Page 34 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

It could have been lifetimes later when he finally moved, picking her up and carrying her over to the couch. Once he was there he sat down and pulled her on his lap, then set about kissing her some more.

She was the one who pulled away after another long while and Boone took an extreme, almost violent kind of satisfaction in how wrecked she looked. Sierra’s mouth, swollen from his. Her lips glossy, her eyes wide.

He’d definitely hadthisdream a thousand or five times.

“Are you…?” Her voice sounded raw and breathy. “Am I not doing this right?”

He laughed, and took the opportunity to trace his fingers all over that perfect face of hers that was stamped on the inside of his heart. But he’d never gotten to touch her like this before. Her dark, curved brows. That place at the corner of each eye where he could see how much she laughed. Her outrageously soft lips. Even her cute little elf ears. Even her cheekbones drove him crazy.

“How could you do this wrong?” he asked her when she frowned at him. “I’ve been dreaming about kissing you forever. Even if you bit my tongue off, I’d still like it.”

“But it’s been going on too long,” she said, with a certain quiet seriousness that landed in him, hard. “I know that’s really difficult for men.”

Boone decided that there was no need any longer to school his expressions when she said things like that. Things that indicated the truth about the life she’d been living all this time. Things that told him far too much about the loser she’d been married to.

“I think you mean thatboyshave trouble with that,” he told her, and he held that green gaze of hers while he said it. When her eyes widened slightly, he continued. “I’m a grown man, Sierra. I’m in control of my body. Always.”

He could see her thinking that through. Putting the pieces together.Good, he thought. That could only move things in the right direction. Because he still couldn’t believe that this was finally happening. That she was here, on his lap, and not calling him her angel.

Not scared off that he’d dared show her that he wasn’t the celibate monk he was all too aware he actually thought he was.

“Do you not want to have sex with me?” she asked, baldly.

Boone groaned at that. He could have told her the answer to that, but instead he lifted her up and shifted her so she was sitting on top of him, straddling him. That put her head just a little bit higher than his, so he reached up slightly to hold her face between his hands again.

Then shifted so she could feel how hard he was.

“Oh,” she said, her face going red and hot.

“Baby,” he said, his voice low and intent, “I want everything with you. Things that haven’t been invented yet, I want. Everything that two people can do to each other, I want. I want you here in any way you want to be here. I’ve always wanted you. No part of me isn’t excited by you, wild for you, and as madly in love with you as I always have been. Nothing’s ever going to change that. You have nothing to worry about. Ever.”

“Oh,”she said again. He felt her relax as he held her, but in such a way that he wasn’t sure that she knew she was doing it. Like she still didn’t fully understand how much she trusted him—but that was okay. This was newer for her than it was for him. “I guess I thought that the whole point was to hurry up with this part to get to the other part.”

“I don’t like to hurry,” Boone told her. “You know this about me already.”

“But—”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he told her, taking control again. “This is a big night. No need to put too much weight on it. Why don’t we just hang out, I’ll make you come a few times, and we’ll see where we are.”

She went stiff at that, and looked serious again.

“You should know up front that I don’t do that,” she told him, very matter-of-factly.

He grinned. “You don’t hang out?”

“Not that.” And he watched, fascinated, as Sierra blushed the brightest shade of red he’d ever seen on her. “The other. I… Well, I just don’t. Ever.”

So many things ran through his mind then that he was slightly concerned that he mightactuallyexplode. And not in the fun way. Part of him wanted to leave immediately, so he could drive down the hill and finally punch Matty in the face a few dozen times for being even more useless than Boone had imagined he was. Yet still another part of him felt a little vindicated to discover that good old Matty was exactly as much of a selfish asshole as he appeared to be. Not the biggest surprise in the world.

But he couldn’t get too excited about it. Because at the end of the day, there was Sierra—whose entire perfect body was sleek and hot and humming simply because he’d kissed her—telling him that she couldn’t reach a climax.

Not that shehadn’t. That shecouldn’t.

“If that’s a requirement,” she said when he didn’t say anything, and she sounded a little less matter-of-fact, “then you need to know that you’re going to be disappointed.”

“First of all, nothing about you could ever disappoint me,” Boone told her, even more matter-of-factly than anything she’d said to him. “Second of all, why don’t you let me worry about that? That’s my job. Your job is to hang out. That’s it.”

“I don’t really mind,” she told him brightly, making it better. Tying it in a bow. If he hadn’t actually been holding this dream of his in his arms right now, he would absolutely have gone hunting for shitty ex-husbands down in Marietta. “I like being this close to you. That’s what really matters.”

---