Chapter 17 HUDSON
HUDSON
Matty picked me up like I was paper.
Me, a man who weighed more than him. A man who wrestled cattle, fixed busted fences, and spent ten-hour days in the sun covered in dirt and sweat and regret. A man who never got to be the soft one. Never got to be held like something precious.
And he had me gripped by the back of my thighs like he owned me, like carrying me was nothing. God, he did it so easily. Just the way he had four years ago when I got kicked in the chest by a horse.
My back hit the wall, and he swallowed the gasp I let out with a kiss that seared every part of me. He slid his hands up my sides, dragging his thumbs just under the hem of my shirt, grounding me to the here and now.
His mouth claimed mine like he’d been starving for it. Like he was furious and in love and desperate and somehow still afraid it would be the last time.
I grunted and clutched his shoulders harder.
The wall behind me dug into my spine, the pressure of his body pinning me.
My cock twitched. His tongue swept into my mouth, coaxing, demanding, learning me all over again.
He tasted like need and memory, the ghost of a shared summer and every dream I’d tried to bury but failed.
I tangled my fingers in his hair, tugged just to ground myself. “Matt, so good.”
He moaned low, deep in his chest, and something about the sound undid me. His lips softened for a second, like he was asking me if I was still with him—still here—before he deepened it again, and fuck, I was lost.
I tightened my legs around him instinctively, and he moved with me, bringing me over to the couch, swiping off the box that had imprisoned our future, finally free for us to be together.
Matty released me only long enough to pull my shirt over my head. He fastened his lips to my neck, nipping, biting, while he reached for the drawstrings at the front of my sweats.
I grabbed his hand. “We have to go to the bedroom. Ivy…”
She didn’t usually wake up at night, and she hadn’t napped today, which meant she was good until morning, but I didn’t want to risk it.
“Fuck. Sorry. I forgot.”
“No, no, it’s okay.” I ran my hands up his muscled arms. “It’s an easy fix.”
He hadn’t had four years to get used to having a child around and all the changes I’d had to make. Matty reached under me and lifted me with a grunt as he climbed to his feet. I wrapped my legs around his waist and clung to his muscular shoulders.
“I can walk, you know.” I nibbled on his jaw.
“My choice, Hudson. Besides, you love being carried around like a princess. Admit it.” He smirked, and for a second, I recognized the nineteen-year-old boy still living inside him. Confident. Cocky. Charming.
“Go on, then. Don’t complain when you develop a hernia or slip a disk.”
“It’d be worth it to carry you like this again.”
“Matt, you’re still so sweet.”
“No longer a cocky bastard?”
I laughed. “No, you’re definitely that too. You’re many things, Matthias.”
He groaned. “Just for that, I’m going to make you suffer.”
Like I’d protest suffering for him.
He carried me through the hallway, past Ivy’s bedroom, and to mine. He lowered me to the foot of the bed, my body rubbing his all the way down. I was already so fucking hard for what was about to come.
One of his hands cupped the side of my neck. The other rested over my heart like he was checking that it still beat for him.
It did. Loud and unrelenting.
“Hud.”
I turned my face into his hand and kissed his palm. “Hmm?”
“You’re mine,” he said softly, matter-of-factly. “Always have been. And tonight, I’m going to fuck you like I own all of you.”
Oh God. I needed that. “Yes. Do it.”
He dug his fingers into the waistband of my sweats and tugged me toward him, lowered his head and brushed his lips against mine. “How soon can you get tested?”
I flinched, instinctively took a step back, but he pulled me against him. “Relax, it’s not an insult. I don’t like using a condom with you. I prefer the way you feel hot and tight around me bareback. Plus, you know I love eating your ass after I’ve come inside you. So yeah, when can you?”
“Umm, I dunno. Maybe after work tomorrow, but I’d hate to have to take Ivy with me to the clinic, which isn’t ideal.”
“I got you. You don’t have to worry about Ivy. Ever again.” He pressed a gentle kiss against my collarbone, sniffing me. “You’re mine.” Another sweet kiss. “So that naturally means she’s mine to take care of too.”
“Matt, you don’t—”
His lips closed over mine in a sweet kiss. “You say one word, and I won’t let you come tonight.”
My throat clogged up, and not because I wanted to come with him pounding inside me. Also, because he cared about Ivy, and she deserved that. She deserved to be loved and cared for, not abandoned.
I reached for his jeans and we undressed quickly, breath by breath, touch by touch, peeling away the fabric and the years with equal urgency.
When we were bare, I couldn’t stop looking at him.
He was all golden skin kissed by hours under the grueling sun, all ropey muscles and eyes burning like a bonfire at the lake in summertime.
And the way he looked at me. God, the way this man looked at me like I was enough. Like I wasn’t a mistake. Like I hadn’t fucked it all up.
I stepped forward to close the last inch between us and pressed a kiss to the side of his neck.
His pulse leaped beneath my lips. I dragged my mouth across his collarbone, down his chest, tasting salt and skin and everything I’d missed.
His fingers slid into my hair, and I dropped to my knees in front of him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Oh man, did I love the thickness of his cock. Absolutely perfect. He barely fit into my mouth as I swallowed around him, my lips stretched wide.
“Hud.” He tightened his fingers into my hair, tugging at my head. “You’re thirty seconds away from me shoving my cock up your ass.”
I licked a stripe up the length of his cock and met his gaze with a chuckle. “Bring it on.”
Thirty seconds were hardly enough to give a decent blow job, but damn if I didn’t put my jaw, tongue, and throat to work.
I hollowed my cheeks and took him deep, letting the weight of him press against the back of my throat, letting him feel how badly I wanted to be here, how much I needed to be the one on my knees for him.
When I thought I couldn’t take any more, Matty pushed my head forward and went up on the tip of his toes, pressing my face to his pubis. Gagging around him, I held on to his thighs, tears stinging my eyes, while he fucked the back of my throat.
Saliva and my precum stained the floor beneath me. I tapped his leg twice, using our old system, and he immediately pulled back while I dragged painful breaths into my lungs, coughing.
“That filthy mouth of yours is one of the reasons no one else measures up.” Matty prodded me to my feet and backed me up against the bed. I sat down hard at the edge. He stepped between my thighs and spread my legs. “Come on, show me that pretty pink hole, Hud.”
I scooched up the bed a little, grabbed a pillow, and stuffed it under my hips to create an incline to improve his view. I spat in my hand and, watching him, rubbed the saliva over my hole, and slipped the pad of my middle finger in with a hiss.
Matty groaned, holding his cock, and smacked my hole hard with it. “And that’s reason number two.”
He took hold of my cock, stroking it as he rubbed the head of his dick over my hole.
The tip caught against my rim so many times, and I held my breath, bracing for him to slide inside.
You’d think after four years without each other, he would be in haste to get inside me.
Instead, his dark chuckle filled the room at my frustrated grunt.
“What happened to fucking me in half a minute?” I grabbed his cock and pressed the tip against my hole, but he only continued to tease my entrance.
“I think I prefer this.” He leaned in with a smile and pressed a kiss to my mouth. “Forgot how much I loved to see you whining, begging me to put it in. You want to beg, don’t you, beautiful?”
The breath left my lungs. Beautiful. When was the last time I’d heard that?
“You still think I’m beautiful?” It should bother me how desperate I sounded, but this was Matty. My Matt. Not even Ivy’s. Mine. “Even with the scar?”
He placed a kiss on my cheek, right where my scar burned into my skin, although the accident that had caused it was years ago.
An unfortunate run-in with barbed wire when I was still in grief over what I’d lost with Matty and had been working on a fence line drunk.
Gray had been livid that his foreman had allowed me to be there in that state.
“You’re more beautiful than ever.”
I pulled his head down and kissed him over and over. If he wouldn’t enter me, then his mouth was the next best thing.
He slipped out of my hold too quickly, kissing my neck, rubbing his hands over my chest. Not just to touch me but to appreciate my form. He squeezed my muscles, let his fingers dip in the ridges of my abs, in the hollow of my belly button, then trailed his lips over my cock.
“Hudson, you beautiful, gorgeous man.” I clamped my eyes shut and swallowed around the lump in my throat. “With such a nice cock. You gonna miss putting this into anyone?”
“No,” I said quickly. If only he knew the truth. “But I miss you putting yours inside me.”
Matty chuckled, letting his fingers wander down my taint. “Did you prep for me?”
“Yeah, earlier when I was in the shower while you watched cartoons with Ivy.”
“You were hoping to get lucky, then?”
“Matt,” I said, already breathless, already unraveling under his touch, “you were watching Cocomelon with my kid and letting her paint your nails to match mine. I had high hopes that one of us would get lucky, and I didn’t care which of us, because I’d take you any way I can get you.”