CHAPTER 21 #3
Then he was with her again, settling between her thighs, his eyes on hers.
"Tell me if I hurt you."
"You won't."
"Tell me anyway."
"I will."
He entered her slowly, and Wren forgot the ledger, the rain, the numbers, every clean line she had drawn around the life she could manage.
Her hands locked on his shoulders. Colt went still halfway, jaw clenched, giving her time.
She moved beneath him, taking him deeper, and his control frayed with a sound that went straight through her.
Desperate sweetness belonged to first permission.
This was heavier than that. Truer. Grief stood somewhere outside the locked door, not banished, not mocked, simply not allowed to take the only chair in the room.
Trust moved between them with every careful thrust, every time Colt checked her face and found her still there, every time Wren answered by pulling him closer instead of letting old fear make distance feel holy.
He said her name once, low and broken.
She wrapped her legs around him and held on.
The cot creaked beneath them. Rainwater dripped from the eaves.
The office heater clicked off, leaving the room cooler around the heat they made together.
Colt's pace deepened, and Wren met him, no longer hiding the sounds he drew from her.
Pleasure rose again, slower this time, braided with the ache in her chest until she could not tell where want ended and tenderness began.
"Wren," he said again, warning and plea.
"Yes," she whispered. "I am here."
He drove them both over with his face buried against her neck, his body shuddering hard above hers.
Wren held him through it, through the last unguarded sounds, through the weight of him carefully braced so he would not crush her, through the long moment afterward when neither of them seemed willing to move and let the world find them again.
At last he shifted to his side, taking her with him in the narrow space. The blanket tangled around their legs. Wren's hair stuck to her cheek. Colt brushed it back with a gentleness that made her eyes sting more than the hunger had.
"I didn't mean for tonight to become this," he said.
"I know."
"That sounded wrong."
"No. It sounded like you are afraid of having wanted it."
He was quiet a long moment. "I am not afraid of wanting it. I am afraid of making it cost you."
Wren traced the line of his collarbone, grounding herself in warmth and bone and the steady beat beneath her palm. "Then do not make choices for me and call it protection."
His eyes met hers. "Fair."
"I mean it."
"I know."
She looked toward the cabinet. "And do not make Harlow carry your fear for you."
Pain moved through his face, but he did not turn from it. "That is fair too."
They dressed slowly when the room cooled enough to make skin pebble.
Colt stepped outside to the washroom, and Wren took the minute alone to smooth the cot blanket and make sure the office looked like a place where two adults had chosen privacy, not wreckage.
She did not touch the cabinet. She did not reopen the binder.
Respect sometimes meant leaving a thing exactly where it had been placed.
When Colt came back, he had his phone in one hand and two mugs in the other. "Coffee from the house is still hot enough to threaten a person."
"That's not a selling point."
"It is what we have."
They crossed the wet yard to the ranch house porch because dawn had started loosening the dark over the pasture.
The boards were damp under Wren's socks, and the air smelled washed clean in the hard way floodwater left behind, as if the land had been scrubbed but not forgiven.
Far off, cattle bawled at the first pale line of Thursday.
Wren wrapped both hands around the mug and watched steam rise. Colt stood beside the porch post, close enough that their shoulders touched. No one watching from the road would know. That mattered less than she expected. What mattered was that he did not step away when the sky lightened.
"I need to tell you something," he said.
The words were quiet, but they changed the pressure in him. Wren felt it before she understood it. The same tension she had seen earlier when he looked at the loss numbers. The same glance toward closed drawers, hidden paper, decisions waiting under other decisions.
She turned her head. "Then tell me."
Colt looked down at his phone. His thumb moved over the dark screen but did not wake it. "There is an envelope in my office. From Bennet. It has to do with my father and some papers I should have opened before now."
Wren went still, not from fear exactly. From the sense of a door unlatching somewhere she had not known there was a room.
"What kind of papers?" she asked.
He drew in a breath. "Mineral rights. A lease deadline. Money I have been pretending is not there because pretending let me keep thinking I knew who I was."
Colt looked at her then, barefaced and tired and closer to confession than he had been all night. "Wren, it could change -"
His phone lit in his palm with Bennet Orvell's name.