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face had gone absolutely white when she realized her daughter had been in a tree during a lightning storm. To Paige, it had seemed like it had gone on forever, like no one would ever come and save her, that the lightning would surely reach out and get her at any moment.
    “I was playing outside when I was five or six, and a storm came, and I took shelter at the closest spot, which turned out to be my tree house,” she finally admitted.
    “Oooh,” her cowboy sympathized.
    “Yeah, not the best place to be during a storm. It was awful, and it seemed like forever before anyone found me.”
    He held her tight as she lay draped over him, bracing for the next boom of thunder. His hands moved gently over her shoulders, trying to soothe and work out some of the tension there. She snuggled closer, her face pressed as far into the curve of his neck as she could get it, the reassuring rise and fall of his chest beneath her, the beat of his heart, steady as could be, thumping against one of her ears.
    “I could tell you a story,” he whispered.
    And she grinned despite her fears. “Thank you, but I’m not five years old anymore. Besides, I never got bedtime stories. I got songs. My mother used to sing us to sleep.”
    “Okay, I’m definitely not singing. You don’t want me to sing.”
    “Then…I guess there’s not much else you could do,” she said, thinking it came out sounding like an invitation more than anything else.
    Oops.
    She didn’t mean it that way.
    Honestly, she didn’t.
    So what if he was here? She was here. The storm was here. And it was going to be a long night.
    He took her face in his hand, eased back away from her, just enough that he could look her in the eye and said, “Let’s just try one kiss, Red. Okay? One. And we’ll see how it goes from there.”
    Well, if he thought she was going to fight him off….
    No, he knew she wasn’t going to do that.
    Just let go , she told herself. It’s just one night, just one kiss.
    He let his mouth settle over hers, firm and sure, insistent and yet moving like a man who had all the time in the world. She opened herself up to the kiss, to him. To the heat and the pleasure, falling into it.
    Some men just knew how to touch a woman, when to linger, when to blaze forward, when to tease and when to take.
    He knew.
    He devoured her, and she let him, helped him as best she could, with long, hungry kisses and hands that roamed restlessly across his chest, his shoulders, his back, into his hair, trying to get even closer.
    She wasn’t altogether sure how she got there, but she ended up straddling his lap, her hips in his hands, her breasts crushed against his chest, wishing she didn’t have a stitch on.
    And it all happened as fast as a fire roaring out of control.
    “Damn, Red,” he said, lifting his mouth from hers long enough to catch a ragged breath.
    “I know.”
    Maybe she’d just been alone too long, gotten too caught up with her work and her family and all of its craziness. Had forgotten to make time for Paige, the woman, with all a woman’s needs.
    Because this felt very much like need.
    He kissed her again, used his hands on her hips to draw her into a rhythm against him that was both arousing and maddening through their clothes.
    If he’d laid her down on the hard ground right then and started stripping her clothes off, she didn’t think she could have stopped him. She was so aroused already hemight not even have to take her clothes off her. If he just kept doing what he was doing, which now included a hand slipping beneath her sweater and her shirt and that little nothing camisole of a bra to her breast, his mouth on her neck…
    Her whole body gave a shudder.
    The things he was doing to her neck….
    He laid her back against that hard ground, settled himself heavily, but still fully clothed, on top of her, pushed up her clothes and took her nipple into his mouth and sucked hard.
    “Trust me, Red,” he muttered. “Just trust me. Everything will