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

And maybe it was a little bit petty and a little bit mean to compare pale, thin Dylan to Laz, but she did. In the moment, she did.

Maybe he’s fate, or maybe he’s just hotter, a voice whispered.

Maybe he’s both. Because she wasn’t going to enter into the business of doubting herself. Not now. Because it wasn’t just about him being hotter. It was about the way he’d been there for her. All this time.

Then his hands went to his belt buckle and her throat went tight. Her entire body seizing up in anticipation. He pushed his jeans and underwear slowly down his lean hips, and kicked his boots off along with them.

His thighs were muscular, sexy. Indicative of all the hard work that he did on his ranch.

That was what the man did. He worked. Whether it was at the bar or on his land, and he wore the evidence of that in every hard, chiseled line on his body. And then there was... Well, him. That most masculine part of him, thick and proud and so much more than she had ever dared imagine.

If she were going to engage in comparisons again—and she was—Laz came out ahead there too. By a lot.

She swallowed hard.

And then she decided there was no point being a coward. Not about anything. Because this was what she wanted. Plain and simple. And she was going to take it.

She reached her hand down, wrapped it around his hard length, soft and hot and hard all at once. She squeezed him, watched as his face went pained. A tortured look there.

She moved her hand up and down his length, until he caught at her wrist with his hand. “Careful,” he bit out.

“Why? I’m tired of being careful. I’m tired of being what I’m supposed to be. I’m tired of being whatever he thinks I should be. All I have done for all these years is tried to... Tried to stop myself from turning into a monster. I almost committed myself to a life that was going to make me nothing but miserable. Because I was such a coward. Because I wasn’t brave. So now I want to be brave. I want to be brave as I can be. I want to do whatever I want.”

“Well, I am here for being your playground, Jordan, but I don’t want this to end too quickly.”

And that was how she found herself being picked up off the floor and deposited on the bed.

Flat on her back on the soft mattress. And he lifted her thighs, draping them over his shoulders and lowered his head to the heart of her. That part that was slick and wet with desire for him. And she gasped.

She grabbed the back of his head as he tormented her. Pleasuring her with his tongue and his hands.

She writhed against him, arching up off the bed as she found her release, shuddering out his name.

“That’s right,” he said, moving up her body, gazing down into her eyes. “Don’t forget who’s with you.”

“No chance,” she said, her voice weak and shaky.

He took a condom from his nightstand, and sheathed himself quickly as he positioned himself at the entrance of her body.

“Laz,” she whispered, bracketing his face with her hands. And then he thrust inside of her, and she lost her breath.

Because it was him. Finally.

He was something she hadn’t let herself want. This was something she hadn’t let herself want. And it wasn’t until she had stripped away all those other people in her life that had had so many expectations of her that she was free. Free to feel what she did. Free to want what she did.

And she wanted him.

And as he established a steady rhythm that drove them both to the heights, as he thrust into her body, over and over again, he forged in them a bond that she didn’t think could ever be broken.

She felt utterly devastated by it. By him.

And she was glad of it.

Him. And only him.

She broke open, right there with him, pleasure a torrent that poured over, and he growled out his own release too, trembling, this big, sexy man. Trembling because of her.

And the words that she had held back on her lips echoed inside of her, reverberated inside her soul, joining up with that mystical sense of fate, and it all made sense.

It was more than fate. It had felt like it in that first moment. But over a decade of friendship and conversations, of building something genuine and real, had transformed this.

She loved him.

She was certain.

It felt nothing like loving Dylan. Nothing at all. It was its own thing, unique and wild.

And she was terrified with it. But maybe... Maybe the thing about loving Laz was that she had to accept that her future would look different than the one she had imagined with Dylan. Because she had been married to an idea of domesticity. Of having what his parents had. Of having that magical, normal sort of thing that she had never gotten to see in her childhood.

But maybe loving Laz meant being his friend. Sharing his bed. And letting him have his own life. Would that be so bad? She could be herself with him. More herself than she had been all this time. And maybe that was good enough?

Maybe it would be good enough.

Maybe she could accept that. Because she couldn’t imagine going back to not having this. To not having him.

So maybe accepting what was on the table wasn’t a bad thing.

Maybe the problem was that what she wanted was never going to fit her.

And she could take more in terms of what she felt, but less...

Checks and balances. It was reasonable. And as she lay there in his arms, safe and sheltered, buzzing with pleasure after what had just occurred, she decided that it was okay.

More than okay.

Friends with benefits with Laz was better than the promise of marriage and forever had ever been with Dylan.

And for the first time