Page 36 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

It actually took Boone a minute there to realize she wasn’t joking.

“Why would you think that anything that happened tonight would make me think badly of you?” he asked, and he was still trying to adjust to the new reality of this. They’d sat on this couch together a thousand times. But tonight, she was pressed up against him, leaning into him, and everything was different. Hell, he’d just watched her come apart in his arms. “I keep telling you. There’s not anything you can do that could change the way I feel about you, Sierra. Believe me.”

She lifted the washcloth after a while and wiped her face with it, then leaned forward to put it on the coffee table. Boone braced himself for her to bolt.

But instead, Sierra settled back into the couch. She turned to face him even more, gathering her legs beneath her the way she often did. Though this time, he did something he’d always wanted to do, reaching over and pulling her legs over his lap.

And he enjoyed it when he heard the way her breath feathered out.

“I guess we have a lot of things to talk about,” she said, her eyes wide as she studied… the corner of his shoulder. Like she was afraid to look at him. “But the only thing I can really think about is that I’m pretty sure this is how people ruin friendships.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen here,” Boone said, easily. Almost lazily.

“Why not? I think there’s a reason that best friends are afraid of becoming something more. It’s usually because when they try, it ends badly.”

“Funnily enough,” Boone told her, “I’ve thought a lot about that. I think it comes down to fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear that altering the relationship will ruin it. But I think that if our relationship is that fragile, then it wasn’t much to begin with.”

Sierra reached over, a sort ofwonderingexpression on her face, then traced her fingers over his jaw, her fingers finding his mouth. Then she shook her head. “Not everybody in the world is as sure as you are. Nor do we all have the power to bend reality to our will. I think only you do.”

Boone captured her hand with his, then pulled her fully onto his lap again. “Clearly not. Or the past sixteen years would have looked a little different.”

She was closer to him now, her face level with his. “It’s like I never saw you until tonight,” she whispered. “How is that possible? How could I be so blind?”

He smiled. “Because you wanted to be. It was safer that way.”

Sierra didn’t like that. He could see it on her face, but she swallowed it down.

“I thought everyone was ridiculous and, honestly, insulting,” she told him. “Always asking when we were getting together. I thought they were just limited people who couldn’t understand that it was completely possible to be friends like we were without the faintest shred of romantic feelings. Was I lying to myself the whole time?”

Boone didn’t want to answer that. Not tonight.

So he kissed her instead and she melted against him, and soon enough they were sliding down to lie horizontally on the couch. She wrapped herself around him, then groaned when she felt him hard and ready between her legs.

“We can—” she began.

“Absolutely not.” Boone looked down at her, trying his best to seem reproving. “We have some ground to cover first.” When she looked like she might argue, he grinned. “For one thing, I need to taste you properly.”

“I think you have.”

Boone laughed. “I most definitely have not.”

Then he shifted, moving down the length of her body and then reaching up to shift her around so she was slumped down in the seat while he knelt before her on the floor.

He held her gaze as he went to unsnap her jeans, then smooth them down her hips. Her breath hitched, her eyes glassy and wide, but when he began to gently tug the denim off her body, she lifted her hips to help him.

When he slid closer to her, moving her legs so he could drape them over his shoulders, he watched in fascination as she turned that bright red shade again.

“You doing okay?” he asked, hearing that undercurrent of laughter in his own voice.

She was breathing hard. Fast. She stuck her hands over her face and shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. “You’reBoone. And I don’t think I like this.”

“Which part?” Given that he could see the arousal all over her body, he wasn’t particularly concerned that she meant all of this.

Still. He waited.

“I just… I’ve never… I just always thought it seemed so…unsanitary—”

And he really did laugh that. “Sex isn’t supposed to besanitary, Sierra. It’s not surgery. It’s supposed to be hot. Messy. Wild.” He studied her. “Let me guess. This is the first time someone’s put his head between your legs with the express purpose of licking you until you come all over his face.”

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