looked at him.

"It's four in the afternoon."

"It is."

"The doors are open, Owen."

"They are," he said, and got the rest of her buttons.

She was going to argue about it. She got as far as opening her mouth and then his hand was inside her jeans and she put her forehead down on his collarbone instead and held on to the front of his shirt with both fists.

"There's a road right there," she said, into his shirt.

"There is."

"Anybody could come up it."

"Nobody's coming up it." He got two fingers into her and his thumb working and she stopped talking about the road. "And if they did, they'd know whose truck that is out there, and they'd know what I'd say about it, because I've told the whole county already. So you can quit worrying about the doors."

"I'm not worried about the doors."

"No," he said. "You're not."

She came against his hand with her face in his neck and the tin ticking overhead and her boots braced in the chaff, and when she got her head up her face was hot and she was laughing at herself and he was watching her do it.

"Tell me you've got something on you."

"Truck."

"The truck is forty feet away, Owen."

"It is." He went and got it.

She got her boots and her jeans off while he was gone, which took longer than she wanted and involved a fair amount of swearing at a barn floor, and she was sitting on the hay stacked against the tack room wall in her shirt and nothing else when he came back through the door. She watched him stop in it.

"Don't just stand there."

"You're in my hay," Owen said, and shoved the barn door in about a foot, which was as far as he was willing to go about it, and came at her.

She got his belt open and got him in her hand, and he put his forehead against the boards over her shoulder and said something that wasn't a word. Then he sat down in the hay and pulled her over him.

She took him in slow, all the way down, with her hands on his shoulders and her knees either side of his hips.

"Liv."

"I know."

"Liv—"