* * *
WHEN MALLORY WOKE UP the next morning, the room was dark, and her bed was empty.
He was gone.
Of course he was. That was how these things went. She knew that. She did. And it was a good thing too. It really was. Because it was just a one-night stand. And she didn’t know his name, and she was never supposed to see him again.
It had been the longest, most amazing night of her life. There were condom wrappers... In several places about the room. And there was a condom box that had been torn open with absolutely no finesse at all. She lost track of the amount of times they’d... Well, she could always count.
He had gone to the store.
The last time had been at the gray light of dawn. He held her close, entered her from behind, turned her head and kissed her mouth as he thrust into her with a slow determination that had driven her wild. That had made her have a whole different kind of orgasm. One that made her shake and shudder, one that hadn’t seemed to end. One that had come from deep within her, racking her body over and over again.
And now he was gone. She lay there and looked up at the ceiling. This was her new life. She had started it with him. And now she would go on without him. She would go on alone because it was what she had to do. Because it was why she was here. She smiled as she lay there. She had learned new things about herself last night.
There was nothing wrong with her. There was nothing wrong with her body. And another man could want her. Those were all things that she would save for later. There was no room in her life for a man right now. This was her new beginning. Her fresh start.
She’d been a wild thing last night, and if she ever had to face that man again...
She done things with him that she’d never even fantasized about before. She’s been ravenous. She climbed all over him. She’d licked him like he was candy.
She’d take him over a lollipop any day.
And she didn’t have to be embarrassed about any of it. She took a deep breath and lay back against the pillows. Against the sheets. Which were no longer unfamiliar. Which smelled of him. He was a stranger. She didn’t even know his name. Except... In some ways she was now more familiar with him than any other person in the world.
She pushed that aside too. Because it was a pointless thought, and it wouldn’t get her anywhere. And maybe she would just sleep half the day away, because she could. Because no one expected anything from her. Because no one even knew she was here.
She tried to recapture that feeling of freedom from last night, and she felt the spark of it flickering inside of her.
Today was hers. To do with as she pleased. And beyond that, her life was hers.
And she was good with that. She really was.
Last night had been a fantasy.
But tomorrow was the first day of the rest of her life.
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEXT MORNING she got up with an actual bounce in her step and she put on red lipstick. She looked fantastic. She looked new. She didn’t care that it was six thirty in the morning and that she looked ready for a night out rather than a trip to get a morning coffee.
She looked like a woman who’d had a successful one-night stand last night. Happy, relaxed and satisfied. Maybe even a little bit shameless and audacious—two things she’d never been in her life, since shame was a frequent companion, adjacent to guilt, and audaciousness had never really occurred to her.
She was proud of herself. She had gone after what she wanted, and she had paid no heed to any consequences. To the future. She had done the kind of thing she had long dreamed of doing. Okay, maybe she hadn’t long dreamed of it. But she had dreamed of it the moment she had set eyes on him, and that was good enough.
An auspicious beginning.
She put on some nonsense high-heeled sandals that were practical for nothing but making her feel sexy and walked out the door of the hotel, deciding that she would walk to the nearest coffee shop, which she found easily, using her smartphone. The sun was already shining, and she knew that later it would be unbearably hot. That had been a little bit of a shock. Discovering just how warm it could be in Oregon, which she’d assumed was continually rainy. But no, it turned out. Not so. And it was often much warmer than the little pocket she lived in in the Bay Area.
In the summer, it was downright hot. You could take a drive about an hour out to the coast and find it a good twenty degrees cooler, but inland... Scorching was often the order of the day in summertime. But the mornings and evenings were beautiful. At least, this morning was. She sighed, drinking in deeply of the air and not caring that her internal phraseology was a bit dramatic.
She was renewed. Confident.
She had left her old skin behind and had made something new between the sheets with her mystery man. The thought of him made her feel somewhat melancholy, but that was good. It was to be expected. A woman needed something she could look back on with melancholy, and not just humiliation.
She walked into the coffee shop, pushing heavily against the black door, marveling at the cuteness of the place. Griffin had taken her here a couple of times when she’d been to visit. And the coffee was fantastic. The woman behind the register smiled as she took her order, a large ring sparkling on her finger as bright as her smile. She made her order and looked back behind the counter.
There was a guy on the shift that worked in the back who seemed really grumpy, but he was sexy in that sort of growly Viking way.
And she decided to go ahead and appreciate him.
Because while she might have had the perfect specimen of masculinity in her bed not twenty-four hours ago, that didn’t mean she couldn’t still appreciate men out and about.
She was single, after all.
That made her start whistling, and she only stopped when she became keenly aware that the man next to her was staring. She sidled over to the place where people picked their drinks up, moving around the corner of the counter and fading into the woodwork slightly. And that was when the door opened, and her heart hit the floor.
It was him.
It was him.
The man she was never supposed to see again unless she went to the bar. The man she really wasn’t ever supposed to see. The one she’d tasted and clawed and kissed and licked. That one. That man. He was right there in the coffee shop, which was so mundane it was nearly laughable. A man like him shouldn’t just be in a coffee shop in the broad light of day.
Hell, it wasn’t even the broad light of day. It was the morning.
The early morning.
Sex gods of that proportion should not be up at six in the morning.
He is a cowboy...
She had somewhat convinced herself that he was a fake cowboy. Not the kind that rose early and worked the land and rode ranges. Because the real ones were never that pretty, were they?