Page 102 of The Wildest Ride

“I have control.” Lil’s body had gone as stiff as her words.

AJ smiled. “You started a brawl at the registration table.”

“Not my lack of control in that case,” she pointed out. “I am stone-cold.”

He snorted. “Really? Can’t say it’s been my experience of Lil Sorrow...”

“On the bull,” she ground out. “I learned to be stone-cold up there a long time ago.”

He heard her glare rather than felt it, and grinned. “That’s lucky. It took me a while to catch up. Of course, once I did, I realized it was one of those rodeo lessons that applies outside of the arena, too...”

She pinched him, and his smile widened. He said, “You lose when they get to you. When I stopped letting them get to me, it drove them crazy—didn’t matter if it was the other competitors, broncs, bulls...women.”

This time she punched him and he laughed out loud and kissed the top of her head, breathing her in deep at the same time. Squeezed her close again. “Bulls, rodeo, and more bulls. Not your typical pillow talk.”

She chuckled, “I don’t imagine so. Wouldn’t know myself.”

“For shame, Lil. I didn’t peg you as the love ’em and leave ’em type.”

He’d been joking, but he felt her go faintly rigid.

Her words were bright but brittle when she responded: “Oh, you know, more of the never love ’em in the first place type...”

Sensing a fragile point, he rubbed his palms up and down her back and spoke softly, keeping his tone easy and light. “You got something against emotional attachment?”

She exhaled and relaxed into him once more. “No,” she said after her breathing evened out. “I just didn’t want my body calling the shots.”

AJ chuckled. “And here I thought I had control issues.”

“When your story sounds like an after-school special, it makes you cautious.”

“About falling for someone?” he asked.

She snorted. “Having sex.”

He frowned. “What are we talking about?”

She answered, “Having sex?”

That she’d responded with a question, and one delivered with a slight thread of uncertainty woven through it, didn’t immediately register in his mind.

Instead, he was stuck on a catch-up loop that kept coming back to the same thing: Lil had been a virgin.

Had been.

Until him.

The knowledge gave him a strange sense of vertigo even as it made him hard again. Her weight still rested comfortably on him; they still breathed in unison; he still ran his hand up and down her back—but suddenly he had become a permanent feature of her story. Vertigo spun him around as it sank in that unlike his typical encounters, they were both forever changed. He had never been a part of someone’s life story in that way, and with the powerful shift it brought, he realized he liked it. He wanted to be a milestone in her life. For the first time, he wanted to be more.

Like rodeo, she would be a demanding and tempestuous mistress, one who would never go easy on him, as likely to break him as she was to save him. Like the sport he’d given everything to, her mere existence called his best forth and refused to accept anything less. But, unlike the other great passion of his life, Lil was an experience entirely his own. One he realized he wanted to keep. Maybe forever.

In fact, for the first time since he’d decided to retire, the future didn’t look like a long stretch of watching from the sidelines, a slow decline the only thing left to him after reaching his pinnacle.

Instead, it looked like Lil. Lil in the morning, Lil at the dinner table, Lil at night. It looked like holding her hand through hard times, and watching her grow even more cantankerous with each passing year.

The squeezing sensation that was becoming familiar whenever Lil was around returned to his chest as his erection throbbed. He wanted her again, now more than ever, but knowing she was new to it all—making love as well as being the subject of complete focus—he worried she’d need a break. He wasn’t small. She was.

His mental groan was half desire and half guilt. She would be the death of him. A part of him, the part concerned with mortality and survival, resisted, even as his body knew it was the death he’d been running toward his whole life. He pressed against her, and she made a little noise of approval that shot straight to his rigid heat.