Solid Gold Cowboy, Maisey Yates [best young adult book series TXT] 📗

feeling a sharp, fearful side to it. Without being worried that she might lose everything if she couldn’t give him what he wanted.

“You really want me?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice rough. “But he’s always been there. He’s always been in the picture, and...”

“You should have told me to get rid of him.”

You didn’t tell me not to marry Dylan.

Her earlier words echoed between them.

“I wanted what was best for you. Whether you believe that or not. I did. And if it wasn’t... This, then...”

“Why?”

“You know how it is for me. I don’t share. My life is mine. In... Look, I give to people all day every day. It’s part of my job. And when I come home, I do what I want. I don’t rely on anybody, I don’t ask for anything... And that’s the way I like it. Somebody in my position can’t ask someone else to give up the future, to give up a marriage for...”

“For what?”

“There’s not a name for it, is there?”

“Friends with benefits?”

The words made her stomach feel hollow. Because they couldn’t just be that.

“Yeah. Friends with benefits.”

“You know, you actually could have asked me to do that,” she said, her throat getting tight. “The first time I saw you... I felt like my world turned over on its head. But I was a coward, and I couldn’t understand what my life might look like if I stepped off the path that I’d carved out for myself. And more than that, I was afraid of it. So I... I ignored it. I ignored that I felt that way. I ignored that I wanted something else. But I knew that something changed. Forever when I first met you. And it did. Because you gave me the confidence to do what I did the other day. You gave me the confidence to walk away from Dylan, not because I could have you instead, but because... I have our friendship. And you made me feel something about myself that he didn’t. You made me trust myself in a way that I never did before. But it’s taken me all this time to realize...that I could remove those supports and I would still stand.” She cleared her throat. This next bit felt important. “I’ve only been with one person.”

“I figured as much,” he said.

“I might be bad at sex.”

He chuckled, and the warmth that spread through her body sent tingles all the way from her scalp down to her toes. “You will not be bad at it.”

“How do you know? Maybe I am inept when it comes to handling penises.”

“There’s no way that you could be inept when it comes to handling me.”

And he was the one that closed the space between them, and she was grateful. He came right where she stood and wrapped his arm around her waist, and the air rushed from her lungs.

And there were words that hovered on her lips that terrified her, so she swallowed them. Didn’t say them. She looked up in his brown eyes.

She suddenly wanted to cry. Because it felt like fate. Because it felt like the answer to a thousand prayers that she had never been brave enough to say. Because she felt like a new woman in a way that she hadn’t, when she had decided to leave Dylan at the altar.

That woman had been afraid. She’d been numb. And she hadn’t known what the next step was. Hadn’t known what she wanted or what she was going to do.

And all right, she still didn’t know the answers to all that, not in a broader sense. But she wanted him. She really, really wanted him.

And she felt like if she could be this brave, brave enough to reveal the secret part of herself. Brave enough to expose just how deep her desire for him ran...

Then maybe she could be brave enough for anything.

She put her hands on his face, finally touching him the way that she wanted. She smoothed her fingertips over his stubble-roughened jaw, and ran her thumbs beneath his bottom lip. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she whispered.

The fire in his eyes burned brighter, and he didn’t let her speak again. Instead, he lowered his head, kissing her, hard and deep. Stealing her breath. Stealing her reservations.

It was a revelation, this kiss. And any concerns she had about being bad at sex or undesirable were burned away by the heat in it.

Because she realized then that it actually didn’t matter what kind of experience she had. Because there were kisses, and then there was kissing Laz.

Because there was sex, and then there was just the act of wanting him, which touched somewhere deeper than any other sort of desire ever had.

He was big and muscular, and when he held her in his arms she felt small. Delicate, fragile but sheltered.

She had been given shelter before. By a wonderful family who had taken her in and showed her how to change the shape of herself so that she could fit. But that wasn’t what Laz was doing. Not now. She was in a shelter made from his strength, and it fit around her. In a profound and deep way, and whether or not it was supposed to mean something like that. Whether or not she was supposed to feel it so deep... She did. He kissed her all the way down the hall, taking her into the bedroom she’d been sleeping in, and removing her clothes from her body. And she wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t self-conscious. It wasn’t time or inevitability that made her feel attractive, it was the way that he looked at her. Like she was the most precious thing he had ever seen.

“Now you,” she said.

He took his shirt off slowly, revealing acres of dark, smooth skin. Well muscled and strong.

She put her hand on his chest, thrilling at the feel of him. Because she had certainly never seen such a gloriously masculine man in the flesh before.

Not so close that she could