she couldn’t breathe for how deeply he had buried himself inside of her.
This time, it was his ride. His rhythm.
Hard and magical and filthy. Dirty.
Bad.
Everything she had not to be for so long. But she gave it all up. Her perfection. Her ideas of what she had to do and who she had to be.
She surrendered it all to West.
He grabbed her wrists and pinned them up against the wall, and rode her hard, his mouth firm against hers, then skimming over her jaw, her neck. And impossibly she felt her orgasm begin to build inside of her again.
She clung to him, to his shoulders, as ripples of pleasure moved through her body. She buried her head in his chest and cried out, and then he followed, and she could feel him, pulsing inside of her as he found his own release. His heart hammered hard beneath her forehead.
His breathing uneven.
It was the same.
It was the same for him. This magic explosion of color and sensation was something that he felt too. But as soon as it was finished, as soon as the pleasure started to recede, she felt lost.
And that was terrifying.
“I...”
She pushed him away. She started to straighten her clothes desperately. “I have to go,” she said.
“Do you?” he responded, straightening his own self and hunting around for a trash can.
She put her hands over her face. “You can’t get rid of that here.”
“Where else am I going to get rid of it?”
He discarded the protection then. In that wastebasket and she felt...panicked.
“We went down here.”
“And if someone hunts through the trash can and they figure it out that’s their problem.”
She did not feel that sanguine about it.
She felt exposed.
Like her weakness was just out there for everyone to see. For him to see.
It had been all fine and good to think that was okay while she had been mindless with pleasure.
But her mind had been returned to her.
She sort of wish it hadn’t been.
“Well, you didn’t think you needed my help to move any of this anyway. So I’m going to go.”
She ran. It was even worse than the first time. She was such...she was such a baby. And she didn’t know how to handle any of this. She didn’t know what to do with herself.
She walked blindly to her car, trying to hold back tears, because the last thing she needed was for people to say that they saw Officer Pansy Daniels weeping openly on the streets of Gold Valley.
That would do wonders for rumors about her mental stability. And...and...everything else.
When she got in her car, to keep from crying, she called Sammy.
“Are you guys around?”
“Yes. Iris and I are making cookies.”
“What about Rose?”
“She’s working. But...she should be in for lunch soon.”
“Are Ryder and Logan there?” Anywhere near Hope Springs, that’s what she should have made clear. Not just in the house. She didn’t want them anywhere near when she arrived. She didn’t even want to see them. Couldn’t stand looking them in the face.
“No. They’re off getting a new load of cattle.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Maybe she would regret it. But she regretted a whole lot of things that she had just done, and she needed to sort it all out.
Clearly, she couldn’t trust herself to sort through anything.
* * *
BY THE TIME Pansy arrived at Hope Springs Ranch Iris, Rose and Sammy were all waiting for her, along with a plate of cookies, a tall pitcher of lemonade and an unidentified cake.
“I didn’t know there was cake,” Pansy said.
“It sounded like it might be a cake situation,” Sammy said, pushing it in Pansy’s direction.
“Well, cake is always appreciated.” Food was a way Iris and Sammy showed they cared, and Pansy was very into that sort of caring.
“I know,” Sammy said. “But to be clear, you sounded like you really needed cake.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“You had that sound in your voice. Like you were in the middle of a crisis that can only be solved by buttercream.”
“That’s any number of crises,” Iris said, “in fairness.”
“Sure. But I’m wondering if this particular crisis wears a Stetson and saunters around broad shouldered and in possession of large hands,” Sammy said.
Rose’s eyes went wide. “Does it?” she asked, her voice going almost supersonic.
“Yes,” Pansy said, keeping her voice sure and solid.
Like a criminal bent on confessing.
Because again, she was the one that had come here. She was the one that was submitting herself to this torture, and she couldn’t really figure out why. Most of