Claiming The Rancher's Heir (Gold Valley Vineyards #2) - Maisey Yates Page 0,12

she might break apart. She didn’t know why.

And then suddenly, everything came to a head, and she couldn’t breathe. All she could do was cling to him, to keep herself from collapsing onto the ground, to keep herself from flying into a million pieces. She dug her fingernails into his shoulder and cried out as pleasure took over. He wasn’t far behind. On a growl, he found his own release, his body pulsing inside her. And when it was over, they both collapsed there against the wall, sweaty and breathing hard.

“This wine,” he said, reaching around her. “This will do.” He grabbed the bottle, then bent and picked his shirt up from off the floor. He righted his clothes disturbingly fast, and then left her standing there.

She tucked her blouse as firmly into her skirt as she could, crossing the bottom ends and getting the thing to more or less cover her breasts. And then she just stood there for a moment, shell-shocked.

She’d just had sex with Creed Cooper against the wall.

And he had walked away like they hadn’t missed a beat between talking about wine and screwing each other senseless.

She pushed the skirt down over her hips. If it wasn’t for the intense throbbing between her legs... If it wasn’t for that, she would have thought she had hallucinated it all. Because how... How had that just happened?

She grabbed another bottle of wine, not even reading the label, and walked back upstairs. He was in position, his face like absolute granite.

“Want to finish tasting?”

“Are you... Did you hit your head down there?” she asked.

“Where?”

“Why are you acting like we didn’t just have sex?”

“It’s done,” he said.

There was something bleak in his green eyes, and it disturbed her. She was a woman. Wasn’t she the one who was supposed to freak out about this kind of thing? She wasn’t particularly worried about how many partners she’d had, but it was one of those things other women often seemed to worry about. But he was the one who looked...well, vaguely ashamed.

“It’s just that...”

Those green eyes were hard as emeralds now. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not going to happen again.”

Well, on that they could agree. Because there was no way—absolutely no way—that she would ever do anything like that with him again. It had been stupid to do it the first time.

Even though it had felt amazing. She wanted to tell him that. She wanted to cling to him, for just a little while longer. To make him hold her up, because her knees still felt weak. To tell him it was the best sex she’d ever had, and she didn’t know what to do with the knowledge that the man who could make her body do things she hadn’t known it could do was the one man she had decided she hated more than any other.

She wanted to ask him why that was, because he had taken pleasure with her, too, so maybe he could understand it. He’d certainly had more partners than she had. Had more experience overall. So surely he should be able to...

And she realized she was being a ridiculous stereotype. A woman who was putting emotions into something that had been purely physical.

She had been caught up in that moment. In being outside herself. Well, she had done something out of character. And that was that. There was no going back. But there was also no need to continue on with it now.

He was still Creed. She was still Wren.

She didn’t like him any more now that she’d seen him naked than she had before.

Well. That wasn’t true.

The man had given her the most insane orgasm of her life. It would be impossible not to like him slightly more now than she had before.

“I trust you to make your selections,” she said. She felt numb and shaky. And maybe he had a point that the two of them should act like nothing had happened, but she couldn’t do it while in the same room as him.

“I’ll just leave you to it.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.”

It wasn’t until she got back in her car, and was safely back on the road, that she started shaking. She had lived out some kind of fantasy she hadn’t even fully realized she’d had. She’d had sex with her enemy up against the wall. She didn’t intend to have a relationship with him. They couldn’t. They couldn’t even be in the same room without