CHAPTER SEVEN
LUKE HOLLISTER WAS kissing her.
He was only the second man to kiss her. The second man to ever put his mouth against hers. But at the moment, she couldn’t even compare the two experiences. She was frozen, and Luke was still, too, but he was... Him.
He tasted like Luke. Like sunshine and hard work. Like whiskey that lingered on his lips. And like a whole lot of trouble.
It was more than just taste, more than just the strange sensation of a mouth that was an unfamiliar shape pressed against hers. It transcended those physical things.
And it went somewhere deeper.
She was on fire. Melting. Her legs were weak, her stomach trembling. It was as if she had never been kissed before at all. That’s how different it was.
His hand was so big, and it was pressed against her lower back, like he owned her. His other hand came up to cup her face—rough, callused—skimming over her cheekbone. He didn’t take the kiss deeper. Didn’t part her lips.
It was over in less than a second.
A chaste kiss. A simple kiss.
That left nothing chaste or simple remaining in her entire body.
There was a pulse pounding insistently between her legs, a slick wetness that had built up in defiance of everything she knew about herself. Her heart was pounding, her breasts heavy, her nipples tightened into painful points.
It was over. Over long before she was able to move or think or react at all. Over long before she realized they were still standing in the middle of the Gold Valley saloon, rather than in some moment that existed outside of space and time.
Luke Hollister had just kissed her in front of everyone.
Bennett was there. She remembered that too late. She remembered everything too late. Including why they were doing this. Of course. He was making a show, as he had promised he would do. And he was definitely trying to get a rise out of her, which she expected, because he was Luke.
All of that made sense. Except none of it made sense. Not inside of her anyway.
“Throw the dart,” he said, his mouth so close to hers it would take nothing for her lips to touch his again. Nothing at all.
Then he withdrew, taking a step back and leaning against the table again, all cocky arrogance and that kind of masculine swagger she hated. She did. She hated it. And right now she was pretty sure she might hate him, too.
She turned away from him, drew her arm back and threw the dart. And it missed.
She hadn’t missed a bull’s-eye without meaning to in more than ten years.
Hot, angry tears pricked her eyes but she refused to let them fall. Because that was just stupid. This was a game. That was all. It was supposed to be a game where they made Bennett jealous. Where they made him think that he was in danger of losing her.
It was supposed to make Bennett feel wild and unpleasant things; it was not supposed to make her feel wild and unpleasant things.
Too late she remembered to look over at Bennett. And when she did, she had to force herself. He was facing away from them. For all she knew, he hadn’t even seen the kiss.
“He saw.”
She blinked, feeling numb. “What?”
Luke was looking at her, his expression grave. “Bennett saw the kiss,” he said.
And just like that, she felt about two feet tall. Because not only had he read her mind just now, it confirmed to her that Bennett was all he had been thinking about during the kiss. She hadn’t thought of Bennett until after. Much, much after. But Luke had been aware the entire time. And then, when she had been standing there feeling vulnerable and reduced, desperately trying to remember the purpose behind this entire interaction, he had read her. Unerringly.
Meanwhile, she couldn’t read him or Bennett or anything. She couldn’t even read herself.
“Good,” she said, as if it was all she cared about. As if there was nothing more conflicting inside of her than whether or not they had managed to affect Bennett.
To say nothing about how she had been affected.
Except, she had missed the target. And there was no pretending that hadn’t happened. She bit the inside of her cheek. “He’s never seen me miss a bull’s-eye,” she said. “At least, kissing him certainly never made me miss a bull’s-eye. That will give him something to think about.”
She could tell by the particular curve of his smile that Luke didn’t believe her. But he didn’t say that. This, quite possibly, was the first time he had ever been a gentleman to her in any way that counted.
“You sure you don’t want another drink?” he asked, taking a step backward, toward the bar.
She sniffed. “I don’t like whiskey.”
His smile widened. Why was his confidence so impenetrable? Why was he so... So much? “Really?”
“Really,” she confirmed.
“I’ll get you a refill on that Coke,” he said, turning away from her and heading back toward the bar, leaving her to ruminate by the dartboard.
She chanced another look at Bennett’s table. And he still wasn’t looking at her. But she caught Kaylee’s eye again. The other woman was clearly unamused with Olivia. Well, at the moment, that made two of them. Olivia felt like she had taken a step into a river, only to find that there was a drop-off sooner than she had anticipated. And that she had scrambled to find her footing, finding instead only algae. Now she was being swept downstream. As analogies went, it was both unpleasant and apt.
She wanted to run. She wanted to run right out the door of the saloon, down the main street, all the way back home. She wanted to abandon this mission, wave a little white flag of defeat, start over tomorrow morning and pretend that nothing had happened.
The only thing that kept her there was that sheer goal-oriented, stubborn nature of hers. She had started down this path, and she had to see it through.
Well, more accurately at the moment, she had started swimming in this river, and at this point she just needed to see where the current would carry her. She couldn’t undo what everyone had just seen. Couldn’t pretend she hadn’t just kissed Luke in front of God and everybody in the bar.
There was no taking that back. Sure, she could offer up handwritten notes to everyone in attendance explaining what she had tried to do, that she was very sorry and that it wouldn’t happen again. Sure, she could stand up on a chair and make an announcement, that she and Luke had been engaged in a little bit of improv, and hadn’t that been a great scene? But it definitely hadn’t been real.
But that would be silly, and she wasn’t going to do that.
Which meant she had no other choice but to allow the current to continue to sweep her along. And hope there wasn’t a waterfall waiting for her at the end.
She beat Luke soundly at darts, which was the only expected thing to come out of the evening. Thankfully, she managed to get herself solid again, and didn’t miss another shot for the rest of the night. Luke, on the other hand, was actually fairly terrible.
“Don’t you know how to shoot a gun?” she asked when they had finished tallying the score, which had been more of a formality than anything else, because she had so obviously beaten him.
“Yes. With a scope. That’s a little bit different.”
“Pretty pitiful, Hollister,” she said, feeling bolstered by the win and momentarily forgetting what had happened a half hour earlier.
“I know my talents. I’m okay with the fact that they don’t lie at the dartboard.”
“Really. Where do they lie exactly?”
“The back of a horse, out on the ranch and in the bedroom.
Heat flared through her body, bleeding out toward her cheeks, down her neck, lower. To all those places that had been affected by the kiss.
“If a man has to boast,” she said, knowing her tone sounded clipped and stiff, “then it sounds a little like just that. Boastfulness with nothing behind it.”
“I don’t boast,” he said. “I’m terrible at darts, and I never claimed any different. One thing you should know about me, Liv. What you see is what you get. I don’t lie.”
“Except now. What Bennett’s seeing isn’t real. Don’t go claiming perfect honesty when you’re in the middle of treachery.”
“I’m being honest where it counts,” he said. “You know what I want.”
Something about the way the heat shimmered in his green eyes when he said that made her stomach tighten. Made her question if she actually did know what he wanted. If this really was all about Bennett and some property her father owned, or if there might be something else. But that was ridiculous. A man like Luke wouldn’t want anything from a woman like her. A woman who barely knew how to kiss, much less anything else.
And if he did, it wouldn’t be about her specifically, but about the fact that he was a man, and they had needs, and all of that. Particularly men like him, who didn’t practice any kind of restraint.
At least, she had never witnessed him practicing restraint of any kind. He was about as different from Bennett as a man could be.
“I have to get up early,” she said. “We should probably go.”
But first, she really needed to use the restroom, because ultimately she had ended up having three Diet Cokes to keep her focus on something—anything—other than Luke.
“All right,” he said, grabbing his jacket off the back of the chair.
“Just a second,” she said.
She scurried across the bar, the sound of her footsteps swallowed up by the noise of the people around them and the music playing over the speakers.
She grimaced when she saw that there was a line outside the little single-use room. Strangely, she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Strange, since what she and Luke had been doing had definitely been designed to draw attention. But she didn’t want to actually contend with that attention in real time. She wanted to deal with it on her terms. When she was good and ready to deal with it. And that would be when she had been given a lot more time to process everything herself.
She looked up at the scarred, wooden wall and frowned when she saw a list of names carved into it.
Second to last was Luke Hollister. She put her fingertips against his name, a strange kind of energy zipping through her as she did.
“Found me,” he said.
She looked up, startled. Luke was standing right next to her, his hands shoved into his pockets, his black cowboy hat positioned firmly on his head.
She jerked her hand back as though the wall was on fire and in danger of scalding her skin. “What is it?”
They were all men’s names. She recognized a couple of them, but no one she knew very well. And she couldn’t figure out what they might have in common.
Luke lifted a shoulder. “Dumb shit.”
“What dumb... Stuff?” Now her curiosity was getting the best of her.
“They don’t do it much anymore. This,” he said, tapping his hand against his own name, “is from a long time ago.”
“What? Did you... Drink the most beers or something?”
“When a guy hooked up in the bathroom they used to carve his name on the wall.”
Her stomach plummeted down to her toes. “What?”
“Yeah, Laz put a stop to that. He didn’t much care for people carving into the side of his wall when he bought the place.”
“You... You...”
Just then, the bathroom door opened and a woman walked out, barely glancing at her and Luke as she breezed past.
“Looks like it’s vacant.” He gestured toward the bathroom.
“You’re not going to wait outside for me, are you?” That was all she needed. Luke timing her bathroom break. While she was in there it would also probably be unavoidable to imagine him in there with that woman...
“Yes,” he said. “Because I’m waiting for you.”
“You’re awful,” she said, rushing into the bathroom and shutting the door firmly, locking it behind her. She pressed her palms against her face and realized that it was hot.
She looked around the small room and tried to imagine how on earth a person would... Do that. With everybody outside fully aware of what was going on.
She took care of her necessities, her heart thundering hard the entire time. Then, when she washed her hands, she went ahead and splashed some cool water on her face and her neck.
When she exited the bathroom, he was standing there, leaning against the wall, his head down, his black hat concealing his face. Then he looked up, revealing all that stunning masculine glory. Strong chin, square jaw, those lips that she had kissed. Lips that had kissed another woman and more in the bathroom she had just exited.
That thought was even more effective than the cold water she had literally just splashed on herself.
She walked past him without saying anything and he followed behind her.
“Hang on,” he said when they got to the bar. “I have to settle my tab.”
“You couldn’t have done that instead of loitering outside the bathroom door like a pervert?” she muttered.
“I waited for you,” he said. “You can wait for me.”
She realized, dimly, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this all served the purpose that they had come here for in the first place. She wasn’t here with him as a date. She wasn’t. They were here so that they looked like a burgeoning couple. Which made him waiting for her, and them walking across the bar together, look romantic or something.
Of course, had she actually been here on a date with him, finding his name carved into the wall like that would have been even more upsetting. No. It would have been upsetting. It wasn’t upsetting at all as it was. She didn’t care how much of a whore he was. That was his business—and the woman’s. Whatever woman was crazy enough to try and get involved with him with any actual sincerity.
He paid Laz, and then put his hand on her lower back as they headed toward the door. She gritted her teeth, trying her best to keep her expression neutral until that first blast of night air hit her in the face as they walked out onto the street.
Then, she pulled away from him. She shoved her hands in her pockets and walked down the sidewalk, looking for the first crosswalk before making her way across toward the truck. He was already there. Because he had just gone directly across the street.
“That’s jaywalking,” she said.
“Do I look like I care?” he asked, rounding to the passenger side of the truck and jerking the door open for her.
“It doesn’t seem to me like you care about much,” she said, getting in and grabbing hold of the door handle, slamming it shut before he could do the honors.
He got in and started the engine, pulling away from the curb quickly, before she managed to get herself buckled.
“For the record,” she said, once they were on the road, “it’s illegal to start driving before the passenger is buckled, too. Like jaywalking.”
She didn’t know if that was actually true. But it sounded legitimate enough.
“Again,” he said, “I don’t care.”
Now he was starting to sound snippy, and he had no right to sound snippy. He wasn’t the one who had been kissed in the middle of the bar in front of everyone. Okay, so he had been. But it was different for him. Different for him because he was Luke Hollister, and he had kissed any number of women, and his kissing her wouldn’t reflect badly on him. She was the one who had kissed only the second man she had ever kissed in her entire life, and then seen his name carved on the wall because he had...
They headed out of town, the glow of the streetlights fading in the distance behind them, the evergreen trees that lined the side of the road absorbing any light that was coming from the moon or the stars, making them feel ensconced in darkness, only the narrow glow of the headlights illuminating a very tight path in front of them.
She kept her eyes on the double yellow line on the road, something comforting about having that familiar sight to rest her eyes on while the rest of the world felt wild, untamed and unknowable.
And she couldn’t even pretend it was because of the darkness. It was because of Luke. And the way it had felt when his lips had touched hers.
There was a certain point where she’d stopped worrying about unknown things in the darkness, because she had been convinced that she knew herself well enough she could find her way through anything. That she had decided firmly who she was, and who she would be, and had been at peace with that choice. But all of that assurance had crumbled around her in a bar tonight, and she didn’t know quite what to do with that.
So she stared at the yellow line and hoped that it would guide her home, because God knew she didn’t trust herself to do it. She certainly didn’t trust Luke.
“What exactly are you mad about, Olivia?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“You’re a terrible liar,” he said. “Things were going okay, and now you’re mad at me.”
“What does it matter? Nothing that happened tonight is real.”
“Something made you mad. I want to know what.”
“Like you care when I’m mad. You like making me mad.”
“Sure,” he said. “I like making you mad on purpose. Just a little bit mad. A bit of annoyance here and there. But when I do that, you can bet I do it for fun, and you can bet I don’t do it on accident. This is different.”
“Did you honestly have... Did you do...” She stumbled over the words, too embarrassed to talk about it in front of him. Which made her feel silly, and childish. She had no idea how to combat it. She cleared her throat. “With a woman. In that bathroom?”
He chuckled, the sound somehow absent of humor, flat in the cab of the truck, the only other sound the engine and the tires on the road. “You’re mad about that?”
“You kissed me,” she said. “I think I have a right to know where you’ve been.”
“I’m well traveled, kiddo, and I think you already know that.”
“In the bathroom?” she asked, incredulous. “And everybody in the bar knew what you were doing?”
“We didn’t have sex technically speaking.” He paused for a moment. “At least, not in the bathroom.”
“Then why is your name on the wall?” she pressed.
“Something happened in there, not going to lie to you about that. And Wyatt Dodge is a dick when he’s drunk.”
She could hardly imagine Wyatt, who was like a steady older brother to her in many ways, behaving like such a... Such a juvenile frat boy. “Wyatt carved your name onto the sex wall?”
Luke huffed out a laugh. “Yes. But seriously, Olivia, I was like twenty-four years old, and so was he.”
“I’m twenty-five,” she said. “And I think it’s immature.”
“You’re eighty down to your soul,” he said.
“Still,” she snapped, feeling particularly annoyed by that last comment. Mostly because it skimmed a little bit too close to the truth. “That doesn’t make you less gross, and it doesn’t mean that I want you to kiss me to prove points, unless we talk about it beforehand.”
Suddenly, Luke slammed on the brakes and the truck lurched forward. “That does it.” He steered the car off the road onto the shoulder, throwing it into Park, and then turned toward her.
Olivia shrank back, her heart thundering hard from the adrenaline of the abrupt stop, and from the sudden realization of just how small the interior of the truck was. How close he was to her.
“Not everything that happened tonight was fake,” he said.
Her stomach lurched, so hard, so far up that she was afraid it might come out of her mouth. “Yes, it was,” she insisted.
“No,” he said, his voice as rough as the road they’d just been driving on. “It wasn’t.”
Before she could protest, he reached out, wrapping his large hand around the back of her head, drawing her forward. And then Luke was kissing her again. but this wasn’t like The kiss in the bar. There was no audience; there was no excuse for it.
And this time, he wasn’t still. He wasn’t chaste or simple or careful.
He angled his head, forcing her lips apart with his tongue, and her world exploded behind her eyes.
This was Luke. Even in the dark there was no pretending any different.
She lifted her hand, with every intention of pushing him away, but then her fingertips made contact with the scruff on his face, those whiskers that had caught her attention on all those close examinations of him that she caught herself engaged in over the past week. She was touching it. Touching him.
There was only one word that echoed inside of her. A word that didn’t make any sense, but one that shouted loudly nonetheless.
Finally.
She squeezed her eyes shut, so tight that a tear leaked out from one corner. Only because of how tightly she had closed them, not because of emotion. Of course not because of that. This was Luke and she didn’t feel emotions for Luke.
Luke.
Instead of pushing him, she dragged her fingertips along that sharp edge of his jaw, tracing the line of his face down to his chin, brushing her thumb beneath his lower lip as he widened his mouth to taste her even deeper.
She could feel the motion of the kiss under her hand, and somehow, that added to the intensity of the moment.
Which seemed impossible, really. Because the kiss itself was so slick, so hot, so all consuming in a way that she had never imagined a kiss could be.
It eradicated her sense of responsibility, her sense of self. The reason that she was here in this truck with Luke in the first place. The fact that they were on the side of the road—a public road just outside of town where anyone might spot the vehicle and be able to identify it.
None of that seemed as important as what he might do next. As the way he might angle his head, the way the tip of his tongue might trace her lip, might slide against hers.
She was hot all over, her breasts heavy, the ache between her legs a fierce and unrelenting thing that made her feel hollow all the way through.
Luke shifted, pressing both of his hands between her shoulder blades before moving them down her back, coming to rest on her hips. He gripped her hard, his fingertips digging into her skin, through the thin fabric of her dress and her leggings.
Then, suddenly she found herself being hauled across the cab of the truck, as Luke quickly undid her seat belt and drew her up onto his lap, positioning them both at the center of the bench seat, her back to the dashboard.
He pulled her hard against him, until she could feel that telltale, uncompromising ridge between her legs. There was one moment where she thought about protesting. Where she had a spare brain cell in her head that told her she needed to put an end to this.
But it was only a moment. And when he flexed his hips forward, meeting that place at the apex of her thighs that was so desperate, so needy for some satisfaction, it burst into blinding brilliant light, lost completely in the heat and intensity of the moment.
He kept one hand placed at her hip, raised the other one and cupped her face, his hand sliding around behind her head, sifting through her hair as he continued to kiss her, deep and slick.
Then he abandoned her lips, and she groaned, her sound of regret quickly replaced by one of pleasure when that hot mouth of his made contact with the vulnerable skin on the side of her neck, down farther, down all the way to the neckline of her dress. And back up again.
She didn’t know what was happening to her. Didn’t know what had possessed her. She felt like a stranger inside of her skin, one who had no control over the reactions happening inside of her. One who had no understanding of them.
Of course she had been kissed. She had been kissed quite passionately before. But she had been so very aware of herself, so very aware of what was happening, of what might happen next and what she would allow.
Here, now, all of that had been blown apart. Reduced to such tiny fragments that she would never be able to piece them back together. In the moment, she didn’t want to.
In the moment, all she wanted to do was feel.
There was no sound apart from their breath, hard and heavy, mingling together. A sign that the two of them were completely lost in this. Together. It was so intimate. Yes, of course, her tongue against his was intimate, her most sensitive place pressed against his was intimate. But their breath, their heartbeats, that evidence of what this did to them... Somehow that was even more. Even deeper. Even more impactful.
Something dark, delicious and unfamiliar was building inside of her. Dimly, she thought she should fight it. That it was something she had fought against before. But his hands were so warm, so large and masculine and wonderful holding her head, holding her hip. The whiskers on his face burning delicate skin on her cheek, her neck, her collarbone, too wonderful to pull away from. She rocked her hips against his, the rhythm natural, seeming to blend with the rhythm of their kiss as he licked a path down to the very edge of her dress, then lifted a hand and flicked open the top button, then the second.
Until he revealed the edge of her bra and licked around the edge of that, his tongue tantalizing the sensitive, aroused skin there.
She rolled her hips forward, the tension low in her midsection drawing up even tighter, that place between her legs slick and sensitive. He moved the hand on her hip lower, around to grip her butt, pulling her hard against him. And then the world burst into brilliant color behind her eyelids. She pressed her hips forward, rubbing herself against that hard ridge in his jeans as wave after wave of pleasure rolled over her, as internal muscles she hadn’t been aware of before clenched tight.
She buried her face into the curve of his neck, a hoarse cry on her lips as she shivered through the onslaught of release that seemed to be unraveling her, pulling at some previously unseen thread deep inside of her, undoing everything that had been Olivia Logan before. Leaving behind a worn, threadbare stranger that was sweating and panting in a man’s arms.
In a truck. On the side of the road.
And then it hit her. Fully hit her.
She had been making out with Luke Hollister on the side of the road.
She’d...
She scrambled out of his hold, pinning herself against the passenger door, her heart pounding so hard she was afraid it was going to break into a million pieces as it slammed itself against her breastbone. As if it were trying to escape, or trying to destroy itself, to release her from this moment. From this humiliation.
She grabbed hold of the door handle and opened the door. And before she could fully think her next action through, she jumped out of the truck and started to walk back toward her house. Away from Luke.
Away from the kind of insanity she knew had the power to ruin her carefully laid plans.