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This was soft beds and rough hands. It was safety and the feeling of edgy danger she knew would only result in good things.

Risk and reward all rolled into a kiss.

Fear and satisfaction encapsulated in a moment.

She had spent so many years feeling tired. Her age had never meant much to her. When she had been a child it hadn’t meant that someone was taking care of her, not like it should.

And as she had become an adult, it had meant even less.

But she’d been tired. Maybe more than a twenty-three-year-old should be.

She didn’t feel tired now.

This, their connection, it went past time and age and experience.

When she had knelt there on the ground and looked up at him, he’d seen her.

And she’d seen him.

It had been real and honest and this was too.

She didn’t have a snarky comment to make. Didn’t have a way to make light of the glory she felt around them then.

He held her. And she loved it.

She thought she might even love him. It didn’t scare her. It felt sort of beautiful. The idea that she could maybe love another person. Not feel tied to them because of genetics and a sense of loyalty for family thatshouldn’t have to exist when that family had never been loyal to you.

Bix had never really been loved.

But maybe worst of all, she had never loved.

The idea that she could was beautiful. A flower unfolding at the center of her chest, making something new and pretty and lovely.

She clung to him, then moved her hands down his bare chest, down the front of his flat, ridged stomach. She luxuriated in the way that he felt. In the way this felt.

“Sheriff,” she breathed. “You really are something.”

“So are you. Something else. Something special.”

It was his turn to kiss her. Her nose, the edge of her lips. Her mouth, just tenderly, and it made her knees feel weak.

It was strange how this could feel so pure when her thoughts were anything but. How it could feel right and good at the same time it felt gloriously dirty in the loveliest way.

She supposed if she could thank her dad for anything it was that she didn’t have any shame around the idea of sex. She’d only held herself back from it because of her sense of self-preservation.

In the environment she’d been in, she’d known that would have only exposed her to hurt. To maybe being pregnant. To all kinds of things she just didn’t want to deal with.

And so now, while she had some concerns, some worries, she at least didn’t have any shame to shift.

She could feel some happiness about that.

And mostly, she didn’t want to give any credit to her dad. Not for her being here. Because this was all her. And all Daughtry.

She clung to him, let him kiss her. Kissed him back.

Until she was panting, until she could barely breathe.

He moved his hand around to cup her ass, and she gasped, arching against him, rolling her hips forward in an instinctive bid to feel him right where she was most needy for him.