Steel Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #2, Chloe and Matthew's story) by Amelia Rose

lobby and tonight, most likely, we wouldn't sleep in the house he'd bought from Hutch.  It might only be a few miles away, but the room I usually took at the Queen was only a few flights of stairs away.
     
                  He carried me through the door, over the threshold, our eyes never letting each other go.  He kicked the door shut behind us with his foot and carried me to the bed where so many nights he'd said goodnight to me.
                  The bed gave under his weight.  He sat, pulling me down with him, cradling me in his arms.  His mouth found mine again, in the half dark room lit only by the gas lights beyond the windows.  His face was lines and shadows, hollows of cheekbones, dark of beard.  His eyes seemed endlessly dark; in the shadows, I could make out the love in his eyes.
                  I pressed myself against him, feeling his heartbeat quicken beneath his suit jacket.  My arms stretched around his neck, my cheek against his chest.  We pressed together, kissing as if we meant never to stop.  His hands were gentle on the buttons of my dress, reverent, almost, as if he'd never before gone so far. 
                  The jacket of my dress finally fell open to the corset beneath and then he smiled, just a little, and whispered, "Can you breathe in that?"
                  And I couldn't, not really, and I said so, feeling his fingers more sure than mine, even as he untied the stays and pulled the ribbons free.  He slipped the arms of my dress off my shoulders, pulled them behind, gently, so my arms came free.  Already, I was tugging at his tie, at the buttons on his shirt, shoving shirt and suit coat off together, tangling him in them and untangling him, at the same time my mouth explored his smooth chest, the hard muscle, the hot skin, the smell of him, the way Matthew still smelled of freshly cut wood and sage and Nevada dirt and the wind. 
                  When his arms were free, he continued the mysteries of the dress, fussing with bustle and buttons meant to tame the train when we danced, buttons that allowed him no closer to freeing me from the dress but confounded him and finally made him laugh, swearing softly, asking, "Did Annie make this to fox me?"
                  "Wouldn't put it past her," I said, my words muffled by his throat, his curls, his skin.  I pushed away from him, stood to get a better take on the dress, suddenly unable to remember how I'd gotten into it in the first place and, standing, felt it fall from me in a rush of satin, pooling around my knees, too much dress to go much farther but I was free, still booted, but the corset fell away. The under shift twisted easily over my head; the dress, I stepped clear of.
                  The room was cold.  We hadn't bothered with a fire, hadn't remembered to close the curtains earlier in the night.  I didn't feel the cold.  I felt Matthew's heat, felt his impatience as we struggled now with his trousers, a perfectly normal garment that to our fingers felt strange and ill-made.  We laughed together, tugged, stopped when Matthew sat to kick off his boots, then stood again, working the buttons on the trousers until they, too, fell away, and there was just the two of us, standing together, pressing together so close we could be one person.
                  The icy sheets welcomed us and warmed around us quickly.
     
                  In the morning, I woke with sunlight pouring into the room through curtains we'd never remembered to close.  My head was nestled in the hollow of Matthew's shoulder.  His lips were in my hair, gently kissing me awake.
                  When I shifted to smile up at him, he winked and said, "You never took your boots off, Mrs. Longren."
                  I stilled, shifted my legs under the quilts and laughed.  "My feet are warm, Mr. Longren. That oddity may never