Free Mary Fran and Matthew by Grace Burrowes

warm feel of him, pushing intimately into her body. He was careful at first, a soft nudge, a sigh, another easy little push. The sun had never coaxed a snowy little crocus to open to its warmth as gently as Matthew Daniels joined his body to hers.
    “Matthew, you’re killing me. Killing—”
    “Then we’ll die together.”
    She could not rush him, could not affect his damnably tender pace one bit. She tried, tried to recapture their previous frenzy with hot kisses, except he somehow turned them into lazy, hot kisses.
    She dragged her nails down his muscular back, urging him faster, but by the time her hands reached his buttocks, her harrying had turned into a caress.
    He was relentless in his tenderness and patience, a one-man onslaught of caring who would neither be dictated to nor distracted from his intention to devastate her with pleasure.
    Mary Fran was practical woman, a woman who knew when she’d met her match, so she did something she would have never have considered doing with any other man: she surrendered and let herself be loved.

Four
    Mary Fran was heaven, and Matthew was a devil. He stored up the sounds of her sighs and groans, saved back the memory of her heathery-flowery scent, made a miser’s hoard of the pleasure of slow, deep thrusts into her heat.
    He was wrong to abuse her trust like this, wrong to let her think Altsax had been spewing lies, wrong to make love to her for the first time in a damned stable—except it would be their only time, of that, Matthew was certain.
    Mary Fran locked her ankles at the small of his back—her booted ankles. The clutch of her legs felt marvelous. The strength in her, the need, made a wicked, lovely contrast to the impersonal couplings he and his wife had shared.
    Damn duty anyhow.
    When Mary Fran started trying to scoot into Matthew’s thrusts, he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face against her neck. Her fingernails dug in low on his back, a fierce, unrelenting grip. Her breath came more harshly against his skin, and the sounds she made threatened to obliterate his control.
    “Matthew—”
    He kissed her to stop her from begging verbally, though her body was shameless in its demands, and even more shameless in their satisfaction. As she seized around him, hard, repeatedly, her kiss became a plundering of his reason, her pleasure his complete undoing.
    He tried to pull away, but her legs were scissored around his waist, and she would not allow it. He growled her name and made another attempt to withdraw, but she held him, her arms and legs a vise, and the struggle itself only heightened his arousal.
    “Surrender, damn you, Matthew.”
    A command. Matthew understood about taking orders, and his body understood opportunity. Pleasure flooded him body and soul, a wracking release that had him pounding into his lover until his legs threatened to give out and he had to hold on to Mary Fran for both balance and sanity.
    He managed to remain standing, if only to bask in the way her hand winnowed through his hair in a slow caress. She kissed his throat, nuzzled his breastbone, and still did not drop her legs from around his waist.
    “We need…” His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for too long. “My handkerchief is in my left pocket.”
    Thank God she obliged and dug into the breeches sagging around his hips. Matthew did not want to turn her loose from his embrace, not ever.
    Though he would. Altsax had seen to that handily enough.
    “The next time we do this,” Mary Fran said, “we’re going to have a damned bed. My bum can’t—”
    His cock slipped from her body, slunk away in defeat more like. “There will not be a next time, Mary Fran, not unless you agree to marry me.”
    She stopped dabbing at him with his handkerchief. Her head came up, and the smile disappeared from her well-kissed lips. “Are you trying to trap me, Matthew Daniels?”
    Just like that, she’d emotionally come about and swung her gun ports open, which was