Loving Against the Grain (Into the West #2)

Chapter 16

 

“I’ll see you about seven, darlin’.” Noah leaned in and kissed Emmie fleetingly across the lips, hat brim grazing her still uncombed hair before raising his head, gray eyes warming as they met hers while one forefinger gently traced her chin. Then he turned away, bounding off the porch steps and heading off through the morning woods toward the Cookhouse and stables beyond without looking back, a definite swagger to his steps. Once her insides stopped their traitorous flutters at the feel of her husband’s featherlike kiss upon her mouth, Emmie bristled as she gazed after him, noticing that strut and scowling.

It had been like that since Christmas Day, the day Emmaline Lawson’s husband, quiet, shy, horse wrangler Noah Lawson, dropped the bottom out of his wife’s stomach with one long, heated, scorching kiss. Emmie now stared into the forest where Noah had disappeared, as if attempting to summon him back onto this porch, where she could experience those same sensations, those exquisite effects of that moment two weeks ago. She wanted to relive the Christmas Day embrace, experience again the wonderment of being thoroughly kissed by her husband.

Plopping into one of the chairs on the front porch with no desire to return to her one-room confinement, Emmie cast back in her mind to that holiday morning, the morning the world tilted right under her feet. She could still remember the moment when Noah blurted those cryptic words “Not good enough!” Recalled once more when he took her face between his hands as gently as if he’d held a baby bird within those two, large palms, and closed the distance between their mouths. She could still see the deeper gray flecks shimmering around the darkened centers of his eyes; studied again the long fringe of lashes protecting that piercing gaze, until, spellbound, her lids had dropped over her own gaze and she’d sank into the kiss. And flew.

 Fireworks had erupted behind Emmie’s eyelids and around her floating form; her lips burned from their point of contact, melting under the pressure of Noah’s mouth upon hers. Desire, laid dormant for months, burst into flames throughout Emmaline’s body like dried kindling set to match, shooting right through to her fingertips, searing her senses, sending her rocketing upward.

Soaring amongst the explosions in the sky, Emmaline had felt the singe of sparks tingle across her skin, burning right through to her core. Heated syrup had thrummed through her veins, thickly spreading throughout her body till the weight from its passing weakened her knees and Emmaline lost the ability to stand. Instinctively her hands had come up, fingers grabbing something, anything to anchor her staggering drop from space like a spent Roman candle. She vaguely remembered clutching material, sagging into a hard body that stopped her fall, only to send her spinning right back into the heavens with that one touch.

She’d sailed with the stars above the very clouds, weightlessly wheeling and circling amongst the celestial bodies as his lips nipped and tugged and nibbled at hers until, dizzy from the height, Emmie had whimpered, wanting to catch her breath, needing to disembark from this sensual journey before she careened right back into the blazing trajectory of the sun. Those little sounds struggling past heated lips released Emmie from her whirling orbit, setting her down to earth upon shaking feet, quivering limbs, where worldly awareness gradually returned to her branded senses.

Eyes heavy from their brush with an inferno slowly opened, revealing once more her husband, Noah Lawson, as he’d gently set Emmaline back from him, tongue swiping across those treacherous lips quickly in preparation to speaking. She’d swallowed thickly, watching as he started to speak, stopped and cleared his throat, and hoarsely spoke again, all the while with those storm gray eyes holding hers hostage. “Now that is our first kiss, Mrs. Lawson. Merry Christmas, Emmie.” And then he’d pivoted, heading around back with no more by-your-leave. And that kiss had not been replicated since.