Crazy in Love by Kristin Miller

showing up online.”
    She craned her neck around. The bartender, Nathan Ogletree, was averting his eyes, pretending to dry the bar with a wet towel—she wasn’t buying it—and Dom, the town’s snow-plower and painter, was holding up his phone.
    “Did you take a picture, Dom?” Rachael spat, spinning around.
    He shrugged big, flannel-covered shoulders. “What if I did?”
    “Shit,” Cole said. “This is what I was worried about.”
    Rachael narrowed her eyes, holding Dom square in her sights. “If anything shows up online, I swear to God that I’ll tell your mother about the graffiti we did to her barn.”
    Dom shoved his phone into his breast pocket and shuffled outside.
    “You graffitied a little old lady’s barn?” Cole asked.
    She laughed into a snort. “You’re not the only one who had a delinquent streak in school.”
    “Rachael McCoy, you are one sweet surprise after another.” His hand moved to her thigh. “What do you say we go back to your inn and finish what we started here?”
    “I’m not falling for you, Cole Turner,” she said rather decidedly. “I won’t let myself.”
    “That’s good,” he said, brushing a few strands of hair behind her ear. “Because I’m not talking about falling for anyone. I’m talking about hot and heavy, make-you-forget-your-own-name sex. What’d you say?”
    Is this really what she—
    “Hell, yes!” She hopped off the pool table, and dragged him out of the saloon.

Chapter Eight
     
     
    They burst through the front door of the inn, laughing as their mouths collided. Cole pinned her against the door as it swung wide and slammed into the wall.
    “Wait,” she said, gasping for air. “Waitwaitwait.”
    He licked her bottom lip. “For what?”
    He smelled like rich spice and tasted like whiskey—she wanted to lap him up and eat him in one swift helping.
    “I can’t…” She clawed at the wide breadth of his shoulders, her fingers suddenly numb as they skidded down his bicep. “…breathe.”
    She should’ve stopped at the first drink…or the fifth.
    He palmed her stomach and took a step back so she could get some air. He looked disheveled, his short dark hair sticking up on end from her hands grabbing fistfuls of it. His caramel-brown eyes were intense, glaring through the dim lights of the hall.
    It struck her how crazy this was.
    She was making out with Cole Turner, the same guy that she’d seen on the American Music Awards last year. The same Cole Turner who had a cardboard cutout twin standing up in Lucy’s house.
    If she brought the cutout over to the inn, Cardboard Cole could watch her have hot kinky sex with Real Deal Cole.
    A laugh bubbled out of her at the drunken thought. She slid along the wall and slammed the door shut, and then threw her arms around Cole’s neck, leaning all her weight into him. She smashed her mouth to his. He moaned against her lips and let her guide him back against the opposite wall of the entry. His hands were possessive and greedy, gripping her with more force than she expected. She felt alive, wanted , and damn, it felt good.
    He smudged fevered kisses down her neck. “Can you breathe now?”
    “Don’t care.”
    He nipped at her earlobe, sending starbursts of hot sensations down her neck. And then, in a flash of movement, he clenched her sweater in his fists and raised it to her breasts.
    “May I?” he asked, licking a scorching line just beneath her jaw.
    She nodded, her head knocking against the wall.
    Lifting the sweater from her body, he left her in a red lacy bra—one she’d bought specifically for her date tonight.
    He groaned as his gaze drank her in. “Red?”
    “Let me guess. Is red your favorite color?”
    The corner of his lips curved upward in the sexiest way. “It is now.”
    Palming her breasts in his hand, he dropped to his knees. He ravished her, gripping her waist, burying his head between her breasts, nipping at the lace and tugging it with his teeth. The whiskey flowed through