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she hated Lucas Miller. She hated his smug smile. She hated how he’d just . . . pulled her up against him and kissed her. Hated the way electricity was still sparking through her body.
    Most of all, she hated just how right he was about her.
    She was a coward. A damned, unhappy coward who was a prisoner in her own life. Who was afraid to take hold of anything she felt overly passionate about for fear she’d lose her grip on her tightly held control.
    For fear people might see inside of her and find her lacking somehow. Find her weak. Her mother wore everything out in the open, all there for people to judge, and judge they did. Carly had never wanted that. Had never wanted to expose herself in that way.
    She stalked back to the couch and picked up her bowl. She took another bite of her defiant breakfast-for-dinner. She grimaced. It was soggy.
    And she really didn’t feel all that triumphant either. She felt alone. And turned on. And fixated on Lucas Miller. And too scared to do anything about any of it.

Chapter Five
    Carly’s head hurt from reading too many city ordinance amendment propositions. In all honesty, as much as she cared about Silver Creek, she couldn’t care less whether or not the regulations on historic colors should extend to the interiors of homes and businesses with rooms visible to the street.
    It was all a bunch of people trying to feel more important than they were, in her opinion. And she just sat there and smiled and nodded. She did well on the council, but when it came to opposing people who were serving their sixth term, she wasn’t exactly super bold.
    She was a pansy, is what she was. A big old yellow-bellied coward. She wanted to be perceived well more than she wanted to make a difference. She wanted people to think of her as something other than “that poor Denton girl.”
    Now she was withering up inside of herself. She didn’t even know what she really wanted.
    That was a lie. What she wanted, what she really wanted, and had wanted, since she was a teenager, was Lucas Miller. And yes, when she’d been a teenage girl she’d woven stupid romantic fantasies about him. Fantasies that were about emotion and love and hearts and crap.
    But she was a woman now, and her fantasies were a whole lot more physical. And physical, she knew he could do.
    The simple fact was that she wanted Lucas Miller, no strings, no consequences. She wanted to flip the world off, discreetly, for a while and get rid of her inhibitions and her clothes with the one man she knew who seemed to just be who he was with total ease.
    Oh, what would people say if they knew that staid, sensible Carly Denton wanted things like that. A physical affair, a night of passion and sex with a man who was from a family just as screwed up and gossip-worthy as her own.
    She didn’t care. Not right at the moment. She just didn’t care.
    She turned her car off the main road and started heading out of town, heading toward Lucas’s ranch. She hadn’t been out there since that day. That day she’d seen him with that other woman.
    She was admitting it now, to herself at least, that that experience had crushed something in her. It wasn’t Lucas’s fault, either—something else she was going to admit now, and also only to herself.
    He didn’t know she’d had a crush on him. They weren’t attached, and he owed her nothing.
    It had still hurt. It was still part of why she treated him badly.
    She pulled off the paved two-lane road onto a winding, one-lane gravel road, fighting the urge to turn around and head back to town, toward her little subdivision. Toward safety and security and propriety.
    The problem was, tonight, she just didn’t want propriety. She wanted to know what it was like to be, figuratively, the woman up against the side of the barn, with her head thrown back, all of her focus going into what she felt, not what she thought, not what was right, but on her own needs, her own pleasure.
    She pulled up to Lucas’s house