jaw clenched tight and her eyes reduced to slits and he knew he’d hit a nerve. That was good, because when she was angry with him, she wasn’t thinking of ways to seduce him. All those wicked ideas she seemed to have would only get her in trouble. It would get them both in trouble.
But she was so wrong. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with her.
She spun on her heel and headed for the door, but not before he saw something else in her eyes. He saw hurt. He’d wounded her pride, and he didn’t figure that was an easy thing to do.
He felt like slime for it, because he’d made her believe that he didn’t want her, that she wasn’t beautiful and sexy and everything any man could ever hope to find in a woman. Himself included.
“Nita, wait.” She was all the way to the stable door before he caught up with her. He grabbed her arm, stopping her in her tracks. She flung herself around, her eyes two purple balls of fire in the dim light.
“Get your hands off me.” She spit out a stream of curses even he’d never used then she shoved him. Hard. So hard he stumbled backward and almost landed on his rear end.
Blood pulsed through his veins and throbbed at his temple. She had no idea what she was doing, what he was capable of. “Don’t do that again.”
“What’s the matter?” she asked, taking a step toward him, her chin high. “You don’t like being pushed around by a girl.”
“Stop it, Nita,” he warned through clenched teeth, but his threat only fueled her determination.
“What are you going to do about it?” She stepped up to him, planted her hands on his chest and shoved again, harder this time, and his blood pressure reached an all-new high. She could see how angry he was, but instead of being afraid, instead of looking wary, she looked even more excited, more determined.
“I’m warning you,” he said, “don’t do that again.”
With her eyes locked on his, taunting him, she very deliberately planted her hands on his chest, ready to give him another good hard shove.
All the anger, all the frustration he’d trapped deep below the surface broke free in a red-hot gush. Before he could stop himself, he caught her wrists in his hands and backed her hard against the door, pinning her arms over her head. He wanted to hurt her, and he wanted scare her and he just plain wanted her, as he’d never wanted a woman before.
She gazed up at him through the pale light, but instead of looking frightened, instead of being angry with him, her lids were heavy with desire, her cheeks flushed.
Before he even knew what he was doing, he lowered his head and crushed his mouth to hers—a hard, punishing kiss—pressing her to the door with the weight of his body. Her mouth was hot and sweet and demanding, her body soft and needy.
He lost himself in the flavor of her mouth, the thrust of her tongue against his own. His hands slipped from her wrists and found their way to the curve of her hips, down the swell of her backside, and Nita moaned into his mouth. Her arms wound around his neck and she hooked one leg over his hip, grinding her body against him.
That’s when he started to melt, when the last of his control began to slip. He began to feel—as he’d never felt before. Arousal and lust and longing. It over-whelmed him.
And scared the hell out of him.
He pried her arms from around his neck and backed away, drawing a hand across his damp mouth, fighting to catch his breath. “Now you see what you’ve done?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She looked like pure sex standing there, her chest heaving, her cheeks the same vivid red as the stripes on her shirt. It was almost more than he could take.
“I’m not doing this with you, Nita. No matter how much we both want it.”
She studied him for a long moment and something in her eyes told him she knew it was a lost cause.
“That’s a fine attitude, now that you’ve gotten me all hot and bothered,” she said, her voice low and husky.
“I sincerely apologize.”
“No need to apologize.” She flattened a hand over her chest where her collar opened, then slipped it inside, caressing the top of her breast, her eyes pinned on his. “Guess I’ll just have to go upstairs and take care of business myself.”
She gave her breast a squeeze and he nearly fell over. It would take the willpower of ten men not to pull her back into his arms, yet somehow he managed all by himself. But she wasn’t finished with him. As she opened the door to leave, she dealt the blow that nearly brought him to his knees.
“Later, when you’re lying in bed and you hear me cry out from the next room, know that it’s you I was thinking about.”
Chapter Eight
Connor sat in a leather arm chair in the cigar lounge of the Cattleman’s Club, head resting on his fisted hand, struggling to stay awake. Figuring Nita would make good on her threat last night in the stable, Connor had slept sitting up on the bench in the foyer. Far enough away that he couldn’t hear her cry out, as she’d put it, but where he could catch her if she tried to sneak down the stairs and give him the slip again—which she had, at 5:45 that morning. And though he’d slept in far worse conditions in the Rangers, sheer sexual frustration had kept him awake most of the night. That and his own self-doubt.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what his brother had said, about what the right woman could do to a man, and how Connor needed to do something for himself. It was true that, since he’d been away from the engineering firm, since he’d started working the farm with Nita, he’d lost that feeling of restlessness, the bone-deep frustration he always seemed to feel whenever he let himself take a step back and look good and hard at his life. That frustration had always been the catalyst, the trigger for the irrepressible rage.
Not that he hadn’t felt frustration lately, but this was an entirely different variety. It was born from the need to keep Nita safe, from her constant refusal to listen to him. From the affection and attraction that he knew was wrong, and felt despite that.
Every so often he’d felt a flicker of something else, too. An emotion he hadn’t experienced in so long he’d barely recognized it.
He’d felt content.
Not that he expected it to last. It never did.
Jake dropped into the chair next to his. “You look like hell.”
Connor shot him an annoyed look. “Thanks.”
“Being a newlywed, I have a valid reason for being up half the night. What’s your excuse? Don’t tell me you turned her down.”
The look went from annoyed to deadly.
Jake laughed. “I don’t understand why you’re fighting it. You two are meant for each other.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because I know Nita and I know you. She needs someone who won’t be threatened by her strength, someone who won’t try to change her, and you need someone who can show you how to have fun. I would say that makes you a perfect match.”
If what his brother was saying made a weird sort of sense, Connor wrote it off as the direct result of sleep deprivation. He knew he was loopy when the next question popped from his mouth. “What did you mean about what finding the right woman can do to a man?”
“Something just…clicks. You start to look at things differently, to see yourself differently. Your priorities change.”
“But you must have dated a hundred different women. How did you know Chris was the one?”
“It was the freckles,” Jake said with that goofy grin of his. “I’m a sucker for that woman’s freckles.”
“Freckles?”