Chapter 5 #2
"I've got the beginning of one. We build the financial case first, lock down the paper trail, then use it to leverage the witnesses.
Flint, my source who traveled with Grant, anyone else who's been too scared to come forward.
We give Torres at the FBI something she can actually prosecute, and we do it methodically, from the outside in, so Merrick doesn't see it coming until it's too late. "
"That could take weeks." His voice is low, and the West Texas in it has gone rough at the edges.
I'm acutely aware that we're standing in a motel room arguing about strategy while the distance between his mouth and mine could be measured in inches.
"Weeks of building a case that holds up, or one moment of satisfaction followed by nothing. Those are your options."
He stares at me. I stare back.
The argument is a live wire between us, and the charge running through it has nothing to do with Merrick or strategy.
"Fine," Colt says. The word comes out like he's chewing glass. "Your way. For now. The second the methodical approach stops working—"
"Then we reassess."
"Then I go through Merrick's front door, and you can either come with me or get out of the way."
He holds my gaze for a beat too long. The argument is over but the energy from it hasn't dissipated, and it's found somewhere new to settle.
The space between us. The too-small motel room. The fact that we're alone together for the first time without arena noise or bar crowds to dilute the proximity.
"You should let this go," he says, and the drawl thickens, pulling every vowel tight. "Go back to your freelance gig and write your feature piece and forget about Merrick and Thornton and Grant and all of it."
"We just agreed on a plan."
"I know what we agreed. I'm telling you to leave anyway."
He closes the distance between us, backing me against the door. His hand lands flat beside my head, blocking the exit.
"This is my fight. My guilt. I don't need a partner, and I sure as hell don't need you in this room."
He's not talking about the investigation anymore.
"I'm not leaving," I say.
"Then you need to understand what staying means."
"I understand exactly what it means."
"Do you?" His other hand comes up to the door frame on my opposite side, boxing me in, and I didn't see him move, the way a storm front builds without any single moment where you can say that's when it started.
"Because from where I'm standing, staying means you're choosing to be in a room with a man who's been thinking about what you taste like since the night you showed up behind the chutes, and that's information you should probably factor into your decision."
My breath catches. Not from fear.
From the direct, unapologetic honesty of it. No games. No pretense. Just a man telling me exactly what he wants and giving me the chance to leave before it happens.
"You don't know what you're getting into," he says.
"I know exactly what I'm getting into."
His eyes go flat in a way that's not angry. Focused. Predatory.
The same concentration I watched him bring to the back of an eighteen-hundred-pound bull.
"One question," he says. "Birth control?"
"IUD." My voice comes out steadier than it has any right to. "And I'm clean."
"Same." He holds my gaze. "This is a bad idea."
"The worst."
"You want to stop?"
"No."
He doesn't wait for more. His mouth comes down on mine hard enough to push my head back against the door, and I taste coffee and heat and the raw edge of a man who has stopped holding back.
His hand slides from the door frame into my hair, fisting at the base of my skull, tilting my head to the angle he wants, and the pull of it sends a bolt of heat straight down my spine.
I grab fistfuls of his shirt and drag him closer because if his mouth is on mine then I'm not thinking about Grant and he's not drowning in guilt and for thirty seconds neither of us is carrying a dead man's unfinished war.
He breaks the kiss long enough to pull my shirt over my head, then his.
The bare skin of his chest presses against mine, all hard muscle layered with scar tissue, raised ridges of old breaks and the smooth planes between them.
My hands map the damage before my brain catches up, tracing the long rope burn across his left shoulder, the knot of a badly healed rib beneath his pec.
He sucks in a breath when my thumb drags across his nipple, and the sound of Colt losing a sliver of composure does something dangerous to my self-control.
His hands span my ribcage, calloused and rough, and the scrape of them against the soft skin of my stomach pulls a shiver up through my whole body that I couldn't hide if I wanted to.
"You're shaking," he says against my mouth.
"So make it stop."
He unclasps my bra with one hand and lets it fall.
For a second he just looks at me, his gaze dragging down from my throat to my bare breasts with an intensity that makes my skin flush hot under the attention.
Then his mouth drops to my collarbone. His tongue traces the line of it, slow, tasting, before his lips close around my nipple and the wet heat of his mouth pulls a gasp out of me that echoes off the cheap motel walls.
He works me with his tongue, circling and sucking, his teeth catching just enough to blur the line between pleasure and sting, and when he switches to the other breast and gives it the same treatment, my hips roll forward against him on pure instinct.
His hand comes up to cover what his mouth left, rolling the wet peak between his fingers, and the dual sensation makes my knees buckle.
He catches me. One arm under my thighs, effortless, and my legs wrap around his waist. The door is behind us and then the mattress hits my back and he's over me, braced on one forearm, his other hand already working the button of my jeans.
He strips the denim down my legs with the same controlled efficiency he brings to everything, and stops. His hands are still on my hips and his gaze drops to the bare skin where underwear should be and isn't.
The corner of his mouth twitches. "Commando."
"Problem?"
"Opposite of a problem." His thumb drags across my hip bone, slow and proprietary. "Gonna think about this every time you're sitting in my truck from now on."
I reach for his belt and he catches my wrist. Pins it above my head against the pillow.
"Not yet," he says.
His free hand slides between my thighs, and his fingers part me, stroking through the slick heat he finds there.
The first touch against my clit is light enough to make me arch off the mattress trying to chase it, and the second is firm enough to pull a moan out of me that is loud enough to hear over the rattling AC unit.
"That," he says, low and rough. "Again."
He gives me what I need to make it happen, his fingers working me in slow, deliberate circles, reading my body the way he reads a bull, learning the patterns before he commits.
Two fingers push inside me, and his thumb keeps that maddening pressure on my clit, and my thighs clamp around his hand because the pleasure is building so fast my body is trying to hold onto it.
He watches my face the entire time. Studies what breaks my breathing, what makes my back arch, what makes my mouth fall open on sounds I have no control over.
When he curls his fingers and finds the spot that turns my vision white at the edges, he does it again immediately, and the orgasm rolls through me before I'm ready for it, a hot, clenching wave that bows my spine off the bed and leaves me gasping with his name caught somewhere between my teeth and my tongue.
He doesn't let me come down. He pulls his hand away and his mouth replaces it, his tongue flat and hot against my clit before I've stopped shaking from the first one.
My hand flies to his hair and grips hard enough to hurt, but if it hurts he doesn't seem to care because his tongue is relentless, licking into me like he's been thinking about this specific act since the night we met and intends to take his time with it.
He pins my hips to the mattress with one forearm when I try to squirm away from the intensity and uses his free hand to spread me open so his mouth can get deeper.
His tongue pushes inside me and then drags up, slow and thorough, and the groan he makes against my skin vibrates through every nerve ending south of my navel.
"Colt." His name comes out ragged. "I can't... it's too much."
He pulls back just far enough to speak against my inner thigh, his breath hot on the oversensitive skin. "You can."
He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and the next orgasm tears through me with enough force to lock every muscle in my body. I come with both hands fisted in his hair and my heels dug into his back, and the sounds I make are guttural and graceless and I do not care.
He works me through it, easing off only when my thighs stop trembling and my grip in his hair loosens. Then he kisses his way back up my body, and when his mouth finds mine I taste myself on his tongue and the intimacy of it is almost more overwhelming than the orgasm.