The Maisey Yates Collection : Cowboy Heroes: Take Me, Cowboy / Hold Me, Cowboy / Seduce Me, Cowboy / Claim Me, Cowboy / The Rancher's Baby
Almost every day of my life. Because I am industrious, and red-blooded, and self-sufficient.”
He cleared his throat, trying to ignore the shot of heat that image sent straight through his blood. Anna. Touching herself.
What the hell was happening to him? Well, there was nothing happening. It had damn well happened. On the couch in Anna’s living room.
He could never look at her again without seeing her there, obeying his orders. Spreading her thighs for him so that he could get a good look at her. Yeah, he could never unsee that. Wasn’t sure if he wanted to. But where the hell did he go from here? Where did they go?
There were a lot of women he could have sex with, worry-free. Anna wasn’t one of them. She was a rare, precious thing in his life. Someone who knew him. Who knew all about how affected he and Sam had been by the loss of their parents.
Someone he never had to explain it to because she’d been there.
He didn’t like explaining all that. So the solution was keep the friends that were there when it happened, and make sure everyone else was temporary.
Which meant Anna couldn’t be temporary. She was part of him. Part of his life. A load-bearing wall on the structure that was Chase McCormack. Remove her, and he would crumble.
That was why she had always stayed a friend. Why he had never done anything like this with her before. It wasn’t because of her coveralls, or her don’t-step-on-the-grass demeanor. Or even because she’d neatly neutered the reputation of the guy she’d slept with in high school.
It was because he needed her friendship, not her body.
But the problem was now he knew what she looked like naked.
He couldn’t get that image out of his head. And he didn’t even want to.
Same with the image of all her self-administered, industrious climaxes.
Damn his dirty mind.
“Okay,” he said, taking a step away from the door. “Why don’t you come out?”
“I’m naked.”
“So am I.”
She looked down. “So you are.”
“We need to talk.”
“Isn’t it women who are supposed to require conversation after basic things like sex?”
“I don’t know. Because I never stick around long enough to find out. But this is different. This is you and me, Anna, and I will be damned if I let things get messed up over a couple of orgasms.”
She chewed her lower lip. She looked...well, she looked young. And she didn’t look too tough. It made him ache. “They were pretty good ones.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. It’s just that all of this is a little bit weird. And I’m not really experienced enough to pretend that it isn’t.”
“Right.” The whole thing about her having been with only one guy kind of freaked him out. Made him feel like he was responsible for some things. Big things, like what she would think of sex from this day forward. And then there was the bone-deep possessiveness. That he was the first one in all this time... He should hate it. It should scare him. It should not make him feel...triumph.
He was triumphant, dammit. “Why haven’t you slept with anyone else?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I told you. I didn’t really think my first experience was that great.”
“So you just never...”
“I’m also emotionally dysfunctional, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
A shocked laugh escaped his lips. “Right. Same goes.”
“I don’t know. Sex kind of weirds me out. It’s a lot of closeness.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he pointed out. It felt like a weird thing to say, though, because what they’d done just now had been the epitome of closeness.
“It just all feels...raw. And...it was good. But I think that’s kind of why it bothered me.”
“I don’t want it to bother you.”
“Well, the other thing is it was you. You and me, like you said. We don’t do things like this. We hang out, we drink beer. We don’t screw.”
“Turns out we’re pretty compatible when it comes to the screwing.” He wasn’t entirely sure this was the time to make light of what had just happened. But he was at sea here. So he had to figure out some way to talk to her. He figured he would make his best effort to treat her like he always did.
“Yeah,” she said, finally pushing her way out of the bathroom. “But I’m not really sure there’s much we can do with that.”
He felt like he was losing his grip on something, something essential, important. Like he was on a rope precariously strung across the canyon, trying to hang on and not fall to his doom. Not fall to their doom, since she was right there with him.
What she was saying should feel like safety. It didn’t. It felt like the bottom of the damn canyon.
“I don’t know if that’s the way to handle it.”
“You don’t?” she asked, blinking.
Apparently. He hadn’t thought that statement through before it had come out of his mouth. “Yeah. Look, you kissed me yesterday. You gave me...oral pleasure earlier. And now we’ve had sex. Obviously, this isn’t going away. Obviously, there’s some attraction between us that we’ve never really acknowledged before.”
“Or,” she said, “someone cast a spell on us. Yeah, we drank some kind of sex potion. Makes you horny for twenty-four hours and then goes away.”
“Sex potion?”
“It’s either that or years of repressed lust, Chase. Pick whichever one makes you most comfortable.”
“I would go with sex potion if I thought such a thing existed.” He took a deep breath. “You know there’s a lot of people that think men and women can’t just be friends. And I’ve always thought that was stupid. Maybe this is why. Maybe it’s because eventually, something happens. Eventually, the connection can’t just be platonic. Not when you’ve spent so long in each other’s company. Not when you’re both reasonably attractive and single.”
She snorted. “Reasonably attractive. What happened to me being a damn miracle?”
“I was referring to myself when I said reasonably. I’d hate to sound egotistical.”
“Honestly, Chase, after thirty years of accomplished egotism, why worry about it now?”
He looked down at her. She was stark naked, standing in front of him, and he felt like he was in front of the pastry display case at Pie in the Sky. He wanted to sample everything, and he didn’t know where to start.
But he couldn’t do anything about that now. He was trying to make amends. Dropping to his knees in front of her and burying his face between her legs probably wouldn’t help with that.
He could feel his dick starting to wake up again. And since he was naked he might as well just go ahead and shout his intentions at her, because he wouldn’t be able to hide them.
He couldn’t look at her and not get hard, though. A new development in their relationship. But then, so was standing in front of each other without clothes.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, unable to help himself.
She wasn’t as curvy as the women he usually gravitated toward. Her curves were restrained, her waist slim, with no dramatic sweep inward, just a slow build down to those wide, gorgeous hips that he now had fantasies about grabbing hold of while he pumped into her from behind.