Wild Card (North Ridge #1)

She tenses. I know it’s moving fast and backwards all at once but I keep going because I know what she likes, I know how she likes it. I need to know that I still know her as intimately as I once did.

“Shane,” she says again but her words drip with sex and then I’m pulling her shorts and underwear down, yanking them aside and parting her soft thighs, diving right in.

I need to taste her, messy, hot, and wild. I want her body, her touch, her soul, everything I once had and lost. I need to put my cock deep inside her, make sure she really feels me, knows me, knows I’m hers. Always hers.

But this isn’t about that right now. Right now, I just want to take her mind off of everything. I want to make her come in my mouth, thighs squeezing my face, whispering my name.

“I’m on the pill,” she manages to say as my tongue, flat, wide and wet, licks up her thighs, her taste is sweet and salty and sinfully good. “I mean, an IUD. And I’m clean…I…”

“Shhhh,” I tell her, murmuring into her skin. “Don’t worry about that right now. This is just about you.”

At that, she squirms underneath me in anticipation and my mouth fucking waters at the sight. I push my lips into her, groaning as my tongue swirls around her clit, building and building, just the way she used to like it.

I think she still does. She’s growing wetter by the second, her hands are first in the hay, making fists and then they’re reaching down, in my hair, holding tight, and her legs are splayed wider, wanting more. I pull back, wanting to be a tease and gently blow on her until she’s whimpering.

“Do want it soft or wild?” I whisper, air skirting over her clit. I’ll give her anything she asks for.

“Wild,” she says and I love how bold she is. There was no hesitation at all.

I smile to myself, the sight of her spread before me, then I attack her with my tongue, pulsing it in and out of her, flicking and licking up a frenzy until it’s wet and messy and my mouth is cramping. It’s not long before she’s coming, her thighs wrapped on either side of my head, her skin throbbing beneath my lips.

I smile against her and look up over her chest rising and falling, frantic. She’s gripping the hay for dear life, her back arched and her mouth is gaping open as she cries out my name.

I’ve missed this. It’s like witnessing a miracle. Hard to find in an ordinary world.

I pull back and watch her as she comes down from the high, her cheeks rosy, her skin glistening with sweat.

Eventually she sits up, pulls her underwear and shorts back on.

She’s avoiding my eyes at all costs.

That ain’t fucking good.

My heart seems to drop out of me.

“Was that okay?” I ask her. She sure acted like it was okay in the moment but now that the moment has passed, she looks like she’s struggling with something.

“It was…” she starts. She looks at me. “I’m not sure if that was a good idea.”

I swallow uneasily. “Okay. Why?”

“It’s too much…too fast.” She rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know how I feel about anything right now. An orgasm isn’t going to fix anything, it’s just going to complicate things and we’re already complicated enough as it is.”

An orgasm? I want to say. That wasn’t just an orgasm. That was everything.

But I don’t say it because she’s fucking right and this just proves it. Things are complicated as hell.

Still, “I hate to break it to you, Rachel, but we’re going to be complicated for a while yet.”

“And when does it stop?”

When you love me again. When you stay.

If you stay.

Our eyes lock with each other and I know that she knows what I’m thinking. She has to feel it off of me. Rachel feels everything.

And because of that, I know I have to tread carefully. I don’t want to push her away, I don’t want to scare her off. She has to work things out on her own, even though I would give anything to help her. I gave her closure, I reset her past, but that doesn’t mean that I’m her future.

I get to my feet, breaking our gaze, and start heading down the ladder.

“I better get a move on then.”

“Where are you going?” she asks, staring over the edge as I jump down on the barn floor.

I look up at her. With the way the sun is streaming in, the dust motes floating around her head look like a halo. “I’d just finished hosing down Basil. Now I gotta get Polly, tack up, head out on the range. Some cows have wandered too far.”

“How long are you going to be gone for?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her as she starts climbing down the ladder. “Maybe overnight. Maybe not.”

“Can I come?” she steps onto the ground and turns to face me.

I’m beyond puzzled. “Why would you want to come?”

“I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to talk to my mother after that, I just need to get away for a bit. I don’t want to be alone.”

I raise my brows. For someone who doesn’t want complications, she’s certainly complicating things.

But like hell I’m complaining.

“Of course you can come,” I tell her. “I’ll saddle up Sybil for you. Go put on some jeans, boots, grab a sweater, maybe a toothbrush and I’ll get us some saddle bags just in case.”

She nods, looking nervous at the thought of having to go back into the worker’s cottage and the scene of the crime. Then she turns and runs to go get her stuff.

I watch her ass as she goes, the taste of her still on my lips.

I’m welcoming this complication with open fucking arms.





15





Shane





A lot of time may have passed since Rachel was young and on this ranch but one thing remains the same. She’s cute as fucking hell on horseback.

And a natural, too.

Even though we’d gone bareback riding the other day, now seeing her sit proudly on the back of Sybil, a slow and rather ornery mare (just like the Fawlty Towers character she was named after), as we ride up into the mountains, she looks just as she did back in the day.

“What?” she asks me, adjusting the brim of the black cowboy hat I’d given her.

“Nothing.” I smile.

“You keep staring at me. Am I doing it wrong?”

“You’re doing it great. You belong on the back of a horse.”

She snorts. “Yeah, well after we went bareback, I couldn’t walk very well the next day.”

“Kind of like the day after we’ve had sex.”

She narrows her eyes at me and lets out a puff of air in disgust. “You and your ego.”

I shrug. “Not ego, just the truth.”

I know it’s making her uncomfortable for me to talk about sex but I just had my head between her legs so I don’t think it matters all that much what we talk about. She can pretend that what happened was a mistake but I know that meant something to her, even if she won’t admit it.

“Don’t act like your other partners ever measured up to me,” I add. I bite my lip, watching for her reaction.

Her eyes roll far back in her head and she clucks at Sybil to pick up the pace, trying to get past me.

“You trying to escape?” I call after her.