Like signing a legal document made their friendship change and it shouldn’t.
It’s not just that...
She couldn’t lose focus. This was about her. About finding her place, making her place. Forcing them to...to accept her.
“This has nothing to do with what happened earlier tonight?”
His voice was low and smooth and far too calm. And damn him for asking that.
“Nothing happened earlier tonight.” She stared at him, and she felt her face getting hot. She was grateful for the cover of darkness, because she was absolutely sure that she was blushing.
“Oh, is that right? Nothing happened earlier?”
“We went to your family’s house,” she said stubbornly. “You gave me a present.”
And that was when he reached out and grabbed hold of her hand, almost like she’d done earlier, but different. Assertive. He kept his eyes on hers, glittering in the darkness. He slid the tips of his fingers along the inside of her wrist, down her palm, all the way to her fingertips. His skin was rough. The hands of a man who did ranch work. Familiar hands. Because she knew men like him.
Cowboys.
But they didn’t touch her like this.
Like this.
He was her friend. He wasn’t supposed to touch her like this.
Like what?
She knew. That was the problem. She’d been trying to pretend that she didn’t. Trying to pretend that the small moments of eye contact, these moments that left her insides shaking, weren’t something mystifying. Something that was maybe nothing. A disturbance in the air, rather than a disturbance coming from the innermost core of her being.
And why was he...?
He liked those shiny women. Those pretty women.
He liked easy sex—he’d told her that.
Just then, an arrow of awareness shot right between her thighs. Because she was looking at him, and he was touching her, even if barely, and she had just thought that word.
And about him. Having it. And she’d said all kinds of things about sex and what-have-you earlier, but they hadn’t been touching. And she’d been pretending that...
It was too much. It was overwhelming. And yet, she found that she couldn’t move. He turned his hand, and laced his fingers through hers, tugging her closer. There was still a healthy amount of distance between them, but he was hanging on to her, and he was looking at her. Like a dance that was frozen, neither of them willing to be the one to make the next step. The breath in her lungs was frozen solid. She wanted to run from him, but she also didn’t want to move. Because she didn’t want the moment to pass. She didn’t want now to become later. She just wanted to sit in this. Because it was dangerous, enticing, but also one of the nicer things she’d ever felt in her life.
It made her body feel less like an enemy, this moment. Less like something to be subdued. She had been trying to teach her body all kinds of tricks. All kinds of things over the last few years. Make it stronger. Make it faster. And this... She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what any of it was about. She didn’t know what any of it meant. But her body seemed to know what to do.
This felt like instinct.
The rodeo might be in her blood, but this felt like it might be coming from her very bones. From her soul. And it was the strangest sort of right, and at the same time it felt outrageously, dangerously wrong.
Jake.
It’s Jake.
And that jolted her. Brought her back to reality. Because she was standing there, touching her best friend. Like that. And he wasn’t pretending, and neither was she. And it had to stop. One of them had to be sane.
She jerked her hand away. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with that.”
“But it’s there,” he said.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
He took a step away. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. But to be clear, we are about to go see your family, who does think this is a real marriage. So it’s not like being with my family. I’m going to have to touch you. Because that’s what I would do with my wife.”
She shivered. And then she found she couldn’t stop shivering. Because her sweat had cooled off, and now she was freezing. And that was why. It wasn’t because of anything else. It wasn’t because he’d touched her hand. It wasn’t because he was making her question all the things she thought she knew about herself. It wasn’t because she was afraid. Because she couldn’t afford to be afraid. She had to be stronger. She had to be better and faster. She had to be fearless. And one... Dang stupid cowboy couldn’t make her afraid.
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“You can’t even handle holding my hand,” he said.
“I’m not used to it. That’s different. I’ll be able to do it when it’s time.”
“You have a lot of confidence, Callie Carson, and I have to tell you, it seems to be misplaced.”
“Misplaced?”
“You think you know everything. You think you know a whole hell of a lot. But at this point, you’re just writing checks your ass hasn’t even tried to cash. You think you can do saddle bronc because you’ve done some practice runs. You think you can pretend to be my wife just because you do.”
“Fine. If you need me to prove it.”
And she took two big steps toward him, flung her arms around his neck, went up on her toes and planted a kiss on his lips.
CHAPTER TEN
CALLIE HAD NEVER been kissed before. And she’d been about to lay one on his mouth and pull away. But then his arm went around her waist like a vise, and whatever control she had slipped away. Because he put his forefinger underneath her chin and held her face steady as he angled his own, changed the slant on their mouths and slid his tongue past her lips.
She gasped, because it was so strange. So slick, and it made her... Everything in her body went tight. Muscles that she’d never been aware of before—and she was pretty sure she was aware of all her muscles before this moment—rippled. And she could feel the moment spiraling away from her. Turning into something she didn’t recognize. Turning into something she didn’t understand. She could feel the control getting farther and farther away from her grasp. As he kissed her, took it deeper. Took her to a place she hadn’t known existed.
Jake.
Jake’s mouth. Jake was kissing her. Really kissing her.
And she was letting him. She didn’t know what to do in return, so she was just letting him. And suddenly she realized her face was wet, because tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she didn’t even know why. She didn’t understand what was happening.