Chapter Fourteen #2
This is not real, is it? People can’t smell you from across the room, can they? If they can, your scent can’t lull them to sleep. Not my scent, the little college girl. And not him being put to sleep because of it, the asshole criminal cowboy.
Even so, words leave my mouth before I can pull them back. “Is that why… you drifted off just now? Because of m-my scent.”
A pulse beats in his cheek. “Yeah.”
This is insane. This is… I don’t even want to think about what this is. So I pivot and bring up something else important. “Do you think…”
His stomach hollows out with his next breath, alerting me that maybe we should be doing something about his injury and soon. “Do I think what?”
“That”—I swallow, my throat tight—“maybe you have, uh, PTSD?”
His body stiffens over me and his eyes flash. “What?”
“I-I mean, you spent eight years in prison so—”
“Why don’t you save your psychobabble for all those women you’re gonna help,” he says, cutting me off. “And focus more on what I’m gonna do to you.”
My breath snags in my chest. “I’m… I’m sorry?”
Instead of answering me, he lets his eyes wander.
He lets them go from the top of my head to the bottom of my chin, taking detours on the way to stop at the crests of my cheeks, the tip of my nose, the curve of my lips. Everywhere he pauses, I feel that spot tingling. I feel it getting heated.
He moves on to my throat, then my chest, slowly setting me on fire as he goes along.
His blood on my chest has dried now, making my skin itchy and restless.
But no more restless than when I realize how we’re arranged.
I knew that he was on top of me, of course, but I was too scared to notice details before.
Not anymore, though.
I notice how my chest grazes against his every time we take a breath and how I feel the ridges of his abs on my own belly.
How I can feel the ladder of his sculpted muscles pressing into my soft, pliant flesh.
If I stopped to focus, I’m sure I’d be able to count how many rungs that tight ladder in his abs has.
Probably eight.
But right now, my focus is taken up by how he’s settled into the juncture between my thighs. My body is wrapped around him, my calves all tangled up with his and my thighs hugging the outside of his meaty thighs.
This is too intimate.
More intimate than riding on the horse together. And instead of being utterly terrified, I feel what I felt back then. This quickening in my belly. This restless current in my veins. This urge to move. I try to push him away then, my fingers still all sticky, streaked with his blood. “Get off me.”
He doesn’t.
In fact, he goes ahead and stares at my heaving chest a little bit more before his eyes make their way up, all lazily, almost defiantly. Then, when they reach my eyes, he replies, “No.”
My heart beats like I’m a scared little bird, scared but excited. “You know I had to do that. You know I had to make a run for it. I can’t…”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t let you use me.”
His eyes look molten as he says, “I know.” Then, “You probably wouldn’t be you without all the sass.”
Something squeezes in my chest at his tone, and I have trouble breathing for a second. He sounds exactly like Bo in this moment. Like my Bo. Like those two people could be the same.
“I was right though,” he keeps going.
“R-right about what?”
His lips pull up slightly. It’s too little to call a smile but still too blatantly there to ignore it. Then, “Your cheeks flush when you talk back. You go all red.”
“Don’t,” I blurt out, swallowing. “Don’t talk about the letters.”
Especially not now. Not when this moment feels so precarious. When it feels like I know him after all.
“Yeah? Well, I’m the injured one now,” he says hoarsely. “Think that gets me a few concessions.”
I swallow again. “Just let me go, please.”
“Can’t.”
I push at him again. “You can. You—”
“Maybe I’ll keep you.”
My heart thuds. “W-what?”
“Forever.”
“No. That’s… You said you’d let me go after your revenge. You—”
“Maybe I changed my mind. Maybe you’re growin’ on me. You did sign on the dotted line, didn’t you?” Before I can say anything else, he murmurs, “Till death do us part.”
“Absolutely not. You—”
“You know what I did before I got put away?” He asks the question on a rasp, his eyes going back on their journey down my body.
I’m so thrown by his off-topic question and his perusal that all I can do is whisper, “W-what?”
“I broke horses,” he replies, his eyes on the base of my throat, studying my fluttering pulse.
“Horses?”
He licks his lips, staring at the spot. “Stallions, colts mostly. A filly or two sometimes.”
I jerk at a peek of his tongue. “Okay. But—”
“Been workin’ on the ranch since I was fifteen,” he says, cutting me off, his eyes moving from my throat and going back up to my trembling lips.
“I would’ve started sooner but we had Ax.
Someone had to take care of him. So I started late but I saved up everything I could.
Just so one day I could buy my own land, probably away from Rawhide.
So I could start my own business, breakin’ horses for money. ”
I swallow thickly and before I can think about it, my hands move, my arms wind around his neck, and my fingers, bloody and all, fist his hair.
I don’t know why I do that. It’s the opposite of what I should be doing, but I can’t help it.
I can’t help but wrap my arms around him because he just told me his dream.
It was his dream, wasn’t it, his future that got interrupted.
God, I wish I knew why.
I wish I knew why he did what he did. Why he thinks love is an animal that kills you. I haven’t forgotten about it, the words he said to me at dinner. I wonder if love has anything to do with his thirst for revenge.
He finally looks up, breaking whatever moment we were sharing, and brings us back to the present. With him on top of me, keeping me trapped, refusing to let me go. And I resume my struggles, twisting under him, trying to get away.
“But that’s not here or there. The point is, even though I haven’t been a cowboy in a very long time,” he says, his body just as dense and heavy over me, “any cowboy worth a damn knows that there ain’t no tamin’ a wild little filly with a lasso.
You wanna get her in hand, you gotta let her ride and get it out of her system. ”
My breaths scatter. “What does… what does that mean?”
His eyes glitter. “You don’t want me to drug you, do you?”
My arms around his neck flex. “What? No. No, please. You—”
“And like I said, ropin’ you like a wild little filly hasn’t worked either.”
I go to take my arms away from his neck and put some distance between us, but he sinks into me more. Making me realize he was still keeping a part of himself away from me. But not anymore.
I can feel it.
That part, the one I wanted to feel earlier in the day, back when we were riding.
And holy shit, I was right. It’s hard. Harder than those ridges of his abs.
And it’s big. Although I don’t think I imagined it to be this big.
Or thick. Or that it’d be throbbing. There’s a distinct pulse that I feel on my tummy, and something inside of me, some primitive feminine part, makes me arch up into it.
“So if I wanna keep you, I’m gonna let you ride,” he drawls.
“Ride?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“My mouth.”
“I… What?”
He licks his lips then, as if highlighting them, making them all shiny so I can’t look anywhere else but at his mouth. And he’s successful, because for the life of me, that’s all I see.
“You want that, don’t you?” he goes.
Still staring at his mouth, I shake my head. “No.”
His shiny, dusky-pink mouth tips up. “Well, you’re right. My bad.”
My gaze skitters up. “I’m right?”
“Yeah,” he says, staring into my eyes. “You are. You don’t want to ride my mouth. You want somethin’ else.”
“What?” I ask, staring back, barely aware of what I’m saying.
“Judging by how you’re attempting to give me another desperate and horny lap dance, I’m gonna say you wanna ride the heat I’m packin’ in my pants.”
And I stop. Because this is when I realize I’ve been moving against him.
All this time, I’ve been rocking against that hard thing stabbing my tummy.
My feet are hooked around his thighs and I’m almost off the ground, hanging onto him like a desperate, horny girl, but I’m not.
I’m absolutely, one hundred percent not horny or desperate.
This is not me at all. This has never been me.
I shake my head again. “No, I—”
He cuts me off with, “And you’re doin’ a good job too.” His voice is thick and heavy, just like this thing on my belly that I can’t even think of the proper name for. “Way better than what you did this mornin’. Guess it pays to be desperate, huh? You keep that up and you’re lookin’ at a huge tip.”
“Tip?”
“Yeah,” he keeps rasping, and I think he’s doing it on purpose because his voice is slowly driving me crazy. “And by that I meant cash. Not the other kind.”
“What’s the other kind?”
His lips twitch and something wicked passes through his features. “The tip of my big, hard cock.” I flinch, but before I can do anything, he goes on, “Because the thing is you can’t have it.”
His words give me a pause. “Why not?”
“Because you’re a Turner, remember?” he says, his eyes dark and flashing. “And I don’t stick my dick in a Turner.”
Right, of course. He told me that this morning.
And for some reason, I have to bite my lip really, really hard so I don’t spill out the truth.
Especially when after declaring that rule, he rocks his dick—oh God, just the thought of it makes me blush—into me.
And he does it in a way that, despite everything, I can’t help but rock back.
Since this time I’m doing it more consciously, I feel something else.
I feel another throb and not just the one on my belly due to his thick length.
I feel a pulse between my legs.
I’m wet.