His for the Taking - By Ann Major Page 0,3

had gone still. Her eyes never left his face. “Let me go!” Her voice was shallow.

“You don’t want me to do that, and you know it.” In the grip of a need too fierce to deny, his voice was raspy.

His gaze moved hungrily lower. She had soft, lush breasts. Hell, he wanted way more than a kiss, and he wanted it very badly. She was Jesse Ray’s daughter, so she probably wanted it, too.

Feeling justified in testing a girl of such easy virtue, he gripped her shoulders and pulled her closer. Before she could react, he lowered his mouth to hers so he could take his first taste of her. His lips were hard and demanding because he expected easy compliance. And for an instant she responded just as favorably as he’d imagined, by gasping and sighing and clutching him closer. Her lips did part, and he felt her tongue, if only for an instant. Then almost immediately she stiffened. Recoiling, she balled her hands and began to pound at his chest, thrashing wildly.

When he didn’t immediately let her go, her face flushed with anger. “You wouldn’t treat Lizzie like this! You wouldn’t try to take her in a barn like she was something cheap and easy without ever even having a single conversation with her!”

“Well, you’re not Lizzie Collier, are you? You’re Jesse Ray’s girl.”

“And that makes me too low to have feelings like you and your kind? Well, I do have feelings! And I’m not like my mother, you hear! So, go find your precious, saintly Lizzie Collier, and leave me in peace! She’s your girlfriend. Not me! And I wouldn’t ever want to be!”

But the last was a lie. The quick tears of shame and desolation in her lovely eyes and the thick pain in her ravaged tone told him so. She wanted him, but on equal terms. She didn’t want to be someone cheap in his eyes. Her pride, as well as her longing for him, tugged at his heart and made him feel ashamed even as it made his desire for her increase a thousandfold.

He hadn’t misread her. She had wanted him, badly. But Jesse Ray’s daughter had as much self-respect as Lizzie Collier did any day.

For a long moment, she gazed at him as if pleading for something he was at a loss to give even as her look tore his heart. Then, with a desperate cry, she pushed free of him and ran out of the barn. As he watched her retreating across the pasture, he was stunned by her grace and vital beauty and by how much more he wanted her than he’d ever wanted Lizzie. He was baffled by how low and ashamed he felt by that fact. She was just Jesse Ray’s girl. Why the hell should he feel such an overpowering need for her, such a need to apologize to her?

For weeks afterward, he’d tried to put the scent and softness and taste of the spirited and unsuitable girl out of his mind, but she’d been too lovely, too passionate, too brave, too forthright—too sexy. He’d dreamed of her, dreamed of making love to her.

He tried to forget her, but then his friends began to tell him stories about Maddie—marvelous stories he’d hungered to hear. How Maddie raced with the other kids, mostly the boys, in the pastures outside town. How she always won on the back of that prancing demon, Wild Thing. They said that she’d tamed him, that she was fearless, that she would ride bareback, that the pair could jump anything.

Why, one day after school when Cole’s friend Lyle had been smoking in his vintage Mustang with the top down, she and Wild Thing jumped over him and the car.

“Crazy horse came so close to my head I dropped my cigarette in my crotch. Burned a hole in my best pair of jeans,” Lyle had complained.

Such stories had impressed Lizzie, but they’d merely proved to Cole that Maddie was a headstrong fool—and brave, stubborn and determined. Even if the older generation in Yella wouldn’t change their minds about her because of her mother, some of the kids began to think she wasn’t as bad as they’d been taught. Maddie was smart in school, too, and Miss Jennie, whose approval was hard to win, thought she was as good as anybody.

For all that, Cole knew his mother would never approve of Maddie as his girlfriend. After his mother had married into the legendary Coleman family, she felt