Chapter 11 Rose #2
He kissed me. Harder this time, one hand at the base of my skull, the other sliding around my waist and pulling me flush against him.
I could feel him through his jeans, hard already, and the knowledge that I did that to him, that just kissing me in a barn in the middle of the afternoon had him like this, sent a hot wave of want straight through my center.
We were still on our knees. The position was ridiculous. I didn’t care.
I shoved his flannel off his shoulders and yanked his T-shirt up.
He broke the kiss long enough to pull it over his head, and the sight of him, his bare chest, afternoon light cutting across his skin, breathing hard and looking at me like I was the only thing in the world, made my brain go quiet in a way nothing else ever had.
“Stand up,” I said.
He stood. I stood. I walked him backward until his shoulders hit the support beam between the stalls, and the thud of his body against the wood made Starlight snort from behind the partition.
“Sorry, girl,” I said, not looking away from Graham. “Busy.”
Graham’s laugh was low and wrecked, and it died the second I dropped to my knees.
His breath caught. I looked up at him through my lashes while my fingers worked his belt. His hand found the side of my face, not guiding, not pushing, just touching, his thumb brushing my cheekbone like he was memorizing me from this angle.
“Christ, Rose.”
I freed him and wrapped my hand around his length. He was thick and hot against my palm and the sound he made when I stroked him, low and ragged and involuntary, was the most satisfying thing.
I took him in my mouth.
“Fuck—” His head dropped back against the beam.
His hand slid into my hair, fingers tangling, not pulling, just holding on.
I worked him slow, deliberate, tongue flat along the underside, hollowing my cheeks when I pulled back.
His hips twitched, fighting the urge to thrust, and I rewarded the restraint by taking him deeper.
“Rose. Rose, I’m going to—you need to stop or I’m going to—”
I didn’t stop. I went deeper, hands gripping his hips, feeling the muscles in his thighs tense under my fingers. I wanted him out of control. I wanted the man who was always steady, always careful, always giving me space, to lose it completely. In my barn. In my space. Because I said so.
His hand tightened in my hair. “Rose, I mean it, I want to be inside you, please—”
The please did it.
I pulled back. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Looked up at him and nearly laughed at the expression on his face: his pupils blown, chest heaving, looking at me like I’d just rewired his entire understanding of the world.
“Condom?” I asked.
“Back pocket.” His voice was destroyed.
I reached around and pulled his wallet from his jeans, found the condom, and tore the wrapper with my teeth while he watched me like a man watching a religious experience.
He took it from my fingers, rolled it on, then grabbed me by the hips and spun us so my back was against the beam. The wood was rough through my shirt. I didn’t care.
“Jeans,” he said against my mouth.
I unbuttoned them myself, shoved them down my hips. He hooked his fingers into my underwear and pulled them down in one motion, and then his hand was between my legs and I gasped against his neck.
“You’re soaked,” he breathed.
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m fucking grateful.” Two fingers slid inside me and my vision whited out. He worked me in slow circles, thumb finding my clit with a precision that made my knees buckle.
“I can’t—my legs—”
“I’ve got you.” He lifted me. Just like that. Hands under my thighs, my back against the beam, my legs wrapping around his waist. The position pressed us together and I could feel him right there, hot and hard against where I was slick and open and desperate for him.
“Now,” I said. “Graham, now.”
He pushed inside me in one long stroke and I bit down on his shoulder to keep from screaming.
He groaned against my throat. “Fuck, Rose—”
“Move.”
He moved. Deep, steady thrusts that pinned me against the beam with every stroke.
The wood scraped my back through my shirt and I didn’t care, couldn’t care, because every thrust hit something inside me that turned thought into static.
I gripped his shoulders with both hands, nails digging in, and matched his rhythm by rolling my hips down to meet him.
“Harder.”
He gave me harder. Shifted his grip under my thighs, changed the angle, and drove into me with a force that made the beam shudder. Starlight stamped on the other side of the wall. Cassie blew an annoyed breath from two stalls down.
“Your horses hate me,” Graham managed between thrusts.
“They’ll get over it.” I pulled his mouth to mine and kissed him messy and desperate, letting him taste himself, and the intimacy of that, the rawness of it, the zero-distance-left-between-us reality of fucking a man in my barn in daylight with my jeans around one ankle and hay dust in my hair, cracked something open in my chest.
Not grief. Not fear. Something warmer. Something I hadn’t let myself feel in so long I’d forgotten its name.
“Look at me,” Graham said.
I opened my eyes. His face was inches away. Flushed, intense, his jaw tight with the effort of holding back.
“I want to watch you come,” he said. “Right here. In your barn. With nothing locked and nothing hidden.”
The words hit me like a match to dry grass. My whole body tightened around him and he felt it, I could see it in his face, in the way his control slipped and his thrusts went rough and uneven.
“Touch me,” I breathed.
He shifted my weight to one arm, strong enough to hold me up, which was going on the list of things I was never going to stop thinking about ,and got his free hand between us. His thumb found my clit and pressed, circled, and the orgasm built so fast I couldn’t brace for it.
“Graham—I’m—”
“I know. Let me feel it.”
I came with his name in my mouth and his body buried inside me, my back arched off the beam, my nails leaving marks on his shoulders that he’d feel for days.
It rolled through me in waves, legs shaking, breath gone, the sound I made somewhere between a moan and a sob, and I didn’t muffle it.
I let the barn have it. Let the horses hear it.
Let whoever might be passing outside hear it, because I was done being quiet about wanting this man.
Graham followed me over seconds later. His forehead dropped to my shoulder and he groaned my name against my collarbone, hips stuttering, fingers digging into my thighs, and I held him through it with both arms around his neck, feeling every pulse.
We stayed like that. Pressed together, breathing hard, my back against a rough wooden beam in a barn that smelled like hay and horses and sex, with the afternoon sun cutting through the dust and neither of us saying a word.
His lips brushed my shoulder. Then my neck. Then the soft spot behind my ear.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he murmured.
“You too.” I ran my fingers through his damp hair. “But what a way to go.”
He laughed against my skin, and the vibration of it went through me, warm and reckless, and I held on tighter because my legs were useless and my brain was offline and the only thing keeping me upright was this man.
He lowered me slowly. My legs found the ground but didn’t commit to holding me up.
I leaned against the beam and watched him deal with the condom, wrapping it in a bandanna from his back pocket, because of course he had a bandanna, he was that kind of man, and then he picked up my underwear from the barn floor and handed them to me with an expression that was equal parts reverence and absolute smugness.
“Don’t,” I warned, snatching them from his hand.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face is saying plenty.”
He grinned. I pulled up my jeans and shook hay out of my hair and tried to remember what I looked like before I’d been fucked senseless against a load-bearing beam in my own barn.
Cassie watched me from her stall with an expression I could only describe as I saw everything and I’m judging you.
“Not a word,” I told her.
Graham tugged his shirt back on, still smiling. I straightened my clothes, checked for hay in places hay should not be, and finger-combed my hair into something that didn’t scream I just had sex ten feet from a horse.
“For the record,” I said, pulling my shirt straight, “that never happened.”
Graham leaned against the beam we’d just defiled and crossed his arms. “Absolutely not. Complete fiction.”
“Good.”
“Though if it had happened,” he said, his voice dropping to that low, rough register that had started this whole problem, “it would’ve been the best thing that ever happened in this barn.”
I pointed at him. “Out.”
“Leaving.”
“Out now.”
He pushed off the beam, caught my hand as he passed, and pressed a kiss to my palm. Quick. Warm. The kind of gesture that shouldn’t have leveled me after what we’d just done, but did.
Then he walked out into the afternoon sun, and I stood alone in my barn with shaking legs and hay in my hair and the absolute certainty that I was in over my head.
I pressed my back against the beam. Still warm where his body had been.
“Well,” I said to Cassie. “That happened.”
She turned her back to me and stuck her face in her hay net.
Fair.
The call came at eleven.
I was in the office reviewing the booking confirmation for the Rousseau group when my phone buzzed.
Sandra Locke, my accountant.
“Rose, I need you to look at something.” No pleasantries. Sandra didn’t do pleasantries, which I liked. “I’ve been reconciling your quarterly statements and there are discrepancies I can’t explain.”
“What kind of discrepancies?”
“Payments that don’t match your invoices. Three vendor charges in the last two months that are significantly higher than the quotes on file. And a deposit from your Rousseau booking that should have cleared ten days ago. It’s gone. Like it never happened.”