Black Heat by Ruby Laska Page A

respond at first, but he didn't pull away, either. Roan knew this was wrong; she knew she should stop, but she couldn't. She beat his chest with her fists even as she drank in the taste of him, and his arms went around her and pulled her close. He held her close to him, and even though she could feel his hardness pressed against her, he made no move except to keep kissing her, until finally she collapsed into his arms, exhausted and spent. Tears flowed, wetting his shirt, and she pressed her face against the soft cotton.
    The anger was gone as quickly as it came, leaving shame in its wake. God, why did she have to be this way? Why did she do these stupid things, never thinking first, never stopping herself? She wanted to sink into the floor, to creep to her bed and stay there until day dimmed to night and she could disappear into herself and her sorrow.
    "Roan," he said, holding her up with one arm, gently pushing her hair out of her face with the other. "Roan, honey. It's all right."
    "It's not all right," she mumbled. Because she'd wrecked it again.
    "Not all of it, maybe," he conceded. At least he hadn't tried to cheer her up. She would have hated that. "But there's time to fix things. I promise. I need you to trust me on that. Can you?"
    His voice was so gentle, so kind, that she couldn't help nodding. Cal was the last person she should let affect her—and yet he made her believe in him, in hope.
    "And some things..." he traced her bottom lip, very gently, with his thumb. His touch stirred the heat back up, a cyclone of sensation as powerful as her anger moments ago. "And some things are fine the way they are. Some things are as they should be."
    She held her breath, not sure what he was talking about. Except...the truth was that she was sure. Because she felt it too. Cal's kisses yesterday had been unlike any other she'd ever had: they'd been exactly right . They fit. They made her want more. They made her need more.
    Except he hadn't kissed her back. Just now, when she'd practically savaged him with her lips, her teeth, her fists. Well, who could blame him?
    He bent close and brushed his lips against hers. Softly...so softly she wasn't sure if she'd imagined the sensation. A sound in her throat sounded like someone else, some needful hungry thing. "Please," she whispered, her voice cracked and raw.
    He bent to her again, deepening the kiss with agonizing slowness. His lips were soft and warm and gentle, but when he kissed his way slowly along her jaw, down to her throat, the sensations of his stubble and his teeth nipping her gently were anything but tame.
    She put her hand in his and tugged, at first tentatively and then forcefully.
    He came with her without hesitation. The room was small, her bed made up neatly under the framed picture of the ranch as it had once been, long ago.
    There wasn't far to go. They fell together onto the bed.

CHAPTER TEN
    On Sundays, the shop didn't open until noon. By then, Roan had sent Cal home with a kiss and shy wave, showered, dressed, and fed and walked Angel, feeling the whole time like she was floating on air.
    Maybe it was the lack of sleep. But Roan found herself wondering if it might be something more.
    "You didn't have to come to work, girl," Walt said, standing in the door to the work room with his mug of cold, weak coffee. Walt drank coffee from the minute he woke up in the morning until he went to bed at night. He made it in the old percolator that his wife had used for thirty years before her death; the only difference was that now he brewed it in the shop, and it had grounds in the bottom of the cup. "We would have got on just fine without you for a day or two. Now you're just going to make that bum leg worse."
    Roan looked up from the shipment of parts she was unpacking. "First of all, I've got ice on it, and the swelling's gone almost all the way down. I'll be fine by the time I go home. And second, you can't let Hank anywhere near the Fuji that just came in. It's a