The point she broke off was the point where his hand landed on her hip. Her body softened in an instant, and swayed toward him. Her eyes widened and went dark. Since he was one step below, her mouth was level with his, and only an inch away. He could feel her breath cooling his lip. She didn’t attempt to increase the distance.
Good.
They’d gotten to this, at last.
He hadn’t been sure that they would, and her huge eyes told him it might already be more than she’d expected.
He anchored her other hip in place, to keep the rest of her where she was, and watched her lips press together, then part again. She had another, more determined and even more doomed attempt at saying what she’d wanted to say before. “While we were downstairs, I should have showed you the—” Then she stopped again.
“Just show me the bedroom.” His voice rasped, and the last word lost itself on her mouth.
Her lips were as warm and sweet as ripe fruit. They responded just the way he’d known they would. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look, he only wanted to taste and feel. She stayed in place, thighs pressed to his groin, which meant she had to know just what her body had already done to him.
Oh, yes, she knew! She was overwhelmed by it, but she knew.
Did she know that she’d begun to shimmy against him, too? Her hips slid and rocked, slid and rocked. The movement went just an inch or two either way, and was oh-so-slow, but it made him throb and want to lunge. Her breasts, in their thin covering of lace and stretch cotton, jutted softly against his chest and he imagined her nipples, pebbled as hard as he was, from the slow friction between them.
How would they look, her nipples? Puckered with need? Definitely! Big and dark, or dainty and pink? He didn’t care either way, he just wanted to know, see, touch and kiss.
“Show me the bed,” he said.
Without waiting for her answer, he deepened the kiss, tangling his tongue in her mouth. He tasted the fresh, sweet apple she’d withheld from the horses several minutes ago. He abandoned her hips and slid his hands higher, trailed his fingertips across her breasts and thought, “Yes! I knew it. Like cherry stones.”
She sank back with her spine arched. Suddenly she was seated on the wooden tread of the stairs, reaching up for him, eyes half-closed and hair threatening to tumble from its high knot. He went after her, chasing the taste of her mouth, chasing her body heat. He ended up bracing his fingers on the stair edge, his weight looming over her.
She pulled him lower. His face fell between her breasts and she gasped and threw her head to one side. He felt the heat-perfumed mass of her hair drift onto his hand. The soft mounds of her breasts against his cheeks and nose and lips felt like warm satin.
Her thighs parted and squeezed his ribs, half supporting him while he rolled a little. He slid her top up, clumsy with desire. Cupping her with one hand, he thumbed her hardened nipple, then replaced his thumb with his mouth, through a lace and net bra.
She dragged herself back, higher up the stairs, and held his face between her hands. Her eyes were still enormous, filled with a wild light and a soft flame of doubt. Throbbing, damming himself back, he realized she was still debating this. He pressed his lips together, struggling with a code of honor that said it had to be her own decision, made freely.
“Okay, I’ll show you the bed,” she said at last, on another gasp of air.
Her fingers feathered up his neck and into his hair and she stretched to kiss him, her mouth hungry and full of promise. Lucas discovered he was shaking, and that he hadn’t breathed for the entire time she’d studied his face.
They scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs, breathless. There were just two bedrooms built into the roof line, both of them small, and he had to duck his head through the low doorway of the slightly larger one. Beside a double bed covered in fresh white sheets and a faded patchwork quilt, Reba crossed her arms, pulled her tank top over her head and unsnapped her bra.
Both garments fell to the floor in a pale heap and she turned to face him, straight-backed, arms at her sides, giving him the sight of her bare breasts and peaked nipples like a gift. Her eyes were huge and her breath came in shallow pants.
And he knew so totally that she just—didn’t—do—this, she just didn’t bring men to this cabin to make love, on a regular basis, or ever. Letting her make the decision on her own wasn’t enough.
Not with a woman like Reba.
He knew what he wanted. Even if the corporation didn’t buy the ranch, he wanted a piece of it to take away with him. He wanted a piece of Reba Grant, her passion and her intensity, to take away with him in the form of his memory of how she’d feel in his arms, writhing beneath his touch.
But knowing what he wanted wasn’t good enough.
Instead of wrapping himself around her as he wanted to, instead of lifting her against him and pulling at her jeans, he allowed himself just one soft brush of his knuckles across those jutting gifts. They were fuller and rounder than he’d expected them to be, with the crests even bigger and darker than his imagination had painted them.
Then he placed his hands on the knobs of her shoulders, looked into her eyes and said, “Wait.”
She seemed to understand exactly why he’d stopped. Instead of taking it as a way out, however, or even giving herself any further pause for thought, she lifted her chin, looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes and said, “No.”
“Why, Reba?”
“Because I want this. And so do you. Don’t ask questions. Do me the courtesy of believing I know what I want.”
“I’m not offering anything beyond—”
“I’m not asking for anything beyond. This is now. That’s all. It’s more than I—way more than I expected, even an hour ago, but—” she made her hand into a fist over her stomach “—it feels right, here. It feels necessary.”
For another moment Lucas hesitated, and Reba felt the possibility of rejection slam into her.
Could he?
He couldn’t!
He wanted this every bit as much as she did. She knew that. He hadn’t denied it. The only way he’d reject her would be if some decent, chivalrous, protective instinct overcame him, and he decided that his making love to her right now was a favor she’d be better off without.
Despite the depth she’d glimpsed in him yesterday, Reba wasn’t convinced that a corporate prince like Lucas Halliday possessed any such chivalrous instincts. She certainly didn’t want him to possess them, right now. Gordie McConnell had them, and she was sick of them! Lucas was accurate in what he suspected about her narrow previous experience, and she didn’t want that to get in the way.
Yes, Lucas, you’re right, I’ve never done anything like this before.
Anything like this.
She and Gordie had made love, yes, but Gordie would never have done so in the middle of a working day, with no advance planning, in a location not previously designated as appropriate. And that burned her. So much about her life, and the crossroads she’d reached in it, burned her right now.
Dear Lord, she was nearly twenty-seven years old, she was about to have her home pulled out from under her like an old blanket off a horse’s back. She was going to make love to Lucas now—a rough analysis of her mental calendar told her it should be safe—and she’d think about the ramifications later. She was going to do this before something in her soul atrophied into dry wood and she lost the ability to even imagine a different life for herself, let alone go out and find it!
“There’s no doubt you know what you want.”