She turns a slow circle in the water, hair trailing behind her.
"You can come out now, Garrett," she says in my direction.
I close my eyes, and let out a breath.
Then I step out of the trees into the moonlight, feeling every bit an idiot.
"I was—" My voice comes out wrong. I clear my throat. "Making sure y'all were safe."
"Uh-huh."
"Mountain lions come down to the water at night."
"Mm-hm."
"Snakes, too."
She smiles at me. "Get in the water, cowboy."
I hesitate.
I'm not the man I was fifteen years ago. My gut is thicker than it used to be, my knees don't love the up and down of hill country anymore, and I've got grays in a beard I can't even commit to shaving.
Under my shirt is a body that does hard work for a living and looks like it—not the lean kind of hard, the weathered kind.
Herbody is a goddamn work of art.
"Garrett."
My eyes come up. “I don’t think you want to see this body without clothes.”
She treads water. “Hell yes, I do.”
"Lark—"
"And I don’t only want to see it, I want my hands and mouth all over it.”
Okay then. I can’t argue with that.
I strip on the bank with my back to her since I still have a drop of pride left. My boots, socks, jeans, shirt, and boxers end up in a pile. I wade in fast before I can think about it. The cold hits me up to the thighs, then higher, and I'm cursing under mybreath and she's laughing at me. But when she swims over and latches on to my neck, the cold stops mattering.
"Hey," she says.
She fits against me in the water just as she did on the dance floor, and against that oak. Her legs come around my hips and I hold onto her.
"Hey, darlin’,” I whisper.
Her hands thread through my beard, then down my neck and shoulders.
I tip her chin up and take her mouth properly—deep, open, the type of kiss I've been thinking about since last night.
She melts into it with a little hum against my lips, her tongue sliding over mine. My hand comes up out of the water and finds her breast.
Jesus.
It’s so full and heavy in my palm, and when I roll her stiff little nipple between my fingers she breaks the kiss to gasp into my mouth.
I don’t stop. Her head tips back and her hips roll against mine under the water, my cock already raging.