A Fair to Remember by Barbara Ankrum

Author:Barbara Ankrum [Ankrum, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Western
ISBN: 9781940296739
Publisher: Tule Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

She’d left a lamp lit on the bedside table and the room was filled with shadows. Her bed looked like she’d been wrestling alligators in it. And in a way, she had. She’d wrestled with the part of herself that resisted everything good in her life, everything hopeful.

Quietly, she closed the door and stood looking at him, her back against the roughhewn wood. His eyes were hooded, their blueness gone dark as midnight. A hot thrill chased through her. He still wanted her. He wanted her.

She would remember that look for the rest of her life. And if it only happened this once, that a man she cared for saw her, it would be enough. There was no turning back now. Not that she wanted to. Slowly, she reached for the buttons on her shirt and undid them one at a time.

He stood a few feet away, coiled and waiting. His gaze followed the movements of her fingers and he swallowed hard.

She hardly recognized this girl, the one stripping off her shirt and asking him for sex. It was so unlike her, so off-the-charts reckless, she could only assume it was because she’d lost her mind a little.

Another button went flick.

Not because he wasn’t gorgeous—he was—and not even because he knew every dark crevice of her youth—which he did—but because when she was with him, she felt out of control. Daring. And absolutely female.

“It’s been a long time for me.”

Her whispered warning raised his gaze from the buttons and she couldn’t be sure if it was sympathy or surprise she read there.

“It’s like falling. You don’t forget how.”

She undid another button. “It’s just that… I usually do this… in the dark.” Even before the surgeries left her scarred, she’d made a habit of undressing and slipping beneath the covers before her ex-husband could find something about her to frown at.

A muscle jumped in his jaw and he inhaled back some retort she felt sure he was thinking. Instead, he helped her with the last button and slid his hand inside to fit along the curve of her hip and draw her to him. “You’re beautiful, Liv. Look at you. There’s nothing you need to hide from me.”

But she closed her eyes anyway and let the shirt slide away from her shoulders, heard his intake of breath and felt the warm, whisper of his hands against her skin. Particularly mortifying was the seven-inch, crescent-shaped splenectomy scar that nearly bisected her left side. He’d felt it last night in the river, but seeing it would be different.

The scar was the first thing he kissed, from front to back and around again.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“It’s ugly.”

“No,” he said, “This just proves you’re a survivor. It’s beautiful to me.”

Was it? Kyle couldn’t look at it. Never would.

“If you were mine,” he said against her belly, “I’d want you naked all the time.”

If she were his…

She pushed the thought away. “That would be most inconvenient,” she quipped breathlessly, as his hands roamed over the silky panties obstructing his chosen path.

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