Page 36 of Cowboy in Colorado

“You’re playing chicken with a wolf,” he says, his gaze snapping with his own boiling anger, as well as no small amount of pure high-octane sexual fire. “And you’re going to lose.”

I lift my chin, gaze daring. “Don’t be so sure who the loser will be, Will. I chew up men like you for breakfast, and spit them back out by lunch.”

Lies. Dirty, bald-faced lies. I’ve never met a man like him. Never. But I’m caught up in the web of my own foolish fury, and cannot now disentangle myself. My worst mistakes have all been made in the heat of my lost temper, and if the primal, dominant masculinity in his eyes and the set of his huge shoulders and the clenching power in his hard hands is any indication, this is going to be my worst mistake ever.

He reaches out, his work-roughened hand scraping over my hip, preparing to draw me up against him.

Instead of allowing it, I turn away and step into the shower.

Will watches as I drench myself under the steaming water—he watches the way the hot, stinging rivulets sluice over my naked breasts and over my belly and between my thighs, over my sex. I rinse my hair, scrub my chilled body with the scorching hot water, soaking up the heat until my skin stings.

And Will’s gaze follows it all, every movement, unabashed and rife with desire.

My anger is fading, but need is taking its place. Hormone-fueled desperation, a need to be seen and appreciated and touched and desired and needed and taken—it’s been weeks, if not months since my last lover. I tend to go long periods of time between sexual liaisons, too busy with work to bother, until my high-rev libido is so pent up I have no choice but to find a willing partner to expend it on—always someone easily discarded, a pretty male with a big penis and few words preferably, used for a night and sent away with a signed NDA and a happy grin.

Will fits the bill—he’s big, he’s beautiful, and if the bulge at his zipper is any indication, he’s packing something substantial in there—the mammoth size of his hands is a testament as well. But there’s something more to him that tells me he won’t be as easily discarded as my usual prey. If anything, I may well end up being the prey in this situation, but I’m too far gone to care, at this point.

My nipples stay peaked, hard and thick and prominent, aching. My sex pulses with heat and tension. My belly flutters.

I close my eyes to block out Will, soaking up the delicious heat of the water on my flesh. I remember seeing a bar of soap on a built-in shelf near the knobs, and I reach out, find it, lather it in my hands and rub it over my body. This is not meant to be sexual or sensual, but I’m so aroused I know it comes across that way. My hands move on their own, rubbing the lathered-up soap bar over my flesh in a slow, sensuous slide. Over my shoulders, down my arm. Across my belly. Up to my breasts, over the mounded flesh, tugging past the peaked nipples. Down, down over my stomach again and over my thighs. Over the sensitive, tender flesh of my sex, barely stifling a moan at the accidental scrape of my palm over the most hypersensitive part of my arousal.

He hears it. I know he does.

I turn away, rub the soap down my hips and over the backs of my thighs, up my bare, wet bottom.

I hear his wordless snarl, and I turn around and open my eyes just in time to see him ripping off his T-shirt.

He moves with the slow predatory prowl of an aroused male with a primed female in his sights.

His chest is magnificent, flat and hard with thick slabs of muscle defined and built through hard work rather than time in the gym. His abs are ripped to rippling shreds, leading to a hard V—no underwear beneath those dirty, faded jeans. I can see the sideways-angled ridge of his arousal framed in a fold of dark denim, and the size of what I see has my throat closing in anticipatory nerves. He prowls toward the shower, eyes wild and hungry, fingers plucking at the button of his jeans, toeing off his huge muddy boots, pausing to rip off wet socks, and then his jeans are open in a sagging V and I get a tantalizing glimpse of what’s behind the zipper.

Ohhh crap.

What have I done?

I’ve unleashed a wild animal, an untamable stallion, the most primal alpha male I’ve ever encountered. There’s no backing down now.

This is happening, consequences be damned.

9

He shoves the jeans off, but they’re wet and cling to his thighs and calves, and he stumbles as he struggles to rip them off. Finally the leg holes come free of his feet, and he throws them aside, and any lingering awkwardness on his part is gone.

I’m frozen in place.

There are no words for the glory that is a nude Will Auden. He’s all heavy muscle and long lean limbs, all chiseled angles and hard-hewn planes. There’s nothing soft about this man, not an ounce of fat, nothing extra anywhere. I swallow hard, thinking for the first time in my life that just maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in tangling with this one.

He jerks open the shower door and steps in—there would barely be room for him alone, and now there are two of us. Skin slides against skin, and he’s in my space, pressed up against me, filling my world with billowing body heat and hard muscles and masculine scent. His eyes blaze, snapping with raging arousal and unrelenting fury. He resents me, I think, for crashing past whatever barriers he had against me, or thought he had—for forcing my way into his world and shaking it up.

Sorry, pal, but that’s what I do.

I shrink against the farthest wall of the shower, not to get away from him, but to make room for him. He towers over me, his anvil-hard chest rough against mine, scratchy with a dusting of fine hairs. His manhood is…enormous. Considering his profession and the size of the thing standing rigid and straining between us, it would be rather apropos to say he’s hung like a horse. I can’t take my eyes off it—no more than he can take his eyes off my breasts and the apex of my sex, and the rivers of water coursing over my flesh. Neither of us seem eager to make the first move, although we both know precisely what’s catalyzing between us in this tiny shower stall. His chest heaves, his eyes narrow, and that cliff-craggy jawline of his grinds audibly.

“You’re going to crack a tooth, grinding your teeth like that,” I mutter.

“If you’re planning on quitting this game before I take what I want from you, best do it now, girl.” He stares at me hard, his gaze unforgiving, blue eyes exploding with fiery need. “Last chance.”

I just stare back, and our personalities are a rock meeting a hard place—a projectile traveling at high speed meeting an unmovable object.