Winner Takes All - Anna Harrington Page 0,26
could burn pots of stew to her heart’s content. She would have the freedom to marry him, true, but he’d be nothing more than an indebted trainer who would have to go back to caring for someone else’s horses. A man still no better than the groom who’d mucked out her father’s stables.
Win the race, save his farm…send the woman he loved into the arms of another man.
Lose the race, lose his farm…give Frankie the freedom to choose her own path, one that could never include a penniless groom.
He laughed bitterly. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. Either way, he’d lose Frankie.
All he could ever have of her was tonight.
Needing to be with her to soothe his heart, he returned to his room. She was still sound asleep, the blanket pulled up tight to her chin. But he knew what was hidden beneath, the vivacious and beautiful woman who had him longing for all kinds of things he had no business wishing for yet still desperately wanted.
He shed his breeches and crawled into bed. The movement of the mattress beneath his weight jostled her awake, and her eyes opened, blinking slowly to clear the confusion from her sleep-fogged head as she remembered where she was and how she’d gotten there. With him. A sleepy smile of happiness lit her face as he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. As he took her bottom lip between his, he felt her desire stir once more, and her heartbeat hammered against his lips as he dipped his head to brush his mouth down her neck.
He rolled her beneath him. When her warm and welcoming body wrapped around his, guilt swept over him. He rested his forehead against hers, squeezing his eyes shut against the unbearable choice he’d been given. He couldn’t leave their future to tomorrow’s race and the whims of fickle fate.
“Jack,” she whispered, her voice thick with equal parts arousal and concern. “What’s wrong?”
Everything. Yet he shook his head, his forehead rubbing gently against hers. He couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes, couldn’t bear to see the emotion in hers. Instead, he pulled in a deep breath. “Do you love me, Francesca?”
Her fingers stilled as they brushed through the hair at his nape. “Do you really have to ask?”
“Yes.” The most important question he’d ever posed in his life.
She turned her head to slide her lips back to his ear and whispered, as if sharing a secret, “I’ve loved you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”
A scoffing sound escaped past the tightening knot of emotion in his throat. “The first time you saw me I was mucking out your father’s horse stalls, standing in shit up to my ankles.”
“The first time I saw you,” she corrected, “you were working hard at what you love—caring for horses.” She kissed his cheek, softly cajoling him to open his eyes and look at her. “Even then I knew you were a man who wasn’t afraid of hard work, who was capable of achieving anything he set his mind to.” She lay back on the pillow, and her silky hair spilled around her. “How could I not love a man like that?” Certainty glowed in her eyes as brightly as the moonlight that slanted through the window and polished her bare skin with a silver sheen. “I still do.”
His heart tore. Emotion ripped through him like a ball from a pistol. And just as deadly.
“I want to make love to you again,” he told her in an aching rasp, desperate to lose himself in her and let her ease away his pain. “Will you let me?”
A teasing smile played at her lips as she repeated, “Do you really have to ask?”
He couldn’t tear his eyes away from hers, couldn’t stop the yearning from coiling in his gut and knotting there in a tightening fist that made his breath come hard. It was the exact same sensation that always gripped him when he raced, whenever his horse was only half a length behind and pressing toward the finish, when he would push his mount for all it was worth. Riding for a fall, the jockeys called it, when the desperation to win drove a man to risk everything. Even his own destruction. Just one wrong move, one small stumble, and it would all be over…
He lowered his head to kiss her. The instant his lips touched hers he knew—he was tumbling into the darkness, the hard ground rushing