Page 20 of Return of the Outback Billionaire

He had no finesse. To rut against her much longer and that would be him gone, spent and sticky in his jeans—worse if he managed to get her out of her jeans because then there’d be nothing to halt his reckless, greedy descent into animal behaviour. Judah cursed and put his hands to Bridie’s hips, put some air between them, the better to get his brain to start functioning.

Her gaze met his, glazed, confused. ‘Why are we stopping? This is perfect. You’re perfect.’

What a thing to say to a man like him. ‘You don’t even know me.’

She stepped back, eyes narrowing, and her hands went to her hips. ‘I could get to know you. We could get to know each other and then maybe we could do more of the kissing.’

‘It wouldn’t stop at kissing.’

‘So? I wouldn’t want it to.’

‘You don’t know me.’

‘But I’d like to.’

He tried again to make her see reason. To understand his position. ‘You won’t like what you find.’

‘How do you know?’

‘After what I did to you at the ball, how could you not know?’

She looked at him a good long while, mindless of the pelting rain, and then took a careful step back. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Judah. But if you don’t want what I’m offering, I can’t make you take it. We can just call it a spur-of-the-moment kiss. Forget it ever happened.’

‘Let’s do that.’ He’d spent too many years thinking of this woman as fragile and terrified and young. And maybe she’d grown in years but she had no experience with someone as greedy for touch as him. As unstable as him. Seven long years and counting, and he didn’t trust himself to be the kind of lover she needed. ‘Trust me, it’s for the best.’

He tilted his face to the sky and let the stinging rain pellets wash him clean of his burning desire to get naked and dirty with a woman too pure for him to sully. ‘Please. We’re not doing this.’

Had she touched him again his resolve might have broken, but she turned away and trudged back to her cameras, and he could only hope those canvas covers she’d set up over the camera bodies had done enough to protect them from the downpour.

By the time he came back in and Bridie had packed up, the storm had passed and red mud caked his boots. She passed him a towel in silence, not quite meeting his gaze, and he gruffly thanked her.

He couldn’t have felt any worse.

‘Are you ready to leave?’ she asked quietly.

Note to self: never reject a woman’s advances without having your own ride home.

The drive back took three times as long on account of the rain, but they didn’t get bogged and eventually they pulled up alongside his truck. Bridie’s hair had started to dry in loose curls to frame her face. Such a perfect profile to go with her long lashes and flawless skin. No wonder the modelling world had gone all in for her. No wonder the predators had come circling.

He made a hasty exit and then turned back towards her—simultaneously glad to be out of the car and shamed by his mishandling of the afternoon. ‘Look, Bridie, you’re very beautiful.’

She had a fierce glare. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘I haven’t had sex in nearly eight years and my self-control is hanging by a thread. I don’t want your gratitude, your pity or to hurt you, so it’s best I stay away from you. See out this farce of an engagement and then leave you be. Do no harm. Savvy?’

‘Got it. You’re too big, bad and dangerous for innocent little me.’ She stomped towards her homestead and he figured that was it, but then she turned and fixed him with a soggy kitten glare. ‘Does anyone actually believe that’s who you are?’

‘You’d better believe it,’ he yelled, because seriously. ‘Shouldn’t you be thanking me?’

‘For being a tool? Why does that need praise?’

‘For my restraint!’

For stopping when he did, so as not to overwhelm her? For protecting her? Again, because apparently it was his lot in life to get screwed over for love of protecting Miss Bridie Starr, bane of his existence.

I’m not depressed, he could tell Reid when he got back to the house.

I’m peeling out of my skin for want of a woman I dare not touch.

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