"Clara!" Matt's voice roared over the rising gale of wind. "Get off that horse and get in here!"
The dark-haired girl turned in the direction of Matt's voice, and saw the hulking, massy black cloud of storm-front eclipsing the innocent blue of the sky, devouring it mercilessly. Shit... it was gonna boil up a squall after all, and here she'd been out riding, paying no mind to the weather at all. Clara dug her heels into her mare's sides, and the mare shot forward nearly unseating her. She was just as eager to get into a safe warm barn as Clara's stable-help had been for Clara to get back.
Just as she dismounted, the sky opened up and drenched her in a deluge of cold rain, picking the dust up off the ground with the force of the raindrops impacting the earth before they finally sullenly submitted to the rapidly-amassed muck and mire.
"Here, let me take her," Matt offered, throwing a blanket over Clara's chilly wet clothes and taking the horse.
"I can do that," she protested, but already her jaw was tight and trembling with the cold. Matt just shook his head and proceeded to untack and put away the horse.
"Women. I swear... Always got some silly damn notion and ain't got NO sense to come in outta the rain," he muttered exasperatedly.
"Men- always more ability than tact. That's why you're a stable-*hand* and not a stable-*owner*," Clara snarled through clenched teeth, her chin jutted stubbornly out as she leered with ferocity at him through a matted, damp tangle of black hair that had fallen into her face.
"Oh? And you're doin' such a great job- I see your fences fallin' in, your horses' hooves splittin'... no, you don't need no man's touch around here, you're just gonna decorate it with flowers and half-ass everything because you ain't got the back a man's got, right?" he shot back.
Clara sprang away from the wall, sliding out of the blanket and throwing it through the tack door onto Matt's cot. "You egotistical son of a bitch! You KNOW I pull my own weight around here and I held the damn place down just FINE before you showed up like a damn carpet-bagger on MY doorstep needing a meal and a BATH!" she fumed. "How DARE you insinuate..."
But Matt was done with the small-talk. As he'd watched her ride in, the thin material of her poorly-patched man's shirt clinging so sheerly to her breasts that he could see both dark areolae, her breeches clinging to her thighs so that he could see the definition of muscle all the way up to her cleft, had caused a warm pulling in his loins that he hadn't been able to avoid as he'd breathed in the scent of her wet body and horse-sweaty clothes when he'd blanketed her.
With one swift movement, he up-ended her over his shoulder like a sack of feed, and strode resolutely through the door, tossing her onto his cot, and then he went and barred the barn-door against the howling storm outside.
"WHAT do you think you're d-OW!" she protested, trying to twist away as he unlaced her boots and slid them off the slim stems of wet linen, hard muscle, delicate bone.
He reached for her dark hair and gently, yet firmly pulled her up to him, planting a kiss on her surprised, opened mouth. A stifled gasp turned into a low, throaty moan as she at first rebelled, then softened, her lips burning against his, her fingers lacing together behind his neck as she stood up on tiptoe to be held in his strong, labor-hardened arms. When finally they broke the kiss, she whispered, "How long have you wanted to do that?"
Matt nuzzled her neck, nibbling and tasting the cool ivory flesh that was slowly pinkening and warming beneath his imperious nips and tongue-flicks. "Since you shot at me the first damn day from your porch. I knew then," he drew back to look into her eyes, "I just knew you were fire," he grinned, before taking another kiss from her, his tongue rolling against her lips, which parted to receive it, and Clara's tongue slid along his and darted devilishly into his mouth to elicit a groan from him, her fingers roving his back and then ripping open and sliding away his shirt.