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The sun shining on him, he grabbed his shirt and stripped it off, and she had been thrown into a world of heat, lust and other things she didn’t understand. She had been incapable of looking away from him. Mesmerized by how muscular his body was, even at seventeen.
She had done her level best to never really look at him again when he had taken his clothes off. Which he did, with fairly alarming frequency, because that sort of thing just didn’t matter to him. And her seeing it didn’t much matter to him. So she had endeavored to make it not a thing.
But she was looking now. Even with his skin covered by the shirt. Not only did her heart hurt, but something began to hurt a little bit between her legs, and she wanted to turn away from it and him, and she found that she couldn’t. She became unbearably conscious of her mouth. She slipped her tongue out to lick her lips.
She noticed his eyes lower quickly, then look back up at hers. He took a step toward her and she scrambled backward, tripping over the feed bucket and starting to go down. He reached out, grabbed her arm and pulled her up, which brought her hard up against his body.
And she was sure that he could feel her heart beating against his chest as well as hers. She was sure that he could read her mind, and it made her angry, becauseshecouldn’t even read her mind right now.
Can you not? Or is this the thing that you try so hard to never name?
Is this the thing that made you feel sad after your date? That made you feel insecure about what you were wearing?
Is this the thing that you decided you didn’t want to understand all the way back when you were sixteen because you knew that it would destroy every good thing?
“Doc,” he said, his voice husky. And he put his hand on her face. His hand.
Big and rough and on her cheek, his thumb sliding across her lips, all rough and calloused. His fingertips moved along the line of her jaw down to the center of her chin, and she found herself closing her eyes. And the sound escaped her mouth. A harsh, needy sound that wasn’t quite like anything she’d ever heard in her life, much less heard come out of her.
But it felt so good. This moment. This touch. It wasn’t like anything. He wasn’t like anything.
She could feel his breath on her face, and she would’ve said that that was...something she wouldn’t want. Because who would want it? Except, sharing air with him was like something special she had never known you could do with another person, and she wanted to lean into it. Into him. To explore the inevitability of what was closer than that. There was only one thing she could think of.
Her eyes snapped open. He was right there. His blue eyes intense as he looked at her.
He was the most beautiful man in the world.
She felt that then. With a certainty, deep down in the pit of her stomach. She had avoided ever acknowledging that.
She had always felt proud of him. Like he was something special. But she had gone out of her way not to acknowledge that he was attractive.
She had deliberately put blinders on herself. Had created spaces in moments where she automatically looked away, because looking at him would make it undeniable. And she had never wanted that.
The hell of living in a world where she knew that Lachlan McCloud was beautiful. She had never wanted to subject herself to that. Because she had him. And he was her best friend in the entire world. They had each other, in that sense.
And she had always been happy to have him be the sort of opposite, wonderful, external expression of the wildness that she was always too afraid to tap into herself. But she had been happy to leave the concept of that wildness as gauzy. The past few weeks, he kept making it specific. Bracing.
The words that he chose to use scraped up against a sensuality in her that she had always tried to ignore.
She knew the mechanics.
She knew the mechanics, but she had gone out of her way to not understand what drove people to have sex with each other, even when it wasn’t a good idea. Even when they weren’t in a relationship. Even when it might ruin something. Yes. She had gone out of her way to never know that.
And standing there with him, she thought she might know. Because if the moment was a grenade, she was very close to pulling the pin out and seeing what would happen.
You aren’t brave enough to pull the pin out. You aren’t strong enough. You don’t know what you’re doing.
No. She didn’t.
So she put out her own hand and touched his face, just like she had imagined doing earlier. His whiskers were rough underneath her skin, and she mimicked the move he had just made, dragging her thumb over his mouth. The answering response in her body was a shock. The piercing arrow that shot itself up between her thighs, a pang of need that she had never experienced before in all of her life.
Danger.
Only earlier today had she seen the danger.
And now she felt like she was being swallowed whole by it.
His lips were warm and like velvet. Hot still, in spite of the water droplets. And she felt frozen just then. In this moment. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to breathe. She wanted to stand there with her hand on him and let her body acclimate to the feeling. To the moment.
