He didn’t mean to kiss her. Need overtook reason and the pull between them drew them together until his mouth landed on her warm lips. The intimacy of the simple kiss stunned him.

All but one thought escaped his mind. Hold on.

He hooked his arm around her middle and pulled her into his chest. She felt so good pressed up against him. Her hands slipped up around his neck and she buried them in his hair. When she opened her mouth to him, he took her into the fire.

Pressed against him, her soft breasts rubbed against his chest each time he moved and he slanted his mouth over hers to take the kiss deeper. She tasted sweeter than he imagined, her skin warmer and softer than in his dreams.

She gave everything over to the kiss. When his tongue smoothed over hers again and again, she grabbed fistfuls of his hair to hold him to her and her tongue met his with equal strokes.

Raw need and the rightness of her in his arms made him want to hold on to this moment, her, forever. A low growl escaped from deep in his throat.

She jolted and planted both hands on his chest and pushed back. “I thought you hated me.” The dazed look in her eyes satisfied him.

“Not even a little bit.” In fact, she might be everything he’d been missing in his life. And that realization hit him square in the chest and he stared into her eyes, wonder running through him as he traced his fingertips along the side of her beautiful face.

She touched her fingers to her kiss-swollen lips. “Don’t do that again.”

He wanted to do it, and a hell of a lot more, a million more times.

She tried to get out of the truck, but he touched her shoulder to get her to turn back again.

“Why not? You liked it. You kissed me back.”

“I don’t get involved with anyone. It’s not fair to the boys to have someone else come into their lives only to leave again.”

That surprised him. “Are you saying you haven’t been with a man since Sean died?”

“You’re the first man to kiss me in almost five years.” With that bombshell sitting between them she scooted out of the truck and casually walked up the porch steps.

Just as she closed the front door behind her, it hit him what she had just confessed.

Sean died two years ago. Nick was four. Which meant she hadn’t been intimate with her own husband since before she gave birth to Nick.

She’d admitted that something had been seriously wrong between Sean and her long before his sudden death. That realization came with a great many questions.

The one he wished he knew the answer to the most . . . Did Sarah simply use Sean to elevate her life from poor foster kid to rich wife?

He didn’t want to believe it, which made him wonder what really happened between her and Sean.