I should push him away. Duck under his arm and put space between us.
Instead, I lift my hands to his chest.
The leather is warm beneath my palms.
I don’t push.
Like yesterday at the stadium, I grab his jacket and pull him an inch closer.
“What are you doing?” he rasps.
“Maybe we just need to kiss it out of our system.” The logic sounds flimsy even to my own ears, but I cling to it. “If we kiss enough times, it’ll become dull. We won’t feel anything anymore.”
His breath catches. “Peyton, I?—”
“Kiss me,” I interrupt. “Please.”
I’m literally begging him. And in the second that he holds my gaze without moving, I’m the most pathetic woman on the planet. Desperate.
But then his focus drops to my mouth.
And the gray of his eyes becomes darker. Storm clouds gathering. Thunder rolling in.
“Kiss it out of our systems?” he repeats.
I nod.
In a flash, one of his hands goes to the small of my back, yanking me flush against him. The other tangles in my hair, fisting at the nape of my neck, tilting my head back.
He bends me backward slightly, and then his mouth crashes over mine.
The kiss is nothing like the stadium.
His lips move against mine with a demanding pressure that borders on angry. There’s no hesitation, no polite exploration. His tongue sweeps into my mouth with a possessiveness that makes me want to climb him right here in the dirt.
I grab fistfuls of his jacket, hauling myself up, pressing closer. Kissing while standing is so much worse than in the stadium. Now we’re free to press our bodies together, and Liam’s body, oh, it’s hard in the best way. The collision is jarring—the rough slide of denim against denim, the crushing weight of his chest flattening my breasts, the hardness of his thigh pushing between mine.
Heat explodes through me, scorching through my veins, pooling low and liquid in my belly.
His hand tightens in my hair, angling my head to deepen the kiss. A sound escapes my throat—a whimper, an embarrassingly needy moan—and he swallows it, drinks it down, kisses me harder.
If we weren’t standing in the middle of a pumpkin patch right now, clothes would already be flying off.
A surprised “Oh!” sounds behind us.
We spring apart.
The world rushes back, the blue sky, the golden corn, the distant sound of bluegrass music. I’m panting. My lips feel bruised. My hair is a disaster.
I turn, cheeks flaming, to find Rebecca and Lila standing at the entrance to our dead end.
Rebecca looks amused. Lila’s bliss goes beyond. She’s grinning like she could survive for a week on nothing but the satisfaction radiating off her face.
“Sorry,” she says, not sounding sorry at all. “We thought you guys got lost, but now we can see you’ve been busy with other activities.”
Liam takes a step back from me, but he doesn’t let go. His arm stays around my waist, keeping me tucked against his side. He glares at Lila.
The more he scowls, the more she smiles.