“No, I’ll trust the cowboy to know when a bone is broken or not.”

“I think it’s just bruised.”

“Yeah, that and my ego,” she said under her breath.

When he spotted the humiliated look on her face, Coop put his thumb under her chin, an unfamiliar fullness in his chest. “Hey, no need to be embarrassed around me. Besides, this was my fault. I feel terrible that something I did caused you pain.” He helped her to her feet, and as he held her against him, she seemed a little breathless, a little shaky.

When their gazes met, his heart hammered, and his entire body reacted as if he’d just been sucker punched. Even with her hair mussed and full of hay, she was breathtaking. Absolutely fucking gorgeous.

He picked hay from her hair. “How about a shower?”

She crinkled her nose. “Good idea.” She glanced past his shoulders. “I guess I’d better make my way back to my room.”

“No,” Coop said, caging her against him. “I don’t think you should.”

A bit flustered, she said, “I told you my ankle is fine.”

“And I told you I don’t think you should go to your room.”

She lifted one brow. “No? Then how am I supposed to shower?” She looked around. “Unless you have some shower here that I’m not aware—”

“In my room. With me.”

Her cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink. For a brief second, he thought he spotted a moment of hesitation, but then she quickly blinked it away, her bravado back in place.

“I’d like that.”

He scooped her up and less than five minutes later, he was carrying her into his room on the top floor at the back end of the old farmhouse.

He set her down. “So this is how Chase Cooper lives.”

“Sometimes,” he said, and circled his hand around her waist. Home was in Nova Scotia, where he had a successful sports medicine practice. But he didn’t want to talk about that right now, because that conversation would lead to his mother and the reason he came here often. “Can you walk?”

She rotated her ankle. “It’s already feeling better.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

With his fingers on the small of her back, he led her to the bathroom. Desperate to get her naked again, he pulled the shower nozzle, adjusted the temperature to hot, and then turned his attention to her.

Not wanting to waste a moment, his hand went to her T-shirt. He gripped the hem and peeled it from her body. When he exposed her lace bra, air hissed from him, and his heart pounded harder.

“Jesus, I can’t tell you how happy I am that you agreed to join me.”

She dipped her head to take in the way his hard-on was pressing against his jeans, and in a sexy, teasing voice laced with promise, she responded with, “You don’t have to tell me.”

Stepping into him, she pushed against his erection, letting him know in no uncertain terms what she wanted. This time there was no hesitation in her tone, no doubt in her eyes, and he knew with every fiber of his being that here on the ranch, here with him, she was setting another facet of her personality free.

Beneath the reserved package she presented to the world, she was fun, flirtatious, sexy as hell, and damned if he didn’t want her to understand that, to embrace that side of herself.

Her hand went to her bra, and she unhooked it from the back. It fell to the floor and exposed her full, gorgeous breasts. Her pale buds hardened beneath his lusty gaze, and he was pretty damn certain he was the luckiest fucking guy on earth.

He stepped back and made quick work of his clothes. He kicked the pile away from his feet, entered the shower stall, and pulled her in with him.

She gasped and laughed as water soaked her clothes. “I’m still dressed.”

“I can rectify that.” He unzipped her shorts and peeled them down her long legs, and then he gripped her panties to drag them away.

Her breathing changed, became a little faster, and once she was naked, Coop pulled her into the warm stream and held her tight, enjoying the softness of her skin against his. As the hot water fell over them, Julia made a sexy little noise that prompted him into action.

He grabbed the soap and lathered her body, running it over her curves, around her breasts, and between her legs, taking extra care with her sore ankle. Quivering beneath his touch, she moaned with pleasure, and Coop grinned, loving how responsive she was to his touch. Once she was clean, she took the soap and turned it on him. She ran the bar over his body, paying extra attention to his cock. She ran her hands along the length, and the sweet torture made him throb.

“I was thinking,” she murmured, and wet her lips.

“About what?” he managed to get out as pleasure forked through him.

She stepped closer, her hands never leaving his cock as she rubbed her hard nipples against his chest. “This time, I want to make you scream for me.”

A groan caught in his throat. Truthfully, he loved that she cared about his pleasure, and that she wasn’t simply out to take what she could from the cowboy, the way things normally went down on the ranch. But Julia wasn’t like those other women, and Coop wasn’t a man to take without giving first.

And oh how he planned to give…

He gripped her shoulders, and in a move that seemed to surprise and excite her, he turned her around and braced her hands on the wall. Then he put his mouth close to her ear and said, “Don’t move.” He heard her breath catch as he slid his hands around her waist to cup both her breasts. “Because in my world, sweetheart, the woman screams first.”

As he played with her nipples, he pressed his engorged cock against the small of her back, desperately needing to apply a bit of pressure to help ease the tension. He slipped one hand between her legs until he found her clit. Christ, he loved that she was all wet, swollen, and ready to play.

He stroked her, and she went wild in his arms. Wanton and wicked, she wiggled her ass against his erection, and he nearly abandoned his plan to please her first.

Instead, he slapped her soft, round backside and said, “Stop it.”

But naughty little filly that she was, she didn’t. She gyrated against him, and the moans in her throat thickened his cock almost painfully.

“You’re asking for it,” he said. “Keep it up, and I’m going to lose it, and I promised you that I’d take it slow this time.”

“Maybe I don’t want it slow,” she murmured over her shoulder.

Her words, and the desperation behind them, told him so much—she was as needy as he was. Foreign emotions pressed against his heart, knowing she wanted him as badly as he wanted her. She glanced over her shoulder to see him, and when their gazes met, a new intimacy rose between them, one that went deeper than anything he’d ever felt before.

“Julia…” he whispered, and when he caught the emotions in her eyes, he carefully spun her around to face him.

Her fingers tightened on his shoulders, and his flesh burned wherever she touched. “I want you to lose it, Coop,” she murmured, impatience lacing her voice as her body began to visibly quake. “Right here in the shower.” She went up on her tiptoes and brushed her sex over his erection. “Please.”

Sweet Jesus.

Hungering to claim every inch of her, his mind began spinning, but he knew he wanted so much more than just her body. He reached outside the shower, grabbed a condom from the vanity, and quickly sheathed himself. Then he slipped his hands around Julia’s ass and lifted her off the floor. He pulled her high onto his waist and slowly began to lower her onto his cock.

“Oh, God, yes,” she cried out when he breached her tight opening.

He adjusted his grip and pulled her down hard, dropping her onto his throbbing cock and driving in so deep, she began to claw at his flesh.

He took two measured steps across the tile floor. As he slammed her back against the shower stall, some small, coherent part of his brain warned he was hurting her. “Julia,” he said as he struggled for some semblance of control.