And was she relieved or…disappointed?

  He wandered over to the messy coffee table groaning as per usual in assorted stuff, now including his hat as he put it down next to the sketch pad still open from the other day. Bea had been ignoring it, but Austin didn’t. He picked it up, studying the charcoal drawing.

  “This is the lake,” he murmured. “Did you do this?”

  Bea swallowed, an itch growing under her skin as she suppressed the urge to whip the pad out of his hands and tear that page from the book. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know you were an artist?”

  “Oh, no.” She gave a dismissive shake of her head, stalking over to him, then taking the pad from his hand. After flipping it shut, she tossed it back on the table. “I’m not. It’s just some doodling.”

  He quirked one disbelieving eyebrow. “Have you always doodled?”

  “I dabbled a bit…as a kid. Not for a long time.”

  “Well, it’s good,” he said, putting his beer down and picking the pad up again, turning to the sketch.

  Her belly looped into one giant knot. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s way more than okay,” he insisted. “It’s remarkable.”

  Bea blushed at the compliment, somehow both flattered and discomfited. His compliment was like rain on parched earth, but the urge to go out to the lake again had ridden her hard these past couple of days, and his praise only amplified her conflict. “Says the prominent art critic,” she said derisively but keeping it light.

  He grinned. “Hey, I know what I like.” Then he waggled his brows at her.

  “Well…anyway.” Bea bugged her eyes at him playfully as she once again took the pad from him, tossing it farther away on the couch this time.

  “How do you feel about maybe coming out to the ranch and sketching the house? Mom’s been talking about getting someone to do it for years now, and it’s her birthday soon. I could get it framed, and it’d be the perfect present. I’ll pay you whatever the going rate is.”

  Bea blinked. Pay her the going rate? Crap. This was getting out of hand. “No. I’m not…” She shook her head, her chest tightening. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? You’re looking for something different to do, right?”

  Well, yes…but. He was looking at her like one and one made two, except it didn’t—not in this situation.

  “And you’re good at it,” he continued.

  Just like that? She was free, she was good at it, so…why not? God, she suddenly felt ancient in the face of all his fresh-faced optimism.

  “Did you enjoy it? Out at the lake.”

  The pressure to say no, to deny the buzz that had consumed her at the lake, drummed in her brain and pushed against her vocal cords, but that wasn’t what came out. “Yes.”

  Her decision to pick up the pad had been intense, and afterward she’d been conflicted, but while she was sketching? She’d freaking loved it. And she couldn’t deny it. Didn’t want to, either, even if it was just to this guy who looked at her through giant rose-colored glasses.

  “Well.” He smiled. “Do you need another reason?”

  Oh God. She crossed to the sink, then leaned against it as she took a sip of wine, regarding him over the rim of the glass. If only it were that simple. Except, looking at him in this moment, it did seem simple. Or at least possible, anyway. Anything seemed possible with Austin. Including crossing that line she told herself she wouldn’t cross.

  Sure, he was younger, but…sleeping with him wasn’t running away with him, was it? More than that, she was at least free to sleep with him—she wasn’t married and she didn’t have a kid or family responsibilities. And, as Austin had said, she was looking for something different to do.

  Her situation was not the same as her mother’s situation had been, not at all. So why keep conflating it in her mind?

  Bea’s gaze drifted to the way he held his body, the way he stood with his feet evenly spaced apart, the way his clothes fit, both hiding and sculpting the musculature beneath. The way his bulky utility belt sat low on his hips, emphasizing their narrowness and drawing attention to the flatness of his belly above…reigniting the question of that V below.

  Frankly, it was a much better way to occupy her thoughts than anything to do with art.

  “Beatriss?”

  She blinked at the silkiness of his voice, dragging her eyes to meet his, gratified to find them glowing with the kind of heat that quickened in her veins. It was like being plunged into a thermal pool—heat and steam and the warm caress of water on her bare, aroused flesh. Flowing over her aching nipples, soothing and taunting between her legs. Also running down his chest and his abs and funneling lower to his groin, lapping that V she couldn’t stop fixating on.

  “What on earth are you thinking?” he asked, his voice dark and low, vibrating between them.

  It was plain, from his husky rumble, he knew her thoughts were carnal in nature, but saying them out loud was another thing entirely. “I…” She swallowed, caught between throwing out an easy lie and the temptation of the truth.

  “Tell me.”

  She cringed. “It’s…embarrassing.”

  A small smile played on his mouth as he hooked both his thumbs in his belt. “C’mon, Beatriss. Deep breath. I thought you’d turned over a new leaf and were going to say whatever crossed your mind.”

  Maybe it was the challenge he laid down—a clarion call to the new Beatrice. Maybe it was the wine, or bringing Princess to her, or the way he’d admired her sketch and simply said why not about her art when she’d told herself she can’t for as long as she could remember. Maybe it was those thumbs hooked low in exactly the spot she couldn’t stop thinking about. But the thoughts in her head suddenly became words and the pressure to utter them became too much.

  “I was wondering if you had that V thing going on between your hips, you know…” She dropped her gaze to the area of his anatomy under discussion. “With the muscles there.”

  Austin didn’t say a word as the smile hovering on his mouth faded. He didn’t do anything for a beat or two, either, just drew in a couple of deep, ragged breaths.

  Then reached for his belt buckle.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bea’s heart thumped like a gong as his utility belt hit the floor with a thud. Their gazes locked and her throat went as dry as the Santa Anas in September. He reached for the top button of his shirt and flicked it open before descending to the next and the next.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  How could she be standing so still and yet her body be in such an uproar? Everything heating and blooming and freaking melting. Bea was so damn hot, she wanted to tear her own clothes off.

  Inch by glorious inch, Austin’s chest was revealed. Smooth for the most part, except for a sprinkling of light-brown hair over his pecs and around his nipples. A smattering headed southward, too—down, down, down—to his belly button and down again, arrowing into a single trail until the low-slung band of his pants cut off her view. He tugged his shirttails out, then shrugged out of the garment and tossed it on the floor next to his utility belt.

  And now that she could see the whole, her throat went as dry as the freaking Mojave.

  A shirtless Austin was something to behold. Acres of smooth golden skin, broad shoulders, and well-defined pecs. Prominent collarbones and that shallow little hollow where the two met. Easily traceable ribs and the dips in between. A ladder of slightly puckered abs bisected by just the right amount of hair.

  And yep, there it was. Holy Adonis, Batman. V for victory. V for vice.

  V for va-va-voom.

  Oh, he wasn’t cut like a lot of guys who pranced around certain LA muscle beaches, and while his pants were sitting quite low on his hips, she couldn’t see what was below, but what she could see showed some muscular delineation going on between the hard ridges of his hips. And it was magnificent.

  “So…” She dragged her eyes back to his face to meet his gaze. God, even her eyes felt hot, like they were boiling in their sockets. “That’s a yes, then.” Bea took a giant slug of wine. “You…work out?”

  He teamed a slow, lazy smile with a slow, lazy shake of his head. “Ranch work is all.”

  “Well…whatever you’re doing…” She flicked her gaze down again for another slow tour of his chest and abs. “It’s working.”

  “Thank you.”

  He slid his hand to his belly and drummed his fingers on his abs and, God help her, Bea’s gaze honed in on the movement, following it like he was tapping out some kind of code and the fate of the world depended on her cracking it.

  “I’ve been told they feel pretty good, too.” His smile grew bigger as he lifted his hand from his abs and crooked a finger at her. “Why don’t you come over here and see for yourself?”

  Bea would’ve liked to have been able to say in years to come that she regained her senses at that moment and politely declined his invitation. Alas, she was not that strong. It was like he’d opened the doors to Disneyland for a private tour, and Bea was a sucker for a theme park.

  As if pulled by an invisible string, she gulped down the last of her wine and walked on unsteady legs to where he stood. The closer she got, the hotter things got, as if he was holding her in the beam of a laser. His smile faded as heat smoldered in his eyes and his gaze held and locked on hers. Bea’s heartbeat crashed in her ears and her breathing rasped in her lungs and rattled in her throat.

  A small part of her couldn’t believe she was doing this—that she was daring. The rest of her surrendered to the burn.

  She stopped in front of Austin, close but not touching. Heat radiated off his skin in waves, blasting over her like thermal steam from a geyser, tugging at her like the tide. A faint trace of his cologne tickled her nostrils as the earthier aroma of hot male flesh prickled awareness in that part of her brain that was all primal. All, You Tarzan, me Jane.

  She wanted this man, damn it. And he wanted her.

  With her head thumping to the pound of her pulse, she dragged her gaze from his, zeroing in on the warm bulk of his biceps at her eye level and, tentatively, she touched him there. It was only light, but the shudder of his breath was heavy, and her toes curled as her body swayed toward his. She traced her finger around his biceps, then kept going, moving around him as she trailed across his back.

  Goose bumps stippled his flesh, and the honed muscles beneath her gossamer touch rippled in response. The pad of her finger found his opposite biceps, and she kept going, slowly circling his body till she was back at his front. Her finger trekked across his chest from one nipple to the other, more goose bumps following in its wake as her hand slid away and fell to her side.

  They were close—so close—she could hear his heavy breathing, could see the sprout of his scruff along the hard ridge of his windpipe and the bob of his throat as he swallowed.

  “Can I go lower?” she asked, her husky voice loaning a kind of desperation to the bold request. She didn’t look at him, her gaze transfixed by the thick thud of the pulse in his throat.

  He made a low kind of noise in the back of his throat, somewhere between a growl and a groan. “Be my guest,” he said, his voice full of gravel, laced with the kind of desperation she recognized in herself.

  Permission granted, she placed her shaking hands on his pecs and rested them there for a beat or two, liking the way her fingers looked curling into the cushion of muscle. She molded them, reveling in the soft prickle of hair and the brush of his nipples on her palms as the dizzying whisper of mine shot through her system like an illicit drug.

  Slowly, she moved them down, watching her hands iron flat over his ribs, then her fingers tent and drift down his abs before just her index fingers brushed along his waistband, outward to the subtle furrow defining the inside edges of his hip bones.

  She stroked her nails lightly along the grooves, feeling the muscles contract, the deep suck of his breathing the backing track to her little exploration. She glanced up, and his hot blue eyes blazed like twin lasers down into hers. “You’re beautiful,” she whispered, because he was pure male perfection, and even if she never did more with him than this, she’d die a happy woman.

  “No.” He shook his head, his hands sweeping up, furrowing into her hair at the back of her head, cupping it. “You’re beautiful.”

  He lowered his head then, and nothing on earth could have stopped Bea from rising onto her tiptoes to meet his lips as they crashed onto hers, hard and probing and demanding, speaking of a hunger that had been building from the moment he’d ma’amed her and bloomed with every smile, every piece of pie, every Beatriss.

  And in that instant, she knew that just touching him was never going to be enough. That if she died right now, she’d become a vengeful ghost roaming the earth, pissed that she didn’t get to know Austin Cooper in the most intimate way possible.

  “Jesus,” he said, pulling away, his eyes glinting with a wild kind of fever, his mouth wet, his lungs working hard, and she took a mental picture because she had done this to him. Beatrice Archer—mild-mannered, play-it-by-the-book, ex–corporate sheep—had made this sexy man pant and yearn and lust. “I think my heart is about to burst out of my chest.”

  Bea smiled, slipping her hand over his pectoral muscle again, feeling the brisk, hard bang beneath her palm. She grabbed one of his hands that was still cradling her head and pulled it down, placing it over the frantic beat of her own heart, his big hand cupping her breast over the fabric of her shirt. Her left nipple went rigid beneath his palm, and his thumb stroked over it, causing her to shudder.

  “You like that?” he asked, his voice low and husky as his thumb continued its maddening tease.

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “And this?” His hand slid away, only to find the hem of her T-shirt and push under, sliding up the bare skin of her belly and her ribs to claim her equally bare breast, his thumb returning to taunt the nipple some more.

  Bea’s throat constricted, and she had to lock her knees tight as a surge of lust turned everything liquid. “Yes,” she gasped.

  His other hand pushed under her T-shirt, sliding onto the other breast, his thumb working that nipple, and Bea thanked all the sweet angels and evolution, she supposed, for opposable thumbs. She actually whimpered this time as a hot pulse shot like a flaming arrow from her nipples straight down her belly, hitting a target directly between her legs.

  “What do you want, Beatriss?” he asked, his blue gaze boring into hers as he continued to wreak havoc on her body. “Tell me what you want.”

  Bea had never been asked what she wanted. Normally, at this stage of the sexy times, it was fairly obvious, and one thing led to another and the P in V thing happened. It was usually accomplished in the standard missionary position, because frankly, it had been too damn infrequent to get particular.

  But hell, if she didn’t know exactly how she wanted this to go down.

  “I want to—” Bea stopped abruptly and swallowed, hesitant again as her gaze dropped to his throat. Could she actually go there? Sure, she’d declared she was going to say whatever crossed her mind, but could she say that?

  “Tell me,” he murmured. Then he squeezed her nipples, and Bea’s eyes fluttered closed on a hot wave of ecstasy, her hand sliding to his hips for purchase as more flaming arrows found their mark. “Tell me how you like to be fucked.”

  Bea opened her eyes, meeting his with frankness and purpose. That was the thing—she didn’t want to just lay there and be serviced by him. She’d been too damn passive in the bedroom. Letting men lead. Letting men do stuff to her, often to the detriment of her own pleasure. And enough was enough.

  “I want to fuck you.” Yes. That’s what she wanted, damn it. She wanted to fuck him. Not the other way around. She was so freaking mad at herself for her passivity—she wanted to screw Austin very, very badly.

  Clearly unperturbed by the idea, he grinned and said, “If you insist.”

  Bea took a step back, and his hand slid from her breasts. He didn’t object, but her nipples certainly did. She quashed their rebellion ruthlessly with promises of an imminent orgasm. Planting a hand in the middle of his chest, she shoved him lightly, and he took a step backward.

  “I want you to take off your pants and your shoes.” Bea gave him another light shove, and he retreated again. “I want you to lie naked in the center of my bed.” Another shove, another step backward. “And I want to climb on top of you and ride you until we both come.”

  Her eyes fell on his hat on the coffee table, and she picked it up. Who needed to ride a horse when she could ride a cowboy? Or the closest thing to one she’d ever met. “That okay by you?” she asked as she plonked the hat on her head, still advancing.

  He didn’t bother answering, nor did he stop retreating as he reached for the stud on his pants and yanked his zipper down. The metallic tearing was like a gunshot in the quiet of the room, racing down her spine and tightening everything from her belly to her vocal cords.

  His boots came next, toeing them off and kicking them aside, yanking off his socks, without falling over or even halting his inexorable walk backward. The only thing that did was the mattress hitting the backs of his knees. He stopped then and so did Bea, probably about six feet separating them.

  But then his hands got busy, his blue gaze holding hers as he reached into his back pocket, grabbed his wallet, and pulled out a condom. Bea swallowed at the sight of it.

  Things were getting real.

  He tossed his wallet on the ground and the foil packet on the bed, then slid his fingers inside the waistband of his pants at his hips and eased both them and his black boxer briefs down together. He broke eye contact to bend at the waist and push his pants all the way down his legs and step out of them, but then they were gone and he was straightening, standing buck naked in front of her, his gaze once again seeking hers.