And his orgasm ripped through him like a freight train. He lost it. Completely. Didn’t have a chance to warn her, nothing.
He opened his mouth to apologize, but she moved away from him, a satisfied smile on her lips.
And he felt... Unmanned in a way he hadn’t, not even when they’d made love those first two times. He felt exposed. Robbed. Like she could see the innermost parts of him, and he didn’t like it. Because he didn’t like those things. How could he ever expose her to them? How?
He shut the water off, and all he could hear was the sound of his own jagged breathing, and he liked that even less.
He hauled her up off the floor, and kissed her. Kissed her deep and hard, because at least it blotted out that raggedness in his breath. At least it swallowed up the sound of his beating heart.
Covered up those jagged pieces in him that were starting to show no matter how hard he tried.
Was this it in the end?
Did you break?
No matter how hard you worked to keep yourself together?
Could you only go through so much of life being made of fragments so loosely pressed together?
And he had lost.
Lost the reason why he’d started any of this. Lost his defenses. And what he wanted to do was surrender, because he didn’t feel like he had the strength to keep on pushing her away.
He took them both out of the shower, and wrapped her in a towel, drying her off.
By the time they were in his bedroom, by the time they were back to the bed, he was hard again. He opened up his bedside drawer and got out a box of condoms. And she took one out, her face filled with near-comical concentration as she tore the packet open and rolled the protection over him. And then, with the same look of fixed determination, she put her hand against the center of his chest and shoved him back on the bed.
“It’s about you tonight,” she said.
And she mounted him like he was a bucking bronco, that same fixed expression there, all stubborn and uniquely her, as she lowered herself down onto his erection.
Then her mouth fell open, soft and feminine, her head dropping back, her hair a wet cascade down her back, over her breasts. “Jake,” she whispered.
Like a prayer.
His name.
Because she wasn’t just any woman, and he wasn’t just any man.
She was Callie.
Strong and fierce and the person he cared about most in the world.
Giving him the greatest pleasure he’d ever experienced.
She flexed her hips, all those well-developed muscles in her thighs taking them both on a race to the finish that took his breath away.
His heart was thundering fast, his every muscle tense. And when he exploded, he dug his fingers into her hips, hard, his orgasm like a raging fire that seemed to ignite hers. He pulsed inside her, and her slick body squeezed around him like a fist.
And for a moment, everything was blank. Black. Void of anything and everything except for feeling. He was bleeding with it.
Hemorrhaging.
This bright white sensation of heat and fire and flame. This overwhelming blanket of need.
It was suffocating. Then somehow... Also the first real breath of air he’d taken in more years than he could count.
And when it was over, she collapsed against him, curled herself firmly around him. And everything in her body language told him something he didn’t even need to ask.
She wasn’t going to leave him. If he wanted her out of his room, he was out of luck. He would have to leave.
But he felt exhausted. Undone.
And it was easier... So much easier to just lie there with her. To let her curve her soft, warm body around his. To feel that warm weight of her against his chest.
And for the first time in his life, Jake Daniels shared a bed with a woman all night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE NEXT MORNING, Callie woke up sore but happy.
What had happened between her and Jake last night had been a revelation. A new step, just like she’d hoped.
He had stayed with her. In bed. All night.
She grinned when she woke up, looked across his broad chest at his profile. And then she kissed him. On the cheek.
He stirred slightly, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “Good morning,” she said.
“Morning,” he mumbled.
“See how much more convenient it is when we share a bed?”
She proceeded to show him all the perks involved with the arrangement.
And that was how it went for the next few days.
She did her best to ignore the fact that the time was ticking on their marriage. Tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter. They busied themselves with chores around the ranch, and he kept to his end of the bargain. Instructing her on the minutia of riding saddle bronc, and not overprotecting her. Instead, he gave her solid advice, and good training. And when it was done, they would eat dinner together. Sometimes she would cook, sometimes they would get food at a restaurant. And they always ended up back in bed together. They didn’t talk about it, though, and that bothered her a little bit. Because they were friends, and it was a strange thing that the deeper they got into this physical relationship, the harder it was for the two of them to talk.
He had also not eaten the cookies that she had made him five days earlier, and they hadn’t discussed it all.
The Christmas cheer of December faded into a gray January, but it was all just fine as far as Callie was concerned, because she was with Jake.
And it was beginning to become obvious that the words she was avoiding thinking in her mind were there whether she gave them voice or not. But they filled her, invaded her limbs, soaked down to her bones, flowed through her blood.
That it just was. In everything she did. And in the shifting tide of what she thought about. What she wanted.
It was an odd thing, because a few months ago she would’ve seen it as a failure. To want something—anything—more than success in the rodeo would be heresy. But now, she felt like she could see it clearly for what it all was. She had used the rodeo to avoid dealing with certain issues that she had. Certain things in her family. And once she had begun to break those things apart, once she had stopped erecting barriers inside of herself, limiting herself when it came to certain things, telling herself stories about what she could be, who she was and what she was allowed to be good at, the scope of what she wanted began to get broader.
The scope of who she was was widening, and her dreams along with it.
It was easier to love a sport than to love a person. Easier to pin all of your goals on something like that. Because it was just the luck of the draw with horses. A rodeo ride just went the way that it did. Caring about a human... Well, you weren’t going to be able to strap on a saddle and try to subdue another person. They had to be willing to meet you where you were. And the risk in that was... The risk in that felt terrifying.