Want Me, Cowboy

She was right about that, and when he had made his impromptu proposal a moment earlier, he hadn’t been thinking of that. But now that he was...

He took a leisurely visual tour of her, similar to the one he had taken earlier. But this time, he didn’t just appreciate her beauty in an abstract sense. This time, he allowed it to be a slightly more heated exploration.

Her skin looked smooth. He had noticed how lovely it was earlier. But there was more than that. Her breasts looked about the right size to fit neatly into his hands, and she had an extremely enticing curve to her hips. Her skirts were never short enough to show very much of her leg, but she had nice ankles.

He could easily imagine getting down on his knees and taking those high heels off her feet. And biting one of her ankles.

That worked for him.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” he said.

Poppy’s mouth dropped open and then snapped shut. “We’ve never even... We’ve never even kissed, Isaiah. We’ve never even almost kissed.”

“Yes. Because you’re my assistant.”

“Your assistant. And you’re my foster sister’s ex-fiancé.”

Isaiah gritted his teeth, an involuntary spike of anger elevating his blood pressure. Poppy knew better than to talk about Rosalind. And hell, she had nothing to do with Poppy. Not in his mind, not anymore.

Yes, she was the reason Poppy had come to work for him in the first place, but Poppy had been with him for so long her presence wasn’t connected with the other woman in any way.

He wasn’t heartbroken. He never had been, not really. He was angry. She’d made a fool of him. She’d caused him to take his focus off his business. She’d nearly destroyed not only his work, but his brother’s. And what would eventually be their sister’s too.

All of it, all the success they had now had nearly been taken out by his own idiocy. By the single time he’d allowed his heart to control him.

He would never do that again.

“Rosalind doesn’t have anything to do with this,” he said.

“She’s in my life,” Poppy pointed out.

“That’s a detail we can discuss later.” Or not at all. He didn’t see why they were coming close to discussing it now.

“You don’t want to marry me,” Poppy said.

“Are you questioning my decision-making, Poppy? How long have you known me? If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s an indecisive man. And I think you know that.”

“You’re a dick,” Poppy said in exasperation. “How dare you... Have me interviewing these women all day... And then... Is this some kind of sick test?”

“You threatened to quit. I don’t want you to quit. I would rather have you in all of my life than in none of my life.”

“I didn’t threaten to quit our friendship.”

“I mostly see you at work,” he said.

“And you value what I do at work more than what you get out of our friendship, is that it?”

That was another question he didn’t know how to answer. Because he had a feeling the honest answer would earn him a spiked heel to the forehead. “I’m not sure how the two are separate,” he said, thinking he was being quite diplomatic. “Considering we spend most of our time together at work, and my enjoyment of your company often dovetails with the fact that you’re so efficient.”

Poppy let out a howl that would not have been out of place coming from an enraged chipmunk. “You are... You are...”

Well, if her objection to the marriage was that they had never kissed, and never almost kissed, and he didn’t want to hear her talk anymore—and all those things were true—he could only see one solution to the entire situation.

He made his way over to where Poppy was standing like a brittle rose and wrapped his arms around her waist. He dragged her to him, holding her in place as he stared down at her.

“Consider this your almost-kiss,” he said.

Her brown eyes went wide, and she stared up at him, her soft lips falling open.

And then his heart was suddenly beating faster, the unsettled feeling in his gut transforming into something else. Heat. Desire. He had never looked at Poppy this way, ever.

And now he wondered if that had been deliberate. Now he wondered if he had been purposefully ignoring how beautiful she was because of all the reasons she had just mentioned for why they shouldn’t get married.

The fact she was his assistant. The fact that she was Rosalind’s foster sister.

“Isaiah...”

He moved one hand up to cup her cheek and brought his face down closer to hers. She smelled delicate, like flowers and uncertainty. And he found himself drawn to her even more.

“And this will be your kiss.”

He brought his lips down onto hers, expecting... He didn’t know what.

Usually, sexual attraction was a straightforward thing for him. That was one of the many things he liked about sex. There was no guesswork. It was honest. There was never anything shocking about it. If he saw a woman he thought was beautiful, he approached her. He never wondered if he would enjoy kissing her. Because he always wanted to kiss her before he did. But Poppy...

In the split second before their mouths touched, he wondered. Wondered what it would be like to kiss this woman he had known for so long. Who he had seen as essential to his life, but never as a sexual person.

And then, all his thoughts burned away. Because she tasted better than anything he could remember and her lips just felt right.

It felt equally right to slide his fingertips along the edge of her soft jawline and tilt her face up farther so he could angle his head in deep and gain access. It felt equally right to wrap both arms around her waist and press her body as tightly to his as he possibly could. To feel the soft swell of her breasts against his chest.

And he waited, for a moment, to see if she was going to stick her claws into him. To see if she was going to pull away or resist.

She did neither. Instead, she sighed, slowly, softly. Sweetly. She opened her mouth to his.

He took advantage of that, sliding his tongue between her lips and taking a taste.

He felt it, straight down to his cock, a lightning bolt of pleasure he’d had no idea was coming.

Suddenly, he was in the middle of a violent storm when only a moment ago the sky had been clear.

He had never experienced anything like it. The idea that Poppy—this woman who had been a constant in his world—was a hidden temptress rocked him down to his soul. He had no idea such a thing was possible.

In his world, chemistry had always been both straightforward and instant. That it could simply exist beneath the surface like this seemed impossible.

And yet, it appeared there was chemistry between himself and Poppy that had been dormant all this time.

Her soft hands were suddenly pressed against his face, holding on to him as she returned his kiss with surprising enthusiasm.

Her enthusiasm might be surprising, but he was damn well going to take advantage of it.

Because if chemistry was her concern, then he was more than happy to demolish her worry here and now.

He reversed their positions, turning so her back was to his desk, and then he walked her backward before sliding one arm beneath her ass and picking her up, depositing her on top of the desk. He bent down to continue kissing her, taking advantage of her shock to step between her legs.

Or maybe he wasn’t taking advantage of anything. Maybe none of this was calculated as he would like to pretend that it was. Maybe it was just necessary. Maybe now that their lips had touched there was just no going back.

And hell, why should they? If she couldn’t deny the chemistry between them... If it went to its natural conclusion...she had no reason to refuse his proposal.

He slid one hand down her thigh, toward her knee, and then lifted that leg, hooking it over his hip as he drew her forward and pressed himself against her.

Thank God for the fullness of her skirt, because it was easy to make a space for himself right there between her legs. He was so hard it hurt.

He was a thirty-six-year-old man who had a hell of a lot more self-control now than he’d ever had, and yet, he felt more out of control than he could ever remember being before.

That did not add up. It was bad math.

And right now, he didn’t care.

Slowly, he slid his other hand up and cupped her breast. He had been right. It was exactly the right size to fill his palm. He squeezed her gently, and Poppy let out a hoarse groan, then wrenched her mouth away from his.

Her eyes were full of hurt. Full of tears.

“Don’t,” she said, wiggling away from him.

“What?” he asked, drawing a deep breath and trying to gain control over himself.

Stopping was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to strip that dress off her, marvel at every inch of uncovered skin. Kiss every inch of it. He wanted her twisting and begging underneath him. He wanted to sink into her and lose himself. Wanted to make her lose herself too.

Poppy.

His friend. His assistant.

“How dare you?” she asked. “How dare you try to manipulate me with... wth sex. You’re my friend, Isaiah. I trusted you. You’re just...trying to control me the way you control everything in your life.”

“That isn’t true,” he said. It wasn’t. It might have started out as...not a manipulation, but an attempt to prove something to both of them.

But eventually, he had just been swept up in all this. In her. In the heat between them.

“I think it is. You... I quit.”

And then she turned and walked out of the room, leaving him standing there, rejected for the first time in a good long while.

And it bothered him more than he would have ever imagined.

* * *

Poppy was steeped in misery by the time she crawled onto the couch in her pajamas that evening.

Her little house down by the ocean was usually a great comfort to her. A representation of security that she had never imagined someone like her could possess.

Now, nothing felt like a refuge. Nothing at all. This whole town felt like a prison.

Her bars were Isaiah Grayson.

That had to stop.

She really was going to quit.

She swallowed, feeling sick to her stomach. She was going to quit and sell this house and move away. She would talk to him sometimes, but mostly she had to let the connection go.

She didn’t mean to him what he did to her. Not just in a romantic way. Isaiah didn’t... He didn’t understand. He didn’t feel for people the way that other people felt.

And he had used the attraction she felt for him against her. Her deepest, darkest secret.

There was no way a woman without a strong, preexisting attraction would have ever responded to him the way she had.

It had been revealing. Though, now she wondered if it had actually been revealing at all, or if he had just always known.

Had he known—all this time—how much she wanted him? And had he been...laughing at her?

No. Not laughing. He wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t cruel, not at all. But had he been waiting until it was of some use to him? Maybe.

She wailed and dragged a blanket down from the back of the couch, pulling it over herself and curling into a ball.

She had kissed Isaiah Grayson today.

More than kissed. He had... He had touched her.

He had proposed to her.

And, whether it was a manipulation or not, she had felt...

He had been hard. Right there between her legs, he had been turned on.

But then, he was a man, and there were a great many men who could get hard for blowup dolls. So. It wasn’t like it was that amazing.

Except, something about it felt kind of amazing.

She closed her eyes. Isaiah. He was... He was absolutely everything to her.

She could marry him. She could keep another woman from marrying him.

Great. And then you can be married to somebody who doesn’t love you at all. Who sees you as a convenience.

She laughed aloud at that thought. Yes. Some of that sounded terrible. But... She had spent most of her life in foster care. She had lived with a whole lot of people who didn’t love her. And some of them had found her to be inconvenient. So that would put marrying Isaiah several steps above some of the living situations she’d had as a kid.

Then there was Rosalind. Tall, blond Rosalind who was very clearly Isaiah’s type. While Poppy was...not.

How would she ever...cope with that? With the inevitable comparisons?

He hates her. He doesn’t hate you.

Well. That was true. Rosalind had always gone after what she wanted. She had devastated Isaiah in the process. So much so that it had even hurt Poppy at the time. Because as much as she wanted to be with Isaiah, she didn’t want him to be hurt.

And then, Rosalind had gone on to her billionaire. The man she was still with. She traveled around the world and hosted dinner parties and did all these things that had been beyond their wildest fantasies when they were growing up.

Rosalind wasn’t afraid of taking something just for herself. And she didn’t worry at all about someone else’s feelings.

Sometimes, that was a negative. But right about now... Poppy was tempted—more than a little bit tempted—to be like Rosalind.

To go after her fantasy and damn the feelings and the consequences. She could have him. As her husband. She could have him...kissing her. She could have him naked.

She could be his.

She had been his friend and his assistant for ten years. But she’d never been his in the way she wanted to be.

He’d been her friend and her boss.

He’d never been hers.

Had anyone ever been hers?

Rosalind certainly cared about Poppy, in her own way. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have bailed Poppy out when she was in need. But Rosalind’s life was very much about her. She and Poppy kept in touch, but that communication was largely driven by Poppy.

That was...it for her as far as family went. Except for the Graysons.

And if she married Isaiah...they really would be her family.

There was a firm, steady knock on her door. Three times. She knew exactly who it was.

It was like thinking about him had conjured him up.

She wasn’t sure she was ready to face him.

She looked down. She was wearing a T-shirt and no bra. She was definitely not ready to face him. Still, she got up off the couch and padded over to the door. Because she couldn’t not...

She couldn’t not see him. Not right now. Not when all her thoughts and feelings were jumbled up like this. Maybe she would look at him and get a clear answer. Maybe she would look at him and think, No, I still need to quit.

Or maybe...

She knew she was tempting herself. Tempting him.

She hoped she was tempting him.

She scowled and grabbed hold of her blanket, wrapping it tightly around her shoulders before she made her way to the door. She wrenched it open. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to talk sense into you.”

“You can’t,” she said, knowing she sounded like a bratty kid and not caring at all.

“Why not?”

“Because I am an insensible female.” She whirled around and walked back into her small kitchen, and Isaiah followed her, closing the front door behind him.

She turned to face him again, and her heart caught in her throat. He was gorgeous. Those cold, clear gray eyes, his sculpted cheekbones, the beard that made him more approachable. Because without it, she had a feeling he would be too pretty. And his lips...

She had kissed those lips.

He was just staring at her.

“I’m emotional.”

He said nothing to that.

“I might actually throw myself onto the ground at any moment in a serious display of said emotion, and you won’t like it at all. So you should probably leave.”

Those gray eyes were level with hers, sparking heat within her, stoking a deep ache of desire inside her stomach.

“Reconsider.” His voice was low and enticing, and made her want to agree to whatever commandment he issued.

“Quitting or marrying you?” She took a step back from him. She couldn’t be trusted to be too close to him. Couldn’t be trusted to keep her hands to herself. To keep from flinging herself at him—either to beat him or kiss him she didn’t know.

“Both. Either.”

Just when she thought he couldn’t make it worse.

“That’s not exactly the world’s most compelling proposal.”

“I already know that my proposal wasn’t all that compelling. You made it clear.”

“I mean, I’ve heard of bosses offering to give a raise to keep an employee from leaving. But offering marriage...”

“That’s not the only reason I asked you to marry me,” he said.

She made a scoffing sound. “You could’ve fooled me.”

“I’m not trying to fool you,” he said.

Her heart twisted. This was one of the things she liked about Isaiah. It was tempting to focus on his rather grumpy exterior, and when she did that, the question of why she loved him became a lot more muddled. Because he was hot? A lot of men were hot. That wasn’t it. There was something incredibly endearing about the fact that he said what he meant. He didn’t play games. It simply wasn’t in him. He was a man who didn’t manipulate. And that made her accusation from earlier feel...wrong.

Manipulation wasn’t really the right way to look at it. But he was used to being in charge. Unquestioned.

And he would do whatever he needed to do to get his way, that much she knew.

“Did you take the kiss as far as you did because you wanted to prove something to me?”

“No,” he said. “I kissed you to try and prove something to me. Because you’re right. If we were going to get married, then an attraction would have to be there.”

“Yes,” she said, her throat dry.

“I can honestly say that I never thought about you that way.”

She felt like she’d just been stabbed through the chest with a kitchen knife. “Right,” she said, instead of letting out the groan of pain that she was tempted to issue.

“We definitely have chemistry,” he said. “I was genuinely caught off guard by it. I assume it was the same for you.”

She blinked. He really had no idea? Did he really not know that her response to him wasn’t sudden or random?

No. She could see that he didn’t.

Isaiah often seemed insensitive because he simply didn’t bother to blunt his statements to make them palatable for other people. Because he either didn’t understand or care what people found offensive. Which meant, if backed into a corner about whether or not he had been using the kiss against her, he would have told her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Now he looked genuinely confused. “You’re apologizing to me. Why?”

“I’m apologizing to you because I assumed the worst about you. And that wasn’t fair. You’re not underhanded. You’re not always sweet or cuddly or sensitive. But you’re not underhanded.”

“You like me,” he pointed out.

He looked smug about that.

“Obviously. I wouldn’t have put up with you for the past ten years. Good paying job or not. But then, I assume you like me too. At least to a degree.”

“We’re a smart match,” he said. “I don’t think you can deny that.”

“Just a few hours ago you were thinking that one of those bottle blondes was your smart match. You can see why I’m not exactly thrilled by your sudden proposal to me.”

“Are you in love with someone else?”

The idea was laughable. She hadn’t even been on a date in...

She wasn’t counting. It was too depressing.

“No,” she said, her throat tightening. “But is it so wrong to want the possibility of love?”

“I think love is good for the right kind of people. Though my observation is that people mostly settle into a partnership anyway. The healthiest marriage is a partnership.”

“Love is also kind of a thing.”

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