It was so innocent. A butterfly kiss. A whisper.

And it made him hard as a rock, instantly.

She was not his type.

He would do well to remember that.

She turned beet red, then ducked her head and extricated herself from his hold.

This time, when she went back to put her horse away, he did help with her tack, and he didn’t accept any argument. He was driving her back to the motel. Because they were riding together. And once they were safely ensconced in the truck cab, all the tension that bloomed between them felt like too much to handle.

What was this? He had no idea what the hell it meant. No idea what the hell was happening. He wasn’t...

Did he have a crush on this woman?

That was the weirdest damn thing.

He couldn’t accept that.

They pulled into the motel parking lot and he put the truck in Park, then turned the keys off and pulled them out of the ignition.

“Wait.”

Tansey put her hand on his. He froze. And looked at her.

She scooted across the distance of the truck cab, and put her hand on his cheek.

He just sat. Perfectly still. And he let her decide what to do next. He let her choose.

She leaned across the space, and she pressed her mouth to his. Tentative. Soft.

He sat completely still. And waited. She lifted her other hand, held the other side of his face and pressed more firmly against him, and that was when he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her closer to him, angling his head and deepening the kiss.

She made a muffled sound, wrapping her arms around his neck.

She kissed him back, all enthusiasm, no skill. He slid his tongue between her lips, and she returned fire, kissing him like she would die if she didn’t.

It was all he could do to keep his hands still. To just keep holding her, rather than letting his palms move over her curves, not pushing his fingertips up beneath her shirt.

It was a temptation. It was a real damn temptation.

But there was something beautiful about letting the kiss just...be a kiss.

He thought he might drown in it. Thought he might die. He had no idea how long it went on. Just kissing her. Holding her. Lust was a drumbeat through his whole body. But the moment...

The moment.

He lifted his head. “You don’t happen to have that cactus on you, do you?”

She laughed. The press of her breasts against his chest as she giggled making him groan.

“Why did you ask about the cactus?”

“Because nothing mattered but the moment.”

She let out a long, slow breath. Her eyes looked a little unfocused, her lips swollen. And they were very close to his motel room. Normally, that would be the assumption. He didn’t kiss a woman just to kiss her.

But he had to let the kiss with Tansey just be a kiss. Because it needed to be. It just did.

“You did good tonight,” he said. “The barrel racing. I’m not grading you here. But that was good too.”

She laughed and lowered her head. “Thank you.”

He leaned in and kissed her. Shorter this time. “I need to tell you good night,” he said.

“Why?”

He gave her a meaningful look. “Because I need to. I’m trying to be good.”

“Oh,” she breathed.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And he didn’t know how any of this had happened. How they had gone from friendship to this.

They might be... Hell. He might be dating her.

He didn’t know what he thought about that.

But he also knew that he wasn’t willing to let her go. And that told him quite a bit.

After

Yeah. That was the problem. He had known. He had known that he was getting in too deep. He had known that he was walking into something he had no right to walk into.

And there was no excuse for him. There was no getting older and wiser. Because it was about him. It was about what he had to give.

And sitting across from her now, he could feel the echo of unfinished business inside of him. Except it wasn’t. They’d drawn a line under it because that was what they’d had to do.

Maybe that had always been one of the issues with the song. Maybe one of the issues with the song had always been that it showed him the line hadn’t actually been drawn where he thought.

Because he’d been convinced that he got out of it before he devastated her. And it was a lie; he knew that. But that was part of the problem. He thought that he had a pretty good handle on who he was. But it turned out he wasn’t as strong as he thought when it came to his resolve. And he’d been convinced that he just knew himself. That his resolve was what had kept him from those relationships, when in fact his resolve had had nothing to do with it. There had never been a woman that compelled him. And the minute she’d been there...he turned away from everything he knew. Everything he knew that he had to do to keep someone safe from him.

Maybe the real issue was that as much as she hated him, it had made him hate himself even more.

“I keep waiting,” she said. “To feel triumphant. I keep waiting. I had pretty great revenge on you, you have to admit that.”

“I thought you said you didn’t think about how I would feel.”