Chapter 19 #3
I set a pace that matches the one he used on me, calculated and thorough, designed to take him apart. My hand works the base while my mouth takes the rest, and I hollow my cheeks on each upstroke and press my tongue flat on the way down.
His hand finds the back of my head. He's not pushing, not guiding, just holding, his fingers spread through my hair and trembling with the effort of not taking over.
The discipline of that restraint, the visible fight between the man who controls everything and the one giving that control to me, is the most erotic thing I've ever experienced.
"Kenna." My name sounds different in his mouth right now, rough and fractured at the edges. "You need to stop or this is going to end before the plan."
I pull off slowly, letting my lower lip drag along the length of him, and the look on his face is worth every second of the wait. The composed, controlled bull rider is gone. The man looking down at me is stripped bare.
"Get up here." His voice is gravel.
He pulls me up and onto the bed, and then he's over me, and the playful energy between us catches fire. He enters me in one long stroke, and the stretch and fullness of him pulls a sound from somewhere deep. He stills inside me, forehead pressed against mine, both of us breathing hard.
"I love you," he says against my mouth, with the same directness he brings to everything that matters.
"I love you too." I roll my hips underneath him. "Now move."
He moves.
The rhythm starts slow and deep, his hips rolling against mine with a controlled intensity that I feel in every nerve. He braces one hand beside my head and uses the other to grip my thigh, pulling it higher, changing the angle so he hits the spot inside me that makes my vision blur.
"Look at me." His hand comes to my jaw, tilting my face to his. "I want to see you when you fall apart."
Every other time there was darkness to hide behind, urgency to excuse the vulnerability. Here, in the long West Texas light, with his eyes on mine and his body filling mine, there's nothing between us.
I take his face between my hands and hold him there, and the openness in his expression is the closest thing to surrender I've ever seen from Colt.
The pace builds. I lock my ankles behind his back and tilt my hips to meet each thrust, and the rhythm turns urgent, the headboard tapping against the stone wall.
His hand slides between us and finds the swollen center of me, his thumb working tight circles while he drives into me. The dual pressure rebuilds the heat that he drew out of me with his mouth.
"Right there," I tell him. "Don't stop."
"I'm not stopping. Not until you give me everything." His jaw is tight, the cords in his neck standing out, and I can feel the effort it's taking him to hold his pace while his body wants to let go.
The second orgasm hits different from the first, deeper, rolling through me in waves, clenching around him, pulling him in.
He groans against my throat and follows me over.
His hips stutter and lock, and I feel him pulse inside me, the heat of him filling me while his body shudders and his arms shake on either side of my head.
He drops his weight onto me, not all of it but enough. I wrap my arms around his back and hold him there while both of us come down, his face pressed into my neck, his breathing ragged against my skin.
"Was that the plan?" I ask eventually. My voice sounds like I've been yelling at a stadium.
"That exceeded the plan."
"Good. I'd hate to think you undersold it."
He lifts his head. His hair is wrecked, his eyes are still half-glazed, and the smile on his face is the unguarded one, the one I first saw in a borrowed kitchen when he held up a canister of coffee like a trophy and grinned before I could catch it.
I want to see that smile every day for the rest of my life.
He pulls out of me carefully, and the loss of him registers as a physical ache. He rolls onto his back, pulling me with him so that my head rests on his shoulder and his arm wraps around my waist, and we lie there catching our breath while the late afternoon light paints the stone walls gold.
The windows are open, and the mountain air moves through the room carrying the smell of juniper and warm grass. His arm is across my waist. My head is on his shoulder. The silence between us is the kind that means everything important has been said.
"Stay," he says.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I mean stay. Here. Not tonight. Not a visit." His fingers trace the ridge of my spine, slow and possessive. "Stay."
"You want me to move to a ranch in West Texas where the nearest town is a rumor."
"I want you to move to my ranch. With me."
I lift my head. He's looking at the ceiling, but his hand hasn't stopped moving on my back. The expression on his face is one I've never seen, something certain and calm and completely settled.
"I'm going to write a book," I say. "About the investigation. About Grant. About all of it. I can write that anywhere. Here. On the road with you. In some motel outside whatever dusty town the circuit drags us to next."
"So stay."
"So I'll stay." I press my lips to his skin, right where the scar tissue crosses his ribs. "Here and everywhere else."
His arm tightens around me. His lips find the top of my head. We lie there in the bed he built in the house he built on the land he chose, and the evening light pours through the windows and turns the stone walls gold.
For the first time since Grant died, the weight I've been carrying has changed shape. It's still there. It will always be there. But tonight it shares space with something warmer and steadier and harder to break.
I close my eyes and let the warmth of his body pull me toward sleep. The wind moves through the live oaks outside. The horses shift in the pasture. And the man beside me breathes slow and even, his arm heavy across my waist, his heartbeat steady under my ear, choosing to stay as surely as I am.