Dark Horse: Bad Boy Cowboy Romance (19 page)

Sure, that money would be helpful - especially, I pointed out with a groan to myself, with dealing with all of these damn wedding expenses, now that the thing wasn't even going to end up happening. I doubted I'd be able to get any sort of refund if I canceled, only weeks from the date itself.

But even if Marsden had been the richest man on the planet, I still would feel just as determined to burn every last memory of him!

I didn't want a man with money and class. Hell, even though I knew how to conduct myself at all of those high society shindigs, I never really enjoyed them. No, I went out to meet with the other "high class" folks to keep the connections because it was what I'd been raised to do, because those were the only real friends and contacts I knew.

But I'd trade all of that away in an instant for the chance to go out riding Merlot on my own property, maybe accompanied by someone else on horseback.

Finally, the pile of pictures and knickknacks on the bed had grown big enough to need both of my hands to carry, and I'd managed to do a decent job of cleaning up my room. I gathered up everything as best I could and staggered downstairs after Lance.

I found him outside, standing next to the fire pit set up over by the barn. The fire pit, to be honest, wasn't much more than a hole in the ground, surrounded by rocks and with the grass scraped away to reveal bare dirt. Still, it was enough to serve for my purposes.

Lance had dumped out the container of photographs and random junk into the fire pit, and had stacked several logs in amidst the mess, the logs leaning together in the middle to form a teepee. He'd also clearly ducked into the barn and had found an old half-empty bottle of lighter fluid, which stood next to his feet.

He looked up as I approached, watching as I dumped the rest of the junk in my hands down on top of the rest. "There," I said with satisfaction, clapping my hands together. "Now, let's burn this stuff!"

My enthusiasm made the man smile. He picked up the container of lighter fluid and handed it to me, and I enthusiastically drizzled it in big squirts all over the pile of pictures and other assorted items.

"Great! Now, matches!" I commanded, as soon as the bottle of lighter fluid ran empty.

When Lance didn't reply immediately, I glanced over at him, and saw a look of slight uncertainty on his face. "Um, maybe I should be the one to light it," he murmured, stepping forward. "It's probably going to flare up a bit..."

"No!" I burst out. "Come on, give it to me! I want to throw it on the pile like in movies!"

For a second longer, Lance hesitated, but then he finally pulled a pack of matches out of his pocket and passed it to me. I eagerly pulled out a match, struck it against the side of the box, and then dropped it down on the pile.

For a second, nothing happened.

"Is it burning? Did it go out?" I started to ask, blinking and beginning to lean forward.

I didn't finish the sentence.

Chapter twenty-nine

With a whoosh, the bonfire ignited! Flames shot up from the fire pit, reaching nearly as high as my head for a moment, bright and orange and red and sending out a wave of heat against my face.

I stumbled backwards, and this time, not even Lance's hands on my waist could keep me from toppling backwards. All he managed to do, as he tried to catch me, was lose his own balance. Both of us tumbled back, landing in a heap beside the now enthusiastically burning fire.

Fortunately, the dirt was soft enough to cushion us, and nothing felt injured. That didn't stop Lance from quickly pulling himself up above me and peering down, his face full of concern. "Are you okay? Anything broken?"

I couldn't keep from laughing. Just a few minutes ago, the man was professing how he didn't think he deserved me - and yet he didn't hesitate for an instant to leap to my defense, concerned about me! "I'm fine," I replied, as my laughter subsided. "Just surprised, that's all!"

Thankfully, I could feel myself recovering from the morning's heavy drinking. Already, a little ache was developing behind my eyeballs, and I knew that I'd soon be nursing a hell of a hangover, but at least my faculties had largely cleared, and I didn't have the haze of drunkenness covering up my brain any longer.

"Now, wait - I want to say something," I added, as Lance started to rise up off of me. I reached out and grabbed him, pulling him down to keep him crouched on top of me. The man's eyebrows jumped, but he stayed in place.

I stared up at his handsome, hard-lined face. His dark hair was getting a little long, I thought fondly to myself, feeling the temptation to reach up and push it back from his dark eyes. Maybe I'd have to force him to sit down in a chair in the kitchen so I could trim it back before it grew down over his eyes.

"What I want from a man," I said, focusing my eyes on those dark ones staring back at me, "is for him to respect me, to care about me. I want him to make every step we take together to feel natural."

"Gilly, I-" Lance began, but I tightened my hands around his neck so that I could pull myself up against him to kiss him.

Just as I'd hoped, the kiss succeeded in shutting him up, at least long enough for me to keep on speaking. "Lance, I don't care at all about money, or position, or whether you know which fork to use at a fancy dinner," I said, hoping desperately that he could see that I was speaking the truth. "Marsden had all of that - and look how well that worked out!"

I almost expected Lance to interrupt me again, but he kept his mouth shut this time, letting me continue. I took a deep breath, scarcely able to believe what was about to come out of my mouth next, but knowing that I had to say it.

"Don't worry about Marsden - that's all in the past, and I don't want to even think about it any longer, if I can help it," I said. "I want to focus on the future - and I want you to be in my future.

"I had to work every moment with Marsden to try and feel as though things were going all right. I don't want to have to work at trying to make a relationship work any longer. I want it to feel natural, to just relax and enjoy it."

As I finished this speech, I took a deep breath, feeling myself suddenly shivering a little with nervousness. I realized that I'd just bared my heart, confessing my true feelings. How would Lance respond?

For a minute that seemed to stretch on into eternity, he just looked back at me. I couldn't read the expression on his face, and the longer the silence went on, the more nervous I grew.

And then, finally, that hard-lined face broke into a little smile.

This smile wasn't a slight one, however. It was private, just for me - but was no less intense than staring into the sun.

"And you feel natural with me?" he asked, still smiling. "I wouldn't have expected that."

"What?" I felt a little off-balance. "Why not?"

He smiled a little wider. "Well, you're a high-class daughter of an old family, with many connections, a huge property, and independently wealthy. And I'm a drifter, without much to my name besides my horse and the clothes on my back."

"And you can cook, while I burn water," I continued, smiling back at him as my arms tightened around his neck once again, pulling him down. "You listen to me when I talk about my day, while I prattle on and on. You suffer through helping me plan a wedding to a man who doesn't deserve me, while I dither over little decisions. We're clearly not meant to be together at all."

"Now you're seeing what I'm saying," he murmured back to me as our lips met.

This time, the kiss was slower, softer, each of us exploring the other's lips. Lance's body settled down slowly on top of mine, a little cautiously at first, as if he was worried that his weight would crush my more slender frame beneath him. I pulled him down to dissuade him of the notion, even as my fingers tightened into his hair, grabbing tufts to keep his mouth on mine.

After he'd made sure that he wasn't about to crush me into a million fragile little pieces beneath him, he settled down, his hands sliding up the sides of my body, from my waist up to my armpits as he kissed me. I let out a little moan of pleasure as I felt the hard lines of his body pressing up against the soft, lean curves of my own. Down here on the ground together, I didn't notice how he stood close to a foot taller than me; our bodies lined up at the right spots.

"Clearly, we're totally incompatible and not meant to go together," I whispered to him, when we next separated for air.

"Clearly," he replied, grinning as my fingers slipped down to his waist, to the line of demarcation between his shirt and pants, and began to widen the no-man's-land between the two.

After a moment, Lance sat up, reaching down to pull his shirt all the way up, over his head. Grinning with wicked anticipation, I took advantage of his face briefly being covered to reach out and turn my attention to his pants, popping the button on his jeans and tugging the zipper down before he managed to free himself from his shirt.

"Hey now!" he exclaimed as he looked down to see the damage my hands had wrought. "I didn't give you permission to do anything like that!"

"Oh, so I need permission now?" I challenged him, my fingers sliding into his newly exposed boxers and reaching around. It didn't take me long to orient myself inside this new area - and to locate the man's hard member, throbbing as soon as my fingers made contact with it. "That seems pretty chauvinistic! I suppose you next want me to stay home and take care of your children, huh?"

"Children? Are you going to be giving me a few of those?" Lance argued back, his eyes momentarily closing as he felt my fingers brush against his most sensitive areas. He scrambled back onto his knees to push his pants down from his waist, giving me better access.

As he came dropping back down, however, he pulled me to the side, and a second later, he landed on his back, with me on top of him! "Maybe I could be convinced to give you a couple," I answered him, laughing as his fingers tickled me slightly as they pulled at my shirt. "You'll have to be especially good, though!"

"Really? I was thinking of being especially bad," Lance said, pushing my shirt up - and his strong grip pulling my bra up along with it! I felt my breasts drop out from their enclosure, my erect nipples rubbing up against the underwire. "With your fancy house, your wealth, your elegant friends and pursuits - clearly, Gilly, you need a bad boy!"

"I don't need a boy at all," I argued back. "I need a man! I just have to make sure to find the right one!"

I intended to say more, but my words dissolved into a wordless gasp as Lance sat halfway up as he finished pulling my shirt up to my neck. His stubble rubbed roughly against the bare, exposed skin of my chest and stomach as he traced a line of kisses upwards. First, his hands slipped around one of my breasts, hefting it up slightly as his thumb slid over my nipple and made me moan. Next, his mouth followed his hands' path, and he bit down a little as he sucked briefly at my tit, still massaging it in his fingers.

"Oh god, that's good," I managed to say, arching my back as I pulled my shirt the rest of the way off of my head.

Beside us, the fire had dropped down to a more steady crackling height from its initial flare-up, but it still cast a flickering light out on us, sending out wonderful little waves of heat to combat the slight chill in the air as the sun dropped down below the tree line.

Marsden would never have considered seducing me out in nature, I thought briefly to myself.

But then again, this man, the one holding me so lovingly and kissing me so strongly, was most definitely not Marsden.

And that was a good thing.

I leaned down as his hands kept on exploring my body - and this time, I didn't pull away.

Chapter thirty

For a few more seconds, Lance kept on exploring my breasts, feeling how they squished beneath his fingers, how they grew stiff and responded to his kiss. I squeezed my hands around his neck as he pushed his face up against my chest, pushing down with my hips and grinding down on his hip bones and crotch.

Soon, however, Lance's hands slipped further down, running over my stomach until they ran into my pants. His fingers wrapped around the waistband and popped the button open at the top - but then, incongruously, he paused.

"What?" I asked, looking down curiously to see why he'd stopped. Oh god, had he just found something embarrassing?

He glanced back up at me, and although it was a little tough to read his face in the dim light from the flickering fire, I could see that he looked concerned. "Gilly, are you sure that you're ready to go all the way with-"

I cut him off with another kiss - and simultaneously pushed my hand down his pants, wrapping it around his cock and giving it a firm squeeze. I felt him tighten and flex in my hand, straining up as though he could rip through his pants and boxers to leap straight inside of me.

"Lance, you can be such a girl sometimes," I told him, when we broke apart from the kiss. "Can't you stop talking about your feelings and just give me a good, hard fuck?"

For a moment, I saw the man's eyes widen at that comment. But then, as I rubbed my hand up and down along his length, his expression tightened and he surged forward, pulling my pants down off of me with renewed vigor.