Page 39 of The Reckless Rookie

She watches me do it. And she laughs.

Not mean. Low and warm and delighted, up from her chest, the laugh nobody else on this ranch ever gets out of her, and she’s laughing at me, at a grown man white-knuckling a countertop to keep from rushing her.

“You look like you’re defusing a bomb,” she says.

“I’m going slow.”

“You’re vibrating.”

“That’s slow. For me. This is what slow looks like from the inside: you have no idea what I’m overriding right now.”

“I have some idea.” Still grinning, she takes a fistful of my shirt, gentle, the same grip that started all of this in a barn, except now it’s easy, now it’s fond. “You’re trying so hard. It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m not saying it again, so.”

“Say it again,” I tell her. “The sexiest-thing part.”

“Do something about it and maybe.”

So whatever slow I was white-knuckling toward goes straight out the window, because she said do something about it, and she’s in that dress.

I turn her around, and she goes, laughing low, and the laugh catches into a breath when I sweep her hair off her neck to one side. It smells like shampoo, clean and green and ordinary, riding underneath the whole worked day of her, and it does something to me it has no business doing.

I put my mouth to the back of her neck where she’s warm and let my hands trace down her slowly, learning the shape of her through the soft dress. Her waist. The length of her spine. The curve at the small of her back. Lower.

She presses back into me.

“Catt.”

“Mmm?”

“That is not helping.”

Her laugh comes again, quieter this time. “I wasn’t trying to.”

Liar. I ease her forward onto her forearms over the counter.

Then I take one second. Just one. The heels. The dusk-colored dress. Her bare shoulders. The line of her bent over the place she runs her whole damn life from.

I run both palms up the backs of her thighs, and she shivers.

The dress goes with my hands, higher and higher until I push it over her hips. Her laughter disappears. So does mine.

I hook my fingers into her panties and take them down slowly, and she steps out of them without looking back. I touch her.

She’s already wet, and the first brush of my fingers makes her push back into my hand like she’s been waiting for exactly this. Which she has. Weeks. Same as me.

“God, Catt.”

Her head turns enough that I can see one side of her face. “What?”

“You know what.”

My fingers move again, and her breath catches, and that’s all it takes to wreck whatever smart thing I was about to say.

I lean over her, my cock hard against the back of her thigh, and she rolls her hips into me deliberately. My eyes close.

“Jesus.”

“Problem?”