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  His words from earlier rang in her ears.

  Live dangerously.

  Just a little. Just a taste. It wouldn’t be so wrong. Not any worse than one french fry.

  She leaned in, her lips brushing his. Her breath caught in her throat and held, electricity shooting through her veins, immobilizing her.

  But Lucas wasn’t immobile. Far from it. He dropped his hands from her face and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against his hard, muscular body.

  She whimpered and he deepened the kiss, his tongue sweeping the inside of her mouth. The wet friction stole every thought from her head, made it impossible for her to do anything but feel. She was lost, completely, in his touch. In a whole world of new desire and need.

  She’d thought she’d known what attraction was. Had thought she’d known, intellectually, how she would handle it. But she’d never felt anything like this. She hadn’t known. Not at all.

  She pressed her hands to his chest, curling her fingers around his shirt fabric, clinging to him as he kissed her, long and deep.

  “Kiss me back, Carly,” he growled against her lips.

  And she obeyed. She couldn’t do anything else. She wanted him, so much she was drowning in it. She tasted him, her tongue tracing the seam of his lips, delving inside his mouth.

  He was perfection. He tasted like temptation, like an invitation to a kind of wildness, a kind of freedom, she’d never even dared to imagine.

  She wanted to drown in it. In him. She’d never felt restricted by her life. Never felt like she was missing anything. But right now she felt like she was suffocating. Like she was being tied down, bound in the strictures of her life. Strictures she’d set out for herself.

  She wanted to tear them off. And tear his clothes off with them. And her clothes. And she’d never, ever wanted anything like this ever. And it should scare her. But in that moment, it just didn’t.

  Because her senses were filled with Lucas and nothing else seemed quite as important.

  A growl vibrated through Lucas’s chest and he slid his hands down to her backside, cupping her, drawing her even more tightly against him, against the firm length of his erection.

  And that, right there, jolted her back to reality in a very big way.

  She pulled away from him, gasping for air, her head spinning. She felt like she’d just broken through the surface of the water. The haze and silence fading. Now everything seemed too clear, harsh, cold and loud. Their fractured breathing a very potent, and embarrassing, reminder of everything that had just passed between them.

  What was wrong with her? What the hell was wrong with her?

  “Oh . . .” She put her hands on her lips. They felt as hot and swollen to the touch as she feared they looked. “What just happened?”

  “Something that’s been on a slow burn for a while now just combusted,” he said, his voice strangled.

  “It has not been on a slow burn,” she said. “There’s no slow burn.”

  “Oh, darlin’, there’s a slow burn. Or there was.”

  “No, no there isn’t.”

  “Why do you think we fight so much?”

  “Uh . . . because we don’t like each other?”

  “Verbal foreplay.”

  “No.”

  “Remember what I said, Carly? Either you treat me like you do because you don’t like me, or . . .” He let the thought trail off.

  “I’m not doing playground politics with you, Lucas,” she said, even as she questioned the truth of the statement. “I treat you like I do because I don’t have the patience to put up with a guy who . . . who . . .”

  “Who what?”

  “Who makes me want so many things I can’t have,” she exploded, the words unexpected and not at all what she planned. “Who makes me wish that I could . . . do something more with myself. That I could find a way to just give the world the middle finger and go on with life, like you do. But I can’t. I just can’t, okay? I have to . . . to be this way. I have to keep it all locked up, because if I don’t . . . what will happen? What will people think?”

  “Who gives a damn what people think?” he bit out.

  “I do,” she yelled, fighting tears now. “I do. Because do you . . . do you see what happens when you don’t? When you just quit caring?”

  “Your mother,” he said.

  “And my dad. And your dad. They just didn’t care anymore, and what they felt like doing, what they feel like doing is more important than the right thing, or the thing that at least looks right, and our childhoods were . . . a disaster because of it. And I don’t want my life to be a disaster anymore.”

  “What? So you push down all of your desires, blame me, and try to keep me out of your space so you aren’t jealous? Because regardless of what you say, Carly, you are jealous.”

  “No.”

  “Change the way you do things if you aren’t happy, Carly, but don’t make it my problem.”

  “I’m not unhappy with how I do things when you aren’t around.”

  He chuckled, a sound that held no humor. “You make choices, Carly, every day. No one is forcing you to behave this way, and the ‘my childhood sucked’ excuse only holds for so long. So figure out what you want, and do it. But don’t turn your problems into mine.”

  “Get out, Lucas.”

  “You’re dismissing me now?”

  “Yes. You can’t just come into my house and kiss me and then . . . yell at me. Now go away.”

  He nodded his head. “Fine. See you later.”

  He turned and walked out the front door, slamming it behind him. Carly uncurled her fist and saw that the twenty was all balled up in her hand.

  She growled and threw it across the room, not caring that it was a stupid thing to do. Right now, she hated Lucas Miller. She hated his smug smile. She hated how he’d just . . . pulled her up against him and kissed her. Hated the way electricity was still sparking through her body.

  Most of all, she hated just how right he was about her.

  She was a coward. A damned, unhappy coward who was a prisoner in her own life. Who was afraid to take hold of anything she felt overly passionate about for fear she’d lose her grip on her tightly held control.

  For fear people might see inside of her and find her lacking somehow. Find her weak. Her mother wore everything out in the open, all there for people to judge, and judge they did. Carly had never wanted that. Had never wanted to expose herself in that way.

  She stalked back to the couch and picked up her bowl. She took another bite of her defiant breakfast-for-dinner. She grimaced. It was soggy.

  And she really didn’t feel all that triumphant either. She felt alone. And turned on. And fixated on Lucas Miller. And too scared to do anything about any of it.

  Chapter Five

  Carly’s head hurt from reading too many city ordinance amendment propositions. In all honesty, as much as she cared about Silver Creek, she couldn’t care less whether or not the regulations on historic colors should extend to the interiors of homes and businesses with rooms visible to the street.

  It was all a bunch of people trying to feel more important than they were, in her opinion. And she just sat there and smiled and nodded. She did well on the council, but when it came to opposing people who were serving their sixth term, she wasn’t exactly super bold.

  She was a pansy, is what she was. A big old yellow-bellied coward. She wanted to be perceived well more than she wanted to make a difference. She wanted people to think of her as something other than “that poor Denton girl.”

  Now she was withering up inside of herself. She didn’t even know what she really wanted.

  That was a lie. What she wanted, what she really wanted, and had wanted, since she was a teenager, was Lucas Miller. And yes, when she’d been a teenage girl she’d woven stupid romantic fantasies about hi
m. Fantasies that were about emotion and love and hearts and crap.

  But she was a woman now, and her fantasies were a whole lot more physical. And physical, she knew he could do.

  The simple fact was that she wanted Lucas Miller, no strings, no consequences. She wanted to flip the world off, discreetly, for a while and get rid of her inhibitions and her clothes with the one man she knew who seemed to just be who he was with total ease.

  Oh, what would people say if they knew that staid, sensible Carly Denton wanted things like that. A physical affair, a night of passion and sex with a man who was from a family just as screwed up and gossip-worthy as her own.

  She didn’t care. Not right at the moment. She just didn’t care.

  She turned her car off the main road and started heading out of town, heading toward Lucas’s ranch. She hadn’t been out there since that day. That day she’d seen him with that other woman.

  She was admitting it now, to herself at least, that that experience had crushed something in her. It wasn’t Lucas’s fault, either—something else she was going to admit now, and also only to herself.

  He didn’t know she’d had a crush on him. They weren’t attached, and he owed her nothing.

  It had still hurt. It was still part of why she treated him badly.

  She pulled off the paved two-lane road onto a winding, one-lane gravel road, fighting the urge to turn around and head back to town, toward her little subdivision. Toward safety and security and propriety.

  The problem was, tonight, she just didn’t want propriety. She wanted to know what it was like to be, figuratively, the woman up against the side of the barn, with her head thrown back, all of her focus going into what she felt, not what she thought, not what was right, but on her own needs, her own pleasure.

  She pulled up to Lucas’s house and killed the engine, taking a deep breath and trying to gather up the courage to get out and grab life, and Lucas Miller, with both hands.

  She pushed open the driver’s door and walked up to the steps. Her legs felt detached from her body, like they were acting without her permission. Because she felt like her brain wasn’t fully committed to the decision yet. But her body was. Big time.

  She took a breath and knocked on the door. And waited. For a lot longer than she’d anticipated waiting. She had a horrible thought. What if he was in there with some woman right now? Wouldn’t that figure. She comes back to his ranch for the first time in six years and catches him banging—

  The door swung open. It was Lucas, alone, wearing nothing more than a pair of jeans that rode low on his lean hips, showing off his flat stomach and well-muscled chest.

  Her body did a victory dance. Just to let her know she’d made the absolute right decision in coming.

  “Hi,” she said, knowing she sounded brisk and a little bit breathless, but not caring too much.

  “What a surprise. Are you here to tell me more about why the way I live my life is ruining yours?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Not that.”

  “What are you here for then?”

  Sex. She was here for sex. Wild, hot, sweaty against-the-barn sex. But of course, she couldn’t say that. She’d never had it before; how could she say it?

  Of course, if she couldn’t say it, what business did she have experiencing it?

  She took a breath. Just say it. “Sex,” she said, the word pouring out and hanging between them. It had been too loud, and too direct and now she just wanted to crawl under the porch and curl up into a ball.

  She’d said some pretty rude and strange things to Lucas Miller, but never once had she seen him make the face he was making now. Like he’d been struck in the chest with a two-by-four.

  “What?”

  “Do I really have to repeat myself?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Can I come inside?”

  He stepped out of her way and she walked into the house. It had been along time since she’d seen his house. He’d updated it since she’d last been there. The space was open, with high ceilings and large windows that gave a perfect view of the pastures and mountains. Everything was neat—spotless, really, which she put down to a good housekeeper.

  It was good to know though. Clean house. Which was nice, since she figured she might get naked in it.

  Oh, Lord . . .

  “So are you speaking in code?” Lucas asked, crossing muscular arms over his chest.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to work out what the hell you mean by ‘sex.’”

  Heat flooded her face. “Come on, Lucas, I think we both know you know what sex is. I’ve seen you . . . doing it pretty much.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” he said. He turned away from her for a moment, forking his fingers through his hair before turning back to face her.

  Her eyes were drawn to his pecs, lightly dusted with dark hair, and down to his abs. They shifted in the most interesting way every time he breathed. Lucas had always been handsome, and she’d seen him without his shirt lots of times. But that had been years ago. He’d had muscle then, but he’d been slighter. He was a man now, broad and big and so sexy she thought she was going to melt right where she stood.

  “All right. Then I guess I mean sex in the traditional, accepted sense of the word. You know . . . a bed and two people and . . .” Her throat closed in on itself.

  “You don’t make any sense, do you know that?” he asked. “You spend the past . . . forever, biting my head off every time we’re in close proximity, and now you want to sleep with me?”

  She blinked rapidly, trying to get ahold of her nerves. “There was a . . . slight transition period in there where we kissed, if you recall.”

  “Oh, I recall,” he said. “I recall very well. It ended in you pushing me away and then telling me about how I ruin your happiness. So it wasn’t the transition you might think. It was more of the same, but you put your tongue in my mouth before you decided to try and cut my skin from the bones with it.”

  “You were right,” she said. “You were right about me, okay? Are you happy? I am scared. I’m scared of feeling too much, wanting too much, and I’m scared of losing control. And you don’t care, you don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, and I envy you. You were also right about the fact that the choices are mine to make. And if I’m not happy . . . I should change them.”

  “And this is how you want to do it?”

  “I’m never going to not care what people think. I still want . . . I want to be who everyone sees now. I like that person. She’s put together, and people respect her. No one feels sorry for her. But just . . . just for a little while, I need something for me. An indulgence.”

  “An indulgence? What the hell am I, a box of chocolates?”

  She bit her lip. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t act like I’ve wounded you somehow. It’s not like you don’t have casual sex.”

  “I don’t have casual sex with my best friend’s younger sister.”

  “You made out with me yesterday.”

  “There’s a lot of mileage between making out and sex, Carly.”

  “I know that,” she said. “But do you really think of me just as Mac’s little sister? I’m hardly a child. I’m an adult woman, and I have an identity outside of my relationship to my brother.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll be sure to tell him that when he brands my ass with an iron after he finds out.”

  “Is that the only reason you don’t want to?”

  “What?”

  “Mac. Is Mac the only reason you don’t want to sleep with me? Or is it me?”

  Lucas drew his hand over his face and shook his head. “You’re right, I’ve had casual sex. But one thing I’ve never done is sleep with a woman who doesn’t like me. That’s a heavy de
terrent at the moment.”

  “I’m not going to beg you for sex. This is already bordering on that, so just . . . fine. If you don’t want me then say it.” Humiliation and shame tightened her chest. She wanted to vomit. She’d put herself out there for the first time . . . ever. Had gone for something she’d wanted on an emotional level, a physical level, rather than just a cerebral one, and she’d been turned away.

  “You think I don’t want you?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “You think I don’t want you?” he repeated. “I’ve been sleepless for the past week thinking about what it might take to get your puckered lips to soften under mine, and last night I found out. Hell, woman, it’s been hell since then.”

  “You do want me?”

  “Yes, dammit.” He crossed to her and hauled her up against his body, his hold tight, his skin hot beneath her hands.

  “Then wh-why . . . ?”

  “The real problem is that we’re both talking too much. Thinking too much. I don’t want to do either anymore.”

  Okay, so talking to her, and thinking too much about what they were about to do, might put him off, and that wasn’t the most flattering thing in the world, but it was Lucas, so she wasn’t sure what she was expecting.

  And since he didn’t want to talk, it meant he didn’t want to hear about the little potential complication she had forgotten to mention, which was just fine by her.

  She didn’t particularly want to tell him she’d never done this before. It was far too embarrassing. Because he would either think it was stupid, or he would start treating her like some innocent in need of his protection and honor. And she really didn’t want to deal with either.

  But she didn’t have to, because he dipped his head and started kissing her again, hot and wet and everything she’d remembered and more.

  A sharp sound of pleasure climbed her throat and she wrapped her arms around his neck, threading her fingers through his hair, holding him to her.

  Lucas put his hands on her waist, his fingers gently drifting along her back, down to her hips, teasing her skin just beneath the waistband of her skirt. She arched against him, pressing her breasts to his chest, looking for some relief for the ache that was spreading through her now, beating a pulse at the apex of her thighs.