Chapter 9 #2
My hands are shaking against my thighs, and my pulse is a jackhammer in my throat.
"I see them."
Colt hits the county road and cranks the wheel hard right.
The tires scream on asphalt and the truck fishtails, the back end swinging wide enough that I grab the dash with both hands to keep from slamming into the door.
He corrects without braking, feeds the skid into acceleration, and the speedometer climbs past seventy before I take my next breath.
He drives the way he rides: all instinct and controlled recklessness. The narrow road unspools in front of us, and the dotted center line strobes under the headlights he's finally turned on. Eighty. Ninety. The truck shudders over a rough patch, and my teeth click together.
Behind us, the pursuing headlights swing onto the county road.
They're closing. The gap between their headlights and our tailgate is shrinking, and I can hear the whine of their engine even over ours.
Colt's eyes flick to the rearview, then back to the road, then to the rearview again.
His jaw is set, his hands steady on the wheel, and he looks like a man who's been chased before and knows how it ends.
"Hold on," he says, and cuts the wheel left onto a side road with no warning.
The turn throws me against the passenger door. Gravel sprays under the tires, and the truck bounces through a washout that lifts me off the seat. The road narrows to a single lane, fence posts whipping past the windows close enough to touch, and Colt threads the gap without slowing down.
The headlights behind us overshoot the turn. I watch them streak past on the county road, brake lights flaring red, and then they reverse and swing onto the gravel behind us.
"They're still there," I say.
Colt doesn't answer. He kills the headlights again, and the world drops to starlight and the pale ribbon of gravel in front of us.
He's navigating by instinct now, reading the road by the way it feels under the tires, and I press my back into the seat and trust him because the alternative is panic, and panic won't help either of us.
A T-intersection appears out of the darkness. He cranks right, accelerates for half a mile, then kills the engine entirely and pulls off behind a stand of juniper thick enough to swallow the truck.
We sit in the dark. The engine ticks as it cools. My pulse is so loud in my ears I'm sure it's audible outside the cab.
Headlights appear on the road we just left. They sweep past the intersection without slowing, and the sound of the engine fades into the distance until there's nothing left but crickets and my own ragged breathing.
Colt waits a full two minutes before he starts the truck again. When he pulls back onto the road, he keeps the headlights off for another mile before finally clicking them on and letting out a breath that sounds like it's been locked in his lungs since the office window.
His right hand leaves the steering wheel and finds mine in the dark space between the seats. His fingers lace through mine and hold on, and the grip is firm and steady and warm.
The silence after the chase is enormous. My body is vibrating with leftover adrenaline, a full-system flood that hasn't found its exit.
My skin feels electric. Every nerve ending is awake and screaming for something to do with the energy that the flight response dumped into my bloodstream.
Colt drives without speaking. The hand holding mine doesn't let go. His thumb traces a slow line across my knuckles, a gesture so quiet and deliberate that it stands out against everything else he's done since we met.
The dominance, the intensity, the raw possessive energy he brings to every interaction, all of that is absent from the gentle arc his thumb draws across my skin.
This is different. This is tender, and the tenderness is more disarming than anything else.
He pulls off the road at a property marked by a metal gate and a cattle guard. It's a friend's place, he says, a barrel racer he came up with on the amateur circuit who's out of state for the summer.
The house is dark and the barn is locked, but there's a bunkhouse in the back with a door that opens when Colt turns the handle.
Inside, there is a single room with a wood stove, a bed with a striped blanket, and a window that looks out onto nothing.
The space shrinks to four walls and the two of us and the adrenaline still coursing through my blood.
I turn from the window, and Colt is there. He's close. The distance between us has been closing all night, and the chase burned away whatever gap was left.
"They know my name," I say. "They're going to come for me."
"They're going to try."
"Colt."
"Nobody touches you." The words are simple and absolute, delivered with the same flat certainty he brings to the chute.
They aren't a promise. They are a statement of how the world is going to work.
"I don't care what they've done before. I don't care what they think they can do. Nobody touches you."
The possessiveness in his voice should frighten me. It should set off every alarm I've trained into my professional instincts, every red flag that says this kind of intensity isn't safe.
Instead it reaches into the place where the fear lives and wraps around it and holds it still.
I close the distance between us. My hands find his chest, the hard wall of muscle under his shirt, and he goes still under my touch the way a predator goes still before it strikes.
"I need this," I say. "I need to not think about that ledger."
"I can make sure you don't."
His mouth finds mine, and the kiss is different from last time.
Last time was desperate and grief-driven, two people drowning and reaching for the nearest body.
This one starts with the same urgency, with the adrenaline channeling itself into heat, but underneath the urgency is something more deliberate and more territorial.
He kisses me like he's staking a claim, his tongue sweeping against mine, his teeth catching my lower lip hard enough that I taste copper.
He backs me toward the bed. His hands span my waist, his thumbs pressing into the hollow above my hip bones, and the pressure sends a current straight down my spine. He lifts me, sets me on the edge of the mattress, and steps between my legs.
"Tell me to stop," he says.
"When have I ever told you to stop?"
"I'm giving you the option."
"And I'm declining it."
He pulls my shirt over my head and his mouth drops to my collarbone, my throat, the spot behind my ear that makes my breath stutter.
His hands are rough, the calluses from years of bull rope dragging against my skin like sandpaper, and the friction of it sends sparks across every nerve ending he touches.
He works my jeans open and drags them down my legs along with my underwear, and I'm bare in front of him while he's still fully dressed.
The imbalance is deliberate. He wants me exposed while he decides what to do about it.
"Colt." His name comes out half demand, half plea.
"Patience." The word is a threat and a promise, wrapped in a West Texas drawl thick enough to choke on.
He presses me back onto the mattress with one hand flat on my sternum, holding me down.
Then he drops to his knees at the edge of the bed and puts his mouth on me.
The first stroke of his tongue rips a sound out of me that I don't recognize. He licks me in long, flat strokes that cover everything, then zeroes in on my clit with a precision that borders on cruel.
His hands grip the insides of my thighs, spreading me wider, holding me open for his mouth, and the combination of his rough palms on my skin and his tongue working me in tight, relentless circles makes my spine bow off the mattress.
"Oh God. Right there. Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. He slides two fingers inside me while his tongue keeps moving, curling them against the spot that makes my vision white out, and the orgasm builds with a speed that catches me off guard.
I fist the blanket with both hands, my hips grinding against his face, and when I come, it tears through me so hard my thighs clamp around his head and I lose the ability to form words.
He doesn't give me time to recover. He stands, strips his shirt over his head, and I watch the muscles in his torso flex in the low light.
His body is a map of the circuit: old bruises faded to yellow along his ribs, a rope burn across his riding hand, the thick cords of muscle across his shoulders and back that come from absorbing the impact of fifteen hundred pounds of fury night after night.
He unbuckles his belt, and the sound of leather sliding through denim makes my stomach clench.
He shoves his jeans down and comes back over me, all heat and hard muscle and the smell of dust and sweat still clinging to his skin from the chase. He pins my wrists above my head with one hand, his palm dwarfing both of mine.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him. His face is inches from mine, and the expression he's wearing has nothing soft in it.
This is the man who shields me with his body in parking lots, who puts himself between me and danger without thinking. This is what that protectiveness looks like when it turns into something else.
"You're mine," he says. "Say it."