also somehow manage to go down the steps, walk down the steep driveway. She told herself she’d do that, no matter what. Where she would find the strength was something else entirely, but that, too, she would manage.
Except she couldn’t, not like that. She couldn’t leave things unsaid, because that would bring even deeper regrets that she had left with him thinking she was willing to trade herself to anyone. Dredging up the last tattered remnants of her pride, she said, “It isn’t just the valley. I wouldn’t have made that . . . offer . . . to anyone else. Only you. Because . . . because I thought, I felt . . .” She stumbled to a halt, gathered herself. “I felt . . . attraction.” She was done. She couldn’t take any more. She said “I’m sorry” in a thin, stifled tone and turned to leave.
She hadn’t taken a single step before his hard hand closed around her arm and pulled her to a stop. Everything in her rejected being halted; she needed to get away, get out of his sight, before she broke down completely. She didn’t want him to see, to know. Helplessly she tugged on her arm, knowing she would break free only if he let her, but trying anyway because she couldn’t not try.
“Well, now.” His voice was low, almost a growl; she hadn’t heard him move but he was standing right behind her, and the timbre of his words was a stroke along her exposed nerve endings. “That changes things.”
Blindly she shook her head. Anything he said now would seem like pity, and she couldn’t bear that. “No. It doesn’t.” She pulled on her arm again.
“Sure it does. Let me show you.”
He released her arm but closed both of his hands around her waist, turning her around to face him. She didn’t want him to see her face, to know how devastated she was; quickly she ducked her head, and found herself with her forehead resting on his chest. He smelled of soap, of man, of heated skin. She could hear the beat of his heart, muted but strong and steady, luring her to nestle her cheek against him so she could feel as well as hear. She resisted the lure, too shattered to do anything other than endure.
Slowly, almost cautiously, he eased her body against him.
She felt more of that heat. She felt his chest and abdomen, like ridged iron covered with warm flesh. She felt the grip of his big hands, sliding down to her hips. She felt the long, muscled thighs. And she felt the thick ridge pressed against her stomach, felt him move her hips and rock her back and forth against that thick ridge.
Whiplashed first by rejection and now this, strung out on nerves, she shook her head. “I—no. I don’t understand.”
His left hand stroked from her hip up her back, fisted in the hair at the back of her head and tugged, tilting her head back. The expression in those sharp green eyes mesmerized her, like a rabbit being frozen by the predatory gaze of the wolf creeping up on it.
“Understand this.” He kissed her—and nothing about it was anything like how she’d been kissed before. He kissed her as if he wanted to devour her, possess her, wipe the memory of every other kiss out of her mind forever. The kiss was hard, almost bruising; his lips were firm, his tongue in her mouth before she had quite realized what he was doing. He ate at her mouth, holding her head back to give him complete access. He kissed her as if he was about to strip her clothes off, pick her up, and put her against the wall.
The taste of him . . . oh, the taste of him.
A small part of her wanted to push him away and yell at him. He’d said no, and the single word had gutted her. Now he was kissing her as if he intended to never let her go. She wasn’t good at this man/woman stuff and being jerked back and forth like this was so upsetting she wanted to punch him.
Instead she put her arms around him and clenched her fists in his shirt, returned the kiss with her own hunger and fervor, reveling in the strength she could feel under her hands, against her body. That wasn’t enough; she released the fabric, dug her fingers into his back, tried to squirm closer because the only