“So soft,” he whispered against my wrist, moving up. “Your skin is so soft.” The bell sleeve of my blouse was loose, and he moved it up farther, dragging his lips up the inside of my forearm, making me gasp. “Like velvet.” He stopped and placed that hand against his face, his gaze heavy with desire. “I love how you feel. How you touch me.”
“I love you.”
The words were out of my mouth before I realized I’d said them, and I pressed my lips together as the flush came over my face. It was too forward. Everything with Ben was too forward, too much, too unexpected, too inappropriate. I knew that I had to go to the Mason party, whether he wanted me to or not, because of my father if nothing else. He’d know instantly that something was off if I didn’t.
But I’d just declared my love to this man in front of me, knowing that my father would be on a matchmaking hunt. Ben was right. It was insane. And the way he looked at me as I said it made me dizzy with a need I didn’t even know I had. It was like all decorum dissolved into smoke when we were this close.
He didn’t look put off by my forwardness. Or amused. Or afraid.
A long breath escaped his chest, and his gaze was loaded with every emotion I could ever imagine.
“Oh, God, I love you, Josie,” he whispered, as if to himself.
I was all reactive sensation as my hand wound into his hair and pulled his face to mine. Something in the back of my brain said to slow down, not to react to my thighs clamping together over the feel of his stubbled face against my tender skin, over the sound of those words, over the suddenly much deeper kiss we fell into, our tongues exploring desperately. Something said to resist as he pulled my body down to his and I felt all his hard lines and something else very hard pressing right against—oh, sweet Jesus, right against there. Something said that his hands on my body and his mouth tasting his way down my neck to the hollow of my throat and unbuttoning my top buttons was wrong.
But nothing felt wrong.
“Josie?” he groaned against my mouth.
“Yes,” I breathed.
We were in love. Everything felt incredibly right as I gave myself to the man I loved, body and soul, our murmurs of love and my moans of pain and pleasure being carried off by the sounds of the ever-trickling water below.
Chapter 3
1904
Benjamin
Looking around the large sitting room I rarely inhabited, along with the adjoining parlor and dining room—equally unimpressive to me—now spilling over with a bunch of starched-up people I barely knew, my opinion hadn’t changed over the last five years.
I tugged on my too-tight collar and glanced at my uncle’s old grandfather clock, mocking me from the corner. He knew. That damn codger knew from whatever direction he was watching that there was little in this world that I despised more than this godforsaken party.
“Benjamin.”
I closed my eyes.
Except for maybe that person.
I resisted the urge to roll my shoulders away from him or to duck out of sight the way I’d done when I was younger, but he and this place had sucked the life clean out of me. The only bright light in the whole place—in my whole world—was currently asleep upstairs with a homemade doll tucked under her arm. I wished I could go climb in with her. I felt double my twenty-seven years as I turned for the umpteenth time to see what Theodore needed.
“What?” I asked, knowing that it sounded clipped, and losing the will to care.
Theodore had run this house since long before I came, working for both my uncle and his parents before him. Even before my Uncle Travis made a name for himself in the horse ranching business, his father had run a profitable farm there, and I was pretty sure Theodore was just spawned out of the woodwork or birthed in a stable. I had no illusions of whom the real master of the Mason Ranch was behind the scenes, but right now, I’d just about reached my limit of his hard, emphatic Ben-ja-mins at every turn.
“It’s seven on the hour,” he said, as though that was of vital importance. “It’s time to announce—”
“That the food is out,” I said, giving a tight smile. “Yes, I know. You’ve mentioned it. Also, I’ve done this once or twice.”
“Not like this.”
Theodore gave me his standard disapproving look, the same one he’d worn since the day my uncle passed and all this glory was shoved into my hands. He never thought I was worthy or able to take those reins, and he was right. I was fifteen shades of green back then, and only cared about the unthinkable manipulation that had just twisted my life.
I liked to think that I’d done it justice. That I’d taken on a ranch I didn’t know how to run, a woman I was forced to marry, and the hatred of the one person that ever mattered with some amount of grace. Because in all the chaos, God dropped the sweetest little angel into my arms.
I was bucking the system tonight, however, and Theodore wasn’t happy about it. Setting out the food on the long dining table I hated, with the small serving plates my late wife called dessert plates. I figured that guests could serve themselves and continue walking around and talking while they ate. I sure as hell did it all the time. I rarely sat down to eat anymore, except for breakfast with Abigail every morning.
But using dessert plates for regular food evidently wasn’t done in social settings.
Well, it would be done now.
I couldn’t abide another insufferable sit-down with these people,
