McKenna laughed. “I moved to a ranch to be with Grant. Well, I guess I moved to the ranch first. But I’m staying on the ranch because of Grant. He’s definitely changed me.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” McKenna said. “Being with him has... My life wasn’t easy before I came here. I mean... Everyone’s life is hard, so I’m not trying to be all sob story about it, but it was tough. I had a pretty thick sheet of armor all wrapped around me. Nothing could get in and hurt me. But nothing could get in and heal me, either. And until him... I didn’t care about that. But I wanted to let him in. Because I wanted to be the kind of woman that was worthy of a man like him. Honestly, Jamie...you have no idea what a strong, wonderful man he is. And he would never want me to go talking about all that. Because of course he doesn’t like attention and recognition, either.”

“Do you have secrets with him, too?”

“That’s the nature of intimate relationships. I mean, that is the thing about sex, Jamie. It’s intimate. I spent a long time pretending that it didn’t have to be. But it doesn’t just move things around in your body. It shifts them in your soul. For better or worse. It’s kind of a mirror of what happens in a real relationship. You want to do things that you would ordinarily think were crazy, because it’s...him. Physically and emotionally, those things are true.”

Jamie blinked. “Well, love sounds overrated.”

“I would say that it’s not,” McKenna said. “In fact, I would say that we as a culture have bizarrely underrated it.”

“I have to take your word for that.”

Letting someone under your armor. That was the most terrifying thing Jamie could think of. And even though McKenna was happy now, Jamie couldn’t think of anything she would like less.

She had absolutely no inclination toward that.

But even as she rejected it, what McKenna said made a strange kind of sense. Because she thought about the way that Gabe touched her, and how when she was with him, when she was in the moment, it didn’t just seem sexy, it seemed necessary.

And if she were told cold, when she was just standing in an arena with no tingle between her thighs, that it would feel good to have a man touch her between the legs, and suck on her breasts, she would have crossed her arms over her chest and recoiled slightly.

But Gabe made her crazy. A special brand of it. And whatever he did...it seemed right.

Gabe seemed right.

But the armor thing didn’t.

“Hey,” Gabe said, loping up to the fence, his cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, his movements mesmerizing for Jamie.

McKenna shot her a glance, and made a skeptical sound. “Yep. Nothing?”

Jamie treated McKenna to a wide grin, stretching straight across her face, with no curve at all, and a whole lot of teeth. “Hi,” she said to Gabe, pulling her focus off McKenna.