The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

She murmured something drunken in response, no longer caring whether she had to get back on a horse or not. She’d have ridden a buffalo if it meant she could stay with him just a little longer.

He brought her to a meadow glade he knew, where a friendly chuckling creek meandered and the grass was thick and warm and the air smelled of pine needles baking in the sun. He could be alone with her here, and for a few precious hours pretend it was all the world that mattered.

“So beautiful,” Mary sighed, walking slowly through the grass, looking around her at the pine trees’ sheltering walls.

“Yes,” Roan agreed, looking only at her.

He tied the horses in the shade and took off their saddles, then untied the blanket roll on the back of his saddle and spread it on the tall soft grass beside the creek. He turned to Mary and held out his hand. She came to him slowly, like someone in a dream, and he drew a deep, wondering breath, half-afraid to believe this could be real, that he could be here in this place with this woman in this moment, and that he could feel, for the first time in four years, so utterly and completely happy.

He took her face between his two hands and lowered his parted lips to hers, and felt hers stir lazily, drunkenly into a smile. He felt her hands come to lie on his sides…felt the delicate trembling of her body. He made himself kiss her only lightly, at first, holding still and brushing his lips over hers as if it was the very first time, as if he was only now learning the shape and textures of her, testing his patience and self-control. And then, failing the test joyfully, he sank into her warm sweet depths and lost himself there.

“Been wantin’ to do this,” he mumbled as he resurfaced dizzy and intoxicated, quaking with need of her already.

“I think we are,” she whispered, laughing faintly.

“No…this.” His fingers felt for the buttons on her shirt…began to work their way down. He drew back a little, asked the question with his eyes, and receiving his answer in her shimmering golden gaze, watched his hands pull the two halves of the shirt apart, then push them over her shoulders.

He undressed her slowly while her eyes clung to him and his to her, skimming his hands and mouth over each part as he uncovered it, touching her lightly the same way he’d kissed her at first, learning her body in its finest detail, committing each detail to memory, taking the taste and texture and smell of her into his pores, his mind, his being. And in introducing himself to her body’s secrets in sensitive and clever ways, made her his in the only way he knew how.

When she was trembling too hard to stand and begging him in shaken, inarticulate whispers, he laid her down on the blanket, then undressed quickly and stretched himself alongside her, head propped on one hand so he could look down at her, lying golden, flushed and dewy in the sun. Her lips were swollen and moist from his kisses, and when she smiled at him, his heart quivered.

She reached up and touched back a fallen lock from his forehead, then seined through his hair with her fingers, like a weaver. Her lips parted suddenly, urgently, and her breath snagged on the words that didn’t come.

“What?” he said tenderly, when he saw something flare, bright and desperate, in her eyes.

For a moment it hovered there, whatever it was she’d wanted to tell him, balanced like a raindrop on the tip of her tongue. Then her face spasmed, so lightly he might have missed it if he hadn’t known its shapes and moods so well. Her eyes darkened with something that looked like pain, but she smiled at him brightly and whispered, “I want you to kiss me again…please.”

So he did, tenderly as he knew how, his heart swelling inside him with longing and hope…the possibility that the words she couldn’t bring herself to say might be the same ones locked inside his mind, the ones he still felt he had no right to say. Not yet. Not until he’d made things right for her again.

I love you…stay with me forever.

It was all there in his heart, though, as he kissed her, and she kissed him back eagerly, laughing with tears, as if she heard him.

He took his mouth from hers and moved it to her throat, paused to measure the tripping beat of her pulse… faster, even than his own…then left it to wander down her body. He let his hand lead, cupping each breast before his mouth could find its tip…fingers spreading across the silky skin of her stomach, making patterns for his tongue to follow, while she held his head lightly against her, neither guiding nor impeding, fingers weaving through his hair, warm as blessings on his scalp.

He stroked between her legs and they shifted to allow him access…but she winced when his hand brushed the inside of her thighs. He found the chafed red places where the saddle had rubbed and gently laved them with his tongue, and when she whimpered and squirmed and clutched him closer, he laughed softly and gave the same attention to other parts of her the saddle might have touched…

Then, mindful of the abuses her tender body had suffered and of the hard ground and meager grass beneath them, he lay back on the blanket and pulled her over him. “Come to me, love,” he whispered brokenly, words all but impossible now. “If you want me…inside you now. I really want…need…”

He groaned when her warm hand found and guided him home.

She couldn’t stop the tears…it felt so good, the sweet hot sting of him coming inside her. He would wonder-let him wonder. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak…the only outlet she had for the emotions swelling inside her was tears.

She shuddered, the pressure inside her building, so intense now, even tears weren’t enough to relieve it. The delicious sliding pressure of his body…the pressure of her own body’s arousal…sensations so exquisite she wondered how she could endure them without going insane. Pressure from emotions so enormous she couldn’t contain them…wanted to scream them to the sky…feel their echoes rolling back on her like thunder.

Pressure from emotions so powerful they stunned her to silence, so that all she could do was gaze down at the face of the man beneath her and whisper them in her heart.

I love you…never dreamed I could love anyone so much. How did this happen?

Her body clenched, tighter…tighter. Desperate for release, she couldn’t even sob; her breath was trapped high in her chest. Her mind spun her in dizzy circles, as if she had a fever. She was only dimly aware when Roan’s strong arms encircled her…pulled her down onto his chest…when his mouth covered hers and captured her struggling breath…and then her high, keening cry as her body let go at last, and came apart in rippling waves.

She felt his body buck beneath her as he held her tightly and rode the waves with her…felt his chest heave and his muscles grow taut with strain before he surged up into her, gave himself to her in his own magnificent release.

In the aftermath they clung to each other, laughing and wiping away tears, rocking each other like giddy children.

Chapter 16

The sun was hot on her back, but she felt too drained to move. Roan’s hands, stroking and gentling her, felt the warmth.

“You’re gonna get burned,” his lion’s purr voice rumbled as he nudged her forehead with his chin. Getting only a contented murmur in reply, he chuckled and rolled her over onto the blanket, then eased himself away from her and stood up.

Sunk deep in blissful lethargy, she watched from under a sheltering forearm as he walked naked to the edge of the creek, the hard muscle of his back and buttocks gleaming like marble in the sun. When he dropped to one knee and reached to scoop water from the creek with his cupped hand, she thought of statues of ancient Greek athletes, and didn’t even consider it strange to be daydreaming such romantic nonsense when for so many years she hadn’t allowed herself to dream at all. Today, her life was filled with wonder and magic, and even miracles seemed possible.

He splashed the crystal-clear water over his face and neck, shoulders and body, then turned to her, smiling, and held out his hand. Droplets of water clung to his hair and eyelashes and gleamed like oil on his cold-flushed skin. She rose to her feet and walked to him in a daze, too deeply under the spell of his warm and worshipful gaze to feel any self-consciousness at all. She was thinking only of him and how beautiful he was, and of how much she loved him and how much she wished they could be like this forever, just the two of them in a perfect little universe