Owen pulled away and shot me a look of surprise.

“We should talk about this, Aurora…” His voice trailed off, and he paused to pick some stray pieces of straw out of my hair.

A pang of disappointment shot through me.

“All we do is talk,” I snapped at him. “I’m tired of talking. I want more!”

Gosh, since when did a girl have to beg for sex?! I’d hoped to conceal my frustration, but my voice was sharp, and a flash of hurt showed in Owen’s eyes. Silence hung between us. The only sound was the rustling of the hay we were lying in—and Chestnut, still crunching on her apple outside the stable doors. Finally, Owen broke the awkward silence.

“I thought we were on the same page about this, Aurora. We both wanted to wait until we got married. I mean, what would your pops think?”

“I don’t see how my dad is relevant to our sex life.”

“Come on, Aurora, he’s the local pastor. You’re literally the preacher’s daughter. We made a vow to wait until marriage.”

Owen held up his wrist as he spoke and nodded to the thin silver chain on it—a chastity bracelet. I had a matching one. We’d exchanged them on my sweet sixteen. But it had been five years, and I felt like we’d waited long enough.

“Those vows mean something, Aurora,” Owen went on. “If we break them, people will think—”

“Who will know?!” I cut him off. “We don’t have to tell anyone. We can keep it just between us,” I added, punctuating the sentence with a kiss.

But before I could sink into the kiss, Owen pulled away again.

“What’s gotten into you?”

He ran his hand through his hair as he spoke, mussing it slightly—and making him look even sexier than he had before. A fresh flash of desire tingled between my thighs.

“Owen, we were kids when we made those vows. I’m a woman now. I’m twenty-one. I can drink and vote and drive. I want to have sex. Is that so wrong? I just want to do what any twenty-one-year-old wants to do.”

“You’ve been twenty-one for a week, Aurora, and you’ve never mentioned this before. You can’t blame this on your birthday. People don’t change their minds about this stuff overnight.”

“Fine, maybe it wasn’t my birthday,” I shot back with exasperation, “Maybe that tornado scared me. I mean, that last one came really close to the farm. What if it had hit? What if I had died a virgin?!”

Owen pressed his lips together in a tight line. I knew that look. I’d seen him make it in school plenty of times when we were kids. He was trying not to laugh—which only pissed me off more.

“I’m serious, Owen! I don’t want to die a virgin!”

“That’s not happening,” Owen replied quickly, pulling me into his strong arms. For a second, I thought he was going to change his mind, but he went on. “You’re not dying anytime soon. Because I’ll always be here to protect you.”

My heart sank.

“Or you could make sure it doesn’t happen by just…taking my virginity. Now is perfect!”

I wriggled out of his arms as I spoke and stared at him defiantly. Owen gave a sigh before sitting up slowly. I could tell from the firm set of his jaw that he was feeling just as stubborn as I was.

“This is perfect to you?” Owen said, gesturing to the stable. “You want to lose your virginity, unmarried, in a stable that’s full of straw and dust and muck and—”

“You just mucked it out!” I retorted, my voice sharp. By now, even I could hear how crazy I sounded. I was begging my boyfriend to take my virginity in a stable, based on the argument that he’d mucked it out that morning. Why do we have to keep coming back to this unsexy topic of mucking the stable?! He was never going to go for it now.

Sure enough, Owen got to his feet with a heavy sigh.

“You need to cool it, Aurora,” he said quietly as he wiped bits of straw off his jeans. “I thought we had an agreement.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I don’t even know who this Aurora is,” he said, gesturing to me as I sat in the hay. “Whoever this girl is, I don’t like her.”

Ouch. What the heck?

I opened my mouth to fight back, but before I could get out a reply, Owen had turned on his booted heel and stormed off—leaving me sitting alone in a pile of hay.

At least it’s clean hay, I thought to myself bitterly.