“Sit tight.” He felt her gaze on him as he jumped out and ran around to open her door, but hopefully she wasn’t watching so closely that she could tell it almost pained him to walk. Excited was an understatement. He was threatening to bust the fly on his jeans. It was almost embarrassing.
After she got out of his car, she took his hand. Something about the simultaneous simplicity and enormity of her supple fingers curling around his f**ked him all up inside, made something wild and protective ignite inside him.
Trust. She trusted him. Everything about him and his world was the opposite to her and hers, but she was willing to take this crazy gamble on him.
“What is it?” she whispered when he’d only stood there staring down at her like a dope for the last ten seconds.
He snapped out of it and shook his head. “Nothing.”
“You can come in,” she said, as if afraid he thought he wasn’t welcome now or something. She dug in her purse with her other hand and came out with a jumble of keys. Together, they strolled toward her first-story apartment door.
For a second, he hoped things wouldn’t get weird. Then he bitched himself out for acting like a little girl.
Of course things were about to get weird. He lived for weird.
But nothing prepared him for the “weird” that greeted him when Macy flipped on a lamp inside her place.
Okay, in all fairness, this was Texas and the country-and-western décor was, if not the norm, then pretty damn acceptable. But not among anyone he associated with. Everywhere he looked was leather and brown-and-white cowhide patterns. And the trophies. Jesus. She had a special lighted display case for them. He knew she rode horses a lot, but she must have been competing since she could walk to accumulate all of those.
Rows of them. Trophies. Medals. Framed pictures of her holding them as a snaggle-toothed little girl, then a gangly teenager, finally the gorgeous woman he knew. An older couple beaming with pride flanked her in most of them. Parents, probably. She bore a striking resemblance to the woman.
One picture in particular caught his eye. She was astride, turning a barrel in a cloud of dust. The photographer had caught the fierce, determined scowl on her face perfectly, and it didn’t do any favors for his current erection.
“I had no idea I was in the presence of the Queen of the Rodeo.”
“Obnoxious, isn’t it?” she asked, wrinkling her pert nose and tossing her purse on the pale leather loveseat.
“Oh, sure. Totally obnoxious,” he joked.
She laughed. “Well, I sort of…can’t bring myself to get rid of them. For a long time after I quit competing, I packed them away. I didn’t want to look at them, but in the end, I cracked. I guess it’s my inborn competitive streak—I have to have the reminder that I accomplished something. Silly, right?” She actually seemed to be blushing.
It was insanely sexy.
“I get it,” he said. “I feel the same way when I wake up and see the unconscious hookers and the tower of empty beer cans I built the night before. It’s so hard to let go.”
He struggled to keep the statement dead serious, and sure enough, he was gifted with an alarmed look from her wide hazel eyes.
Then, suddenly, she got it. Without him having to say a word or crack a smile, her body went off alert, and she laughed. “God, you’re bad.”
“So is there some reason why you quit racing?”
Her gaze flickered from the relics of her glory days to his face. There was a directness in that stare that threatened to undo him. “Candace never mentioned it to you?”
Racking his brain and coming up empty, he shook his head. “Nope.”
“I was competing in Conroe when I was eighteen. I’d just made the last turn when—I don’t know what happened. I don’t even remember. But apparently, something spooked my horse, and I was thrown. Cracked a couple vertebrae among a dozen other things. I was black and blue all over. Ten weeks in a brace, plus surgery and physical therapy…it was…scary. My mare, Sugar, broke her leg and had to be put down.” She nodded toward the picture he’d been contemplating earlier. “That’s her there.”
“Damn, girl.”
Her lip quirked. “After I came out of all that, I just didn’t have the fire for it like I used to. I still ride, still love it, but I’m way more cautious than before. In all things, I guess.”
“I can see how that would happen. Do you still have problems?”
“Sometimes. But overall I’ve been really lucky. Very lucky. So I don’t complain too much.”
He opened his mouth to say he found it pretty incredible she would even want to look at a horse after something like that, but then being pulled from the mangled wreckage of his parents’ car at six years old hadn’t made him swear off vehicles. Just the opposite, really. He spent his spare time trying to fix them. The bigger the job, the more he liked it. But he’d never be able to mold that shredded mass of metal in his memory into anything resembling an automobile, even in his dreams.
She had caught him. “Were you about to say something?”
“Just that”—he struggled to contain the emotion threatening to crack his voice—“maybe we can compare scars.”
There was little else he’d seen in his entire life more beautiful than Macy’s smile. Maybe that was because, now that he thought about it, it was a fairly rare thing. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine?”
He winked at her. “That and other things.”
The inquisitive way she was looking at him drove him nuts, made him desperate to know what was going on behind those pretty eyes. One thing he knew for certain: there were depths in her he hadn’t even begun to fathom. She intrigued him. Sorting her out would be no simpler than twisting that hunk of distorted metal back into mint shape.
“I’m going to get you used to me before it’s over, you know,” he said.
Her pink tongue swept across her top lip. Maybe her mouth was just dry, but he took it as an invitation. The tap dancing around each other was over. They were here. Alone. She was his and he was hers, if only for tonight.
“I’m getting a little used to you already,” she said softly as he stepped closer.
“Just a little?”
She gave a slow nod, never taking her gaze from his. “Mm-hmm.”
“It’s a start.”
Whisper-soft, he leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, savoring her intake of breath and the way it made her chest graze his. She was perfectly endowed. Way more than the handful most guys claimed was ideal—he’d always said f**k that; he liked the soft flesh to overflow his hands. He liked room to explore. Ample area to kiss and lick and suck. He didn’t discriminate based on his preference, but he rejoiced when he found perfection. She was it.
A whimper escaped her throat when his tongue flickered against her lips, questing for entrance. She gave it, allowing her hands to creep up around his neck. Her flavor exploded on his tongue, sweet and sultry as a damn aphrodisiacal fruit. God. He hadn’t counted on this gentleness. It was throwing him off, making him unbalanced. He groaned and sank his fingers into her silky hair, molding his palm to the back of her head. Reaching for the fire he knew was burning inside her, even if she was afraid to show it to him yet.