No one had ever kissed her like they couldn’t help themselves. Like it was all that mattered. This was the second time he’d done it, but it still wasn’t the same. This wasn’t angry, frustrated kissing that burst into heat and flame.
It was soft. His tongue traced her bottom lip, swept inside her mouth with a languorous ease that matched the way the heat and ache spread through her. Slow, steady, until she was all but humming with it. With the word more.
The ripple of fear settled somewhere underneath desire. She felt it, but she didn’t act on it—couldn’t. She was drowning in a sea of want. She wanted him to touch her, to follow the spiral of electricity that wound through her body. Every time his mouth touched hers, it was all she could think about. His hands on her skin. Her skin on his skin.
Until a bleating cracked through the peace of a quiet mountain afternoon.
Mel jerked back, eyes falling to where Mystery Llama was standing at the edge of the fence. Staring. Judging.
Not judging, wacko.
“He’s hungry,” she said, pointing to the llama even though Dan’s hands were still on her face, even though she could feel his body heat through her clothes and feel his breath on her temple. Even though everything inside of her was still reeling from confusion mixed with desire.
“The llama will keep.”
It would. It probably would, and as much as she wanted to throw up her hands and say sure, why the hell not, it was the middle of the day. They were in the middle of a project. You did not just leave something undone because you wanted connection. Wanted sex.
Oh, but I bet it will be really awesome sex.
She shook her head, stepping away from Dan and the idea that she could ever forget a responsibility. That she could let a few aches and desperate fantasies change the fact of her reality. She raised her chin, determined. “We have work to do. And you’re paying me. So, that makes this weird.”
He was quiet for a few beats, eyes steady on hers. “One of these days, you’re going to run out of excuses.”
She wanted it to feel like a threat, something she could fight against, be angry about. But it didn’t feel like that at all. One of these days sounded like a gift.
A gift she could have if she ever wanted it.
Not for you.
Why did that keep getting lost in all this…whatever it was? Dan was not for her. She knew that. But she also knew she could have him, however briefly, and she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to resist that forever.
*
Dan put every last ounce of energy into work. He wasn’t going to push Mel. The way he saw it, she had enough people trying to take things from her, and he was determined not to be that guy.
Even if it gave him blue balls in the process.
Every time he thought he got to the bottom of all of Mel’s stress, everything that made her so rigid and careful and tough, he fell down some other chasm.
He couldn’t say he was surprised that her mother had abandoned her family. She obviously had issues with people leaving, and she’d never mentioned a mother. What he was still working his way through was the anger, the absolute disgust in the way she’d explained what happened.
Then she’d cried. As if the anger had just been hiding this vulnerable hurt underneath, as if that’s what her tough-girl attitude was always hiding.
Seeing that filled him with an unease he didn’t know how to fight. Hurt was not something he liked to deal with. Was not something he’d ever had any skill at dealing with.
He had cracked under all the emotion of his parents’ crumbling marriage. Fallen apart, trouble and tears and too much. Too much for me to handle with an absent husband, Mom had said when she’d thought he hadn’t been listening. He had been her last straw.
Then Dad had taught him to skate, and he’d skated away from all feelings since then. From his own, from his mother’s. His grandparents’. He’d used hockey as an excuse not to visit. Grandma’s decline had been much worse, much sharper than Grandpa’s, and the way that broke Grandpa’s heart was written all over his face.
Always.
Dan’s chest ached, a deep, helpless pain he didn’t know what to do with. That pain he always chose to escape. So he didn’t do any more damage, like he had done with his parents. Except there was no skating, no escape in his immediate future. Just…fence building and llamas.
Well, at least it was something.
“It’s seven. I need to head out.” Mel yanked off work gloves and slapped them against her knee. “Think you can handle getting it closed up?”
He looked at the two posts they had left, which would bring the enclosure to a new, expanded rectangle.
“Yup.”
She nodded once then turned on a heel and headed for her truck. No good-bye. No “thanks for letting me cry on you.” No “hey, now that it’s quitting time, how about some sex?”
Which was good, really. This afternoon had given him this feeling of being strong and a take-care kind of guy, but he couldn’t let that feeling go to his head. Hugging someone while they cried did not equal being capable of handling much of anything.