Page 49 of Mountain Target

“You think so, baby?” he growled, low and dangerous.

“I’m not small.”

“You’re small compared to me,” he growled. For a man his size, he moved fluidly. One instant he was leaning against the counter, relaxed, the next instant he was on her.

He was tall enough that she had to crane her head to look at him, but there was no fear. If anything, she felt the safest she’d ever felt with another human being.

As if her body remembered the way he’d held her—the way he’d refused to let her go.

So there was no fear, no concern at all, as he bridged those last inches between them. His lips crashed against hers and she opened her mouth, letting him in.

And as she did so, she waited for the disappointment to hit. Because she was a realist, and she knew no kiss could match that earlier kiss—a kiss which had been one hundred percent a product of the circumstances. A fluke. A once-in-a-lifetime context-is-everything meeting of two mouths. Never to be replicated, because people simply didn’t fit together like that.

Except … there was no disappointment.

And a part of her was confused, because this kiss was completely different.

That first kiss had been lighter, simpler, more gentle, and more tentative. Now, their lips and teeth met harshly, and there was pain and pressure and urgency, and Val registered all this, just before she stopped thinking altogether and gave herself in to the moment.

And just when she thought the pleasure couldn’t climb any higher, Beau groaned against her mouth, a groan that resonated deep inside her, making her clench her thighs together.

Beau was the one who moved back first, gasping. “Need to breathe,” he groaned, which made her laugh, because her lung capacity must be half of his, and she felt no such need.

“I don’t want to breathe,” she said, leaning into him, delighting in the way his hands were holding on to her upper arms, in a hold that should feel bruising but felt too much like coming home.

“How long do we have?” he finally asked.

“Long enough to see where this takes us.”

“I’d like to take you out to dinner,” he said, and she could feel, in the stiff lines of his body, just how much he was trying to control himself, to give her a way out.

But she didn’t want a way out. She didn’t want to be wined-and-dined, she just wanted to know if this pressure, this heat between her legs, could last, when her orgasms were often so elusive, and it was so hard to capture them when she lay down in her own bed and chased one.

She went on tiptoes, her breath hot and heavy against his ear. “I’m not hungry for dinner,” she said. “I’m hungry for this.”

She knew the moment he lost the battle he’d been fighting. His fingers grappled against the zipper of her sweatshirt. She raised her hands to help him with the next layer, a warm thermal. As it came off, she realized she didn’t remember what bra she was wearing, was relieved to see a flash of black.

Her black bras were all okay. It was her old white, cotton bras that she wouldn’t want to be caught dead in—certainly not by a man, and not on their first time together.

But it wasn’t her bra that he was staring at—drooling at, almost, to tell the truth—and she’d never felt this powerful before, because his hands were shaking as they approached her creamy globes.

Time seemed to slow as she took in his calloused hands, his thick, blunt fingers ending in clipped, square nails. They were the sexiest hands she’d ever seen.

Her breath caught.

Please pinch my nipples.

It wasn’t something she could say out loud—one simply didn’t ask for such things—but he seemed to read her mind. His large hands covered her breasts, weighing the flesh firmly, and then finger and thumb of each finger pinched her nipples through the bra, until they were stiff peaks staring straight at him.

“Fuck, Valentina. Your tits could poke my eyes out.”

She realized he’d never called her Val. Everybody called her Val, but he always used her full name, and it made her feel almost like a different person.

Her fingers tangled in his short hair, pulling, grasping. She stopped, horrified, when he gave a sharp, involuntary gasp, and realized she's touched him right over the stitches she herself had applied.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's ok,” he breathed. “Come here.”