Erin McCarthy - Full Throttle

“Screw you,” Rhett told him. “It’s a joke. It’s funny. Now you bitches can stand here quaking in your boots about what your women might do to you. I’m going to get my woman.”

He started to walk, moving toward his wife.

He heard Jared ask Nolan, “How does he get that caveman shit to work for him? I would get my balls ripped off and stuffed in my mouth if I pulled what he does.”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

Rhett smiled. He knew exactly how he got away with it.

Shawn knew he respected her above all things. Shawn trusted him.

And it was time to tell her that he had fallen in love with her and wanted their temporary marriage to become a very real one.

SHAWN was glowing in the triumph of beating Eve by exactly two seconds. Eve was taking it well, joking that she had thrown it so that Shawn could win at her own bachelorette party.

“It was the only kind thing to do,” Eve told her. “And by the way, I have a feeling my thighs are going to be killing me tomorrow. Good thing it’s Sunday. I have a few days to recover.”

Shawn grinned at her. “Yeah, it’s harder than it looks, I’m not going to lie.”

“Look behind you,” Dawn said, pointing. “It looks like our party has been crashed. I swear, what were they thinking?”

Shawn and Eve turned and there were Rhett and Nolan and the other guys, watching them from across the room. “How long have they been here?” she asked, her heart starting to race. Just the sight of her husband got her blood pumping.

“Long enough that they caught both your final rides. Voyeurs.” She sounded disgusted.

Shawn wondered if she was a disgrace to wives that she actually wanted her husband to be there. And that it actually turned her on that he had seen her ride a bull. “I wonder whose idea it was to come here?”

“It had to be Rhett or Nolan. The other guys, one, know better. Two, they don’t really want to see us. Y’all are still in the honeymoon phase, but never fear, the need to see each other all the time will wear off.”

Somehow Shawn didn’t think she would be like that. Given that her adult relationships had never been particularly all-encompassing, romantic, or devotional, she found that with Rhett, it was totally different. She both loved and was terrified by her need, her want, to be with him.

“Maybe I don’t want it to wear off,” she murmured as Rhett started toward her, his stride confident, Nolan immediately falling in step behind him.

“It’s not practical,” Dawn stated.

Something about her tone had Shawn wondering if Dawn and her husband were not quite okay. But she wasn’t about to ask her here, not now.

“If Shawn doesn’t care that the guys are here, then I don’t suppose you should,” Eve told her. “It’s her bachelorette party.”

“I don’t mind,” Shawn said.

In fact, when Rhett came over and smiled at her, immediately pulling her into his arms, she didn’t want to do anything other than kiss the stuffing out of him. So she did.

“Mm. That was an awesome greeting,” he murmured in her ear, stroking his hands down her back. “Nice bull riding.”

“I have strong thighs.”

“Something I’ve always admired about you.”

“So what are you doing here?” she asked him.

“I was bored. I missed you. I thought if we’re already married, why shouldn’t we spend the night partying together, instead of separately?”

“Sound logic,” she told him. “Though you may have pissed your sisters off.”

But he just shrugged. “It’s not their night. It’s ours. And I found myself wanting to dance with my wife.”

Oh, damn, he was just so . . . much. It wasn’t charm, it wasn’t being smooth, it was something else. Something . . . more. He looked at her like that, and she melted. She gave in, she opened to him, she forgot who she was, and wanted nothing more than to be with him, to please him. It was exhilarating. Awful.

“Are you asking?” she said, to remind him that outside of their bedroom, she called the shots, so to speak. Not that she did, really. Rhett was by nature a dominating personality, and even when he was being polite and thoughtful and offering to cook dinner or change her oil or take her to the movies, he tended to initiate the order of their days. She didn’t mind, not really, because if she said no to anything, he would change gears without question. If she wanted pasta instead of steak, he would go to the grocery store and get pasta, so she didn’t care that he had a strong personality.

But she worried that she should.

“Yes. Will you dance with me, Shawn, my beautiful wife?”

“I would love to.” The ease with which he used the word wife made her feel warm inside. It made her wonder if he was wondering what she was wondering—that maybe they shouldn’t automatically dismiss their relationship as temporary, as fake. That maybe it could be, should be, something real.

As they swayed to the music with more feeling than any particular skill, Shawn smiled up at him. “Are we going to survive this party tomorrow?”

“It will be fun.”

“I’ve never seen you in a suit.”

“I’ve never seen you in a wedding dress. I’m not sure my blood pressure will be able to handle it.”

His hands were warm on her waist, and he was inching farther south than was really appropriate for a public place, but she let him for now. Once he reached her ass, she would stop him, but for now she was enjoying his touch. “I don’t think you’re that delicate. You’ll be fine.”

“There is delicate, then there is vulnerable. You have no idea how vulnerable I am with you,” he said, his voice low and near her ear.

Shawn shivered, the pulsing beat of the country ballad reverberating through her feet, her breasts, her inner thighs. Or maybe that was just him. But the room was warm, the lighting low, their bodies close and intimate, and she was barely aware that anyone else existed.

“I don’t see how I can make you vulnerable,” she whispered, inching her fingers up to stroke the back of his neck. He smelled like cologne and beer. He didn’t usually wear cologne and she found it appealing, like he had kicked his own manly scent up a notch. “I think it’s the other way around and sometimes it pisses me off.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

She hadn’t really meant to say that, or to get into a discussion about their relationship on the sticky dance floor, but her doubts were getting the best of her. She wanted so much to be with Rhett in a way that was real, yet at the same time it freaked her out. Shouldn’t she want to be independent? Shouldn’t she be ticked like his sisters that he had crashed her girl’s night?

“I don’t know,” was her cop-out response.

But Rhett shook his head. “Don’t pull that. You know you can trust me. Tell me what you’re feeling.”

Shit. How did she explain her jumbled thoughts and feelings?

“It’s just that . . . well, I think about you every day, Rhett. I want to please you, I want to be with you all the time . . . I feel like I’m being absorbed by you. It scares the shit out of me.”

Just hearing her own words had her heart rate increasing. It sounded crazy. She was crazy for him.

He didn’t look particularly alarmed. His nostrils flared and if anything, he looked aroused. “That’s funny, because I feel the same way, yet my understanding was that this is how falling in love works, Shawn.”

“Falling in love?” she asked dumbly. Was he saying he loved her?

“Yes. Falling in love. Which is what I’m doing.” He softly brushed her hair off her cheek. “Do you think that is what you’re doing?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe. Yes.” Way to commit. She mentally kicked herself. Then she took a deep breath and added, “Yes. I am falling in love with you.”

She’d never said those words to anyone. Not even to her high school boyfriend, who she had been sure she would spend the rest of her life with. She’d never told a man she loved him. While this was still one step away from that, it was pretty damn close. Her cheeks burned with the overwhelming realization of what was happening. This was it. This was major.

He smiled at her. “So what do we do now?”

Hell if she knew. “I guess we dance. And we live together. And tomorrow we have a wedding reception.”

Rhett’s thumb rubbed over her bottom lip. “So pragmatic. Where’s the romance, darlin’?”

That made her grin back at him, relieved that he knew her so well already that he was lightening the mood. That he was allowing her to steer this conversation. “Read a novel,” she told him. “You’re barking up the wrong tree if you want a gushy girl.”

“Oh, I think I can get you to gush a little . . . you get more romantic in bed than you realize.”

“I wasn’t aware that begging was romantic,” she said wryly.

But Rhett shook his head. “That’s not what I was referring to. I was thinking more about the way your eyes darken and your skin flushes and the way your fingers trace my face like you can’t quite believe I’m real.”

It was true. She did all that. And she blushed anew to realize that he was so aware of her and her reactions. “Sometimes I wonder if you are real,” she whispered. “Sometimes I think that I’m going to wake up with the clock rewound and find none of the last two weeks has happened.”

“How would that make you feel?”

“Heartbroken,” she told him truthfully.

“Me, too.” His green eyes were shiny with sincerity.

A tap on her arm made Shawn jump. She glanced over and saw Eve and Nolan watching them in amusement.