seen him retrieve it from his wallet, but then she had lost her sense of time and space—and rolling it over himself.
Then he gripped her hips and pulled her toward him as he entered her slowly. His big body over hers like this with the bed soft beneath her was a new experience. She touched his face, watched as pleasure overtook him. As he buried himself in her completely.
Then he reached up and gently, very gently, slid the rubber band out of her hair.
Ran his fingers through it.
And she felt wild.
She gasped when he pulled out and thrust back in. And he tortured them both. With long, slow strokes that took their time to build, until they got hard and fast. Until he was holding her thighs tight against him as he slammed home.
And she held on to his shoulders, because she could do nothing else. Could do nothing but surrender to him and to this.
And then he gritted his teeth and froze above her on a shout, and she could feel him hard and thick pulsing inside of her, and she was pushed over the edge once again.
Shattered.
Into a million, brilliant shining pieces of herself.
And at the center of the rubble was Pansy, wild and free, with her hair blowing in the breeze and her feet bare on the rocky ground.
West hadn’t created this wild woman. He had simply set her free.
And it terrified her. But she couldn’t go back either.
He left her there for a moment as he went to the bathroom to take care of practicalities. And when he returned, he got into bed with her, pulling back the covers and dragging her beneath them, fitting them against his naked body.
“What about the cake?” she mumbled sleepily.
It wasn’t that late, but she was exhausted.
“It’ll keep,” he said, kissing the back of her neck.
She believed him. And it didn’t take long before she closed her eyes. And right as she drifted off to sleep the last thought in her mind was that someone had finally tucked her in.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHEN WEST WOKE up the next morning, Pansy was curled up against him, her dark hair loose over her face. She looked young just then. And like she might not have a worry in the whole world, which he knew wasn’t true at all, because poor Pansy seemed to have worries worked all the way through her.
He got out of bed and put on his jeans, not bothering with anything else, and then he went into the kitchen, where he found the cake.
The piece that they had left out on the counter last night was a little bit dry, but the cake itself had been shut back in the box, and was just fine.
He started a pot of coffee and cut her a fresh piece of the cake.
He didn’t know how a rule follower like Pansy would feel about birthday cake for breakfast, but given that he had pushed a lot of her other boundaries, he figured it wasn’t so bad to push this one too.
When he went back into the bedroom, she had stirred. She was lying on her back, her arm thrown over her face, the sheets low, revealing her breasts.
“Good morning,” he said, injecting every bit of his appreciation of the view into his tone.
“Hi,” she croaked, moving her hand and peering at him like she was a mole emerging from the ground, wounded by the sun.
“How are you doing, sweetheart?” he asked, bringing the mug of coffee and the cake over to the nightstand.
She blinked. “What’s this?”
“Breakfast in bed.” Then he kissed her. “Happy birthday.”
“I...” She stared at him, like she was dazed. Wonder overtaking her features. “It’s not my birthday anymore.”
“Birthday week,” he said, smiling.
She blinked three times in rapid succession. “Thank you.”
He cupped her cheek, dragging his thumb over her skin. He didn’t think anyone had ever looked at him like this. Like she was. Like there was something special in him.
He had sent money home to his mother every time he’d won an event in the rodeo. He had sent money home after he’d started to do well in his career.
He had bought his wife the biggest house their money could buy, on a man-made lake in some housing development all full of McMansions plopped down in the middle of two acre lots.
His wife had never looked at him like this. Neither had his mother.
No one had.
No one had ever looked at him like he had given them much of anything, much less