Chapter 34
LUKE
"Go," Mason says.
He's already turned away, Cal at his shoulder, the trailer gate up and latched. Colt is watching Briggs's taillights disappear down the south pasture road, hat low, arms crossed, holding the kind of stillness that means it's over and he knew it before anyone else did.
I look at Mags.
She's standing two feet from me with pine needles in her hair and her field pack on her shoulder, watching me watch her with an expression I can't read from this distance and intend to fix.
"Luke." Mason, without turning around. "I said go."
"I heard you."
"You've got a split knuckle. Go let your lady make it better."
Colt looks at my hand, then at Mags, then back at me. Half a smile. The other half something heavier than I can deal with tonight. "Six weeks," he says quietly.
"Colt."
"Just noting the duration."
"Colt."
"Go home." He grips my shoulder once, the grip my father used on days that counted. Press and release, nothing more. Then he turns back toward the pasture road.
I open the passenger door and she gets in without a word.
I close it, go around, and we sit for a half second in the dark cab.
The south pasture is opening out ahead of us, the aspens pale and still, the valley below dark and open under a sky full of stars, and nothing moving anywhere that I need to account for.
That last part is new.
I start the truck.
She says three miles down the road: "Your knuckles."
"I know."
"You should have let Mason throw the first one."
"Mason wasn't close enough."
"That is not the point."
"Mags."
"I watched you make a decision in about a third of a second."
"He came at me with a crowbar."
"I know. I watched that too." She turns her head. Even in the dark I can make out the streak of dirt on her jaw, the way she's looking at me like a data set she isn't done with. "Did it help?"
I think about the ground under my boots. Our ground. Cutter on his knees in the pine needles with the crowbar in my hand, and a whole summer of wire cuts and staged calves and a warning shot six feet from her boots arriving all at once in the dark.
"Yeah," I say. "It helped."
She faces forward and lets out a breath that's been in her chest a while. "Good."
That's it. I drive.
I take the turn toward the cabin.
The porch light is on because I left it that way before driving into town for the meeting, when nothing about tonight was guaranteed. It throws a yellow rectangle across the step and the mat and the two boots tucked under the porch roof where she left them the morning after the break-in.
I cut the engine and we sit. The cabin settles into the dark around us.
She sees them. I know the exact second it happens, the stillness, her hand halfway to the door handle, her eyes on those two boots and her shoulders doing something her mouth won't.
Three full seconds.
She pushes the door open and gets out. I follow. She brushes two fingers across the top of the near boot as she passes, not making anything of it, just touching it the way you touch something you needed to confirm was real, and goes inside.
I follow her in.
She turns at the bathroom door and looks at me.
"Shower," she says. "We need to wash this night off."
"My hand —"
"I know about your hand." She pushes the door open and looks back over her shoulder with the expression that's been doing catastrophic things to my nervous system since the storm cab in June. "I'll keep it dry."
The shower has one temperature, and we both know it and neither of us cares.
She keeps her word about my hand, which requires her to do everything else herself.
Her hands move over my shoulders, down my chest, working the soap in slow unhurried circles.
She’s watching my face with the determination of a woman who has been running experiments on me since June and already knows every result.
By the time she works her way down my stomach I have my good hand braced on the tile wall.
"Mags."
"Mm." She doesn't stop.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." Her hands move lower and I gasp, sharp, and she tips her face up at me, water running over her cheekbones, her hair dark and streaming, her hand wrapped around me, and she is grinning. Full-on grinning. "There he is."
I get my good hand into her hair.
"Come here," I say.
MAGS
He walks me backward toward the bedroom, his hand in my hair, his stubble rasping slow against the side of my neck, his mouth at my ear, and he says, low and unhurried:
"I'm going to lay you out and take my time. I'm going to put my mouth on every part of you that missed me." His lips drag along my jaw. "I'm going to make you come until you lose count, Red, and I'm not going to take a single thing for myself until you're begging me to."
My fingers curl into his bare chest.
"Then," he says, even lower, his breath warm against my throat, "I'm going to take you apart all over again just to hear every sound you've been keeping to yourself since August."
"Luke." It comes out unsteady.
"I've been patient." His hand tightens in my hair, tipping my head back. "I am done being patient."
By the time we reach the bed my legs are not entirely my own.
He lays me out and steps back and looks at me and says, low and even: "Touch yourself for me."
"Luke —"
"I've been thinking about watching you for weeks." His eyes move over me, slow. "Touch yourself. Let me see."
I hold his eyes and let my fingers find the slick heat between my thighs, dragging slow through the wet and up to my clit where I circle once, twice, then stroke the full length of myself and watch his jaw go tight.
"That's it." His voice drops to gravel. "Don't you dare stop."
My other hand slides up my stomach to my breast, teasing my nipple, squeezing, and the sound he makes is low and profane and not planned by either of us.
"You're so fucking beautiful." He wraps his hand around himself and strokes, his eyes moving over every inch of me. "Look at you. Do you have any idea what you're doing to me right now?"
I find my rhythm and my hips roll with it and he keeps talking, low and steady and filthy, telling me exactly what he sees, exactly what he wants, what he's been lying awake thinking about in this cabin for weeks, and his voice works on me as well as his hands ever have.
My body arches up into my own fingers. The heat builds fast and hot and when I come it tears out of me with his name in it, my back off the bed, and his eyes still locked on mine, dark and gone.
"Good girl," he says, rough. "Again."
"Your turn," I manage.
"Mine comes when I say it comes." He moves onto the bed, his hands pushing my thighs up and open, his shoulders taking their weight, and his mouth finds me before I finish the thought.
He is thorough and so damn hot, doing exactly what he promised on the ridge.
His mouth is on every part of me that missed him, no shortcuts taken.
I get both hands into his hair, hold on and say his name until I run out of breath.
He pulls it out of me a second time and stays until I am limp and wrung out and shaking against his mouth.
Then he flips me.
I end up on my knees, his hand running slow up my spine, and he says against my lower back, quiet: "This okay?"
"Yes." No hesitation. "Luke, yes, please —"
"Please what?" His hands settle on my hips. I feel him at my entrance, just the tip, barely there, slick and blunt and completely still. "Tell me what you want."
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it." A beat. "All of it."
"I want you inside me." My hips press back and he gives me nothing, holds me exactly in place. "Luke, please, I want your cock, I want all of it, I have wanted you for weeks and I am begging, please —"
The flat of his hand comes down on my ass, sharp and sudden.
It stings, bright and immediate, and then the warmth spreads through me like a lit fuse.
I clench hard around just the small part of him inside me and cry out because I am so turned on, I can barely breathe.
He groans low and deep behind me and his grip tightens.
"Again," he says, rough. "Say it again."
"Please." Barely a word. "Please, Luke —"
He plunges in.
The sound I make is not quiet.
His hands grip my hips. He pulls back and drives home again and I feel every inch of him, the stretch and the fullness and weeks of nothing and all of it arriving at once, and he says behind me, wrecked and low: "Christ. Mags.
You feel —" He drives again, deeper. "You have no idea how good you feel. "
"I have some idea," I gasp.
He laughs, rough, and does it again. "Yeah?"
"Don't stop. Luke, don't you dare —"
"I'm not stopping." His hand slides around my hip and finds my clit.
The combination of him deep and his fingers and his voice at my back saying things about how long he has wanted this, how good I feel wrapped around him, how he has never been this hard in his life, it builds fast and hot and unstoppable.
I am gripping and shaking and gripping, and he is driving deeper, and he says, breaking open at the edges: "Come on. Let me feel you. Come for me, Red —"
My whole body goes rigid.
I come apart completely and he follows me over with a groan that moves through his whole chest and mine, his hands gripping hard enough to leave marks I will find tomorrow and not mind at all, both of us saying things that are not sentences, not words, just sound, just names, just this.
Afterward the cabin is quiet.
His hand is moving through my hair. I lie against his chest and listen to his heartbeat settle and feel the weight of his arm across me.
The south pasture is dark and still through the window; nothing pointed at us from out there anymore.
Stars are brilliant above the ridge. Wind is moving through the aspens, the dry papery rattle of their leaves in the dark.
Nothing coming.
Then his hand moves again. Not urgent. Just moving. Slow, from my hair down the side of my neck, over my shoulder, tracing the curve of my breast, his palm warm and certain, like he has all night and knows it. His thumb drags across my nipple and I pull in a breath. He does it again.
"Luke."
"Mm." His hand continues down my stomach, following my hip, and I feel his mouth at my temple, my cheek, the corner of my jaw. His fingers find the inside of my thigh and stroke upward and when he pushes one finger inside me and his mouth finds mine at the same time I arch into both.
He kisses me deep and unhurried, his finger moving, no rush anywhere in his body, and I reach for him without deciding to, my hand sliding down his stomach, lower, finding him already hard and wanting in my hand. He groans into my mouth.
"Again," I say against his lips.
"Yeah." His voice is rough and certain. "Get up here."
I push him onto his back and swing my leg over and sink down onto him slow. His hands go to my breasts and his head tips back and the sound he makes goes all the way through me. I set my pace and he lets me. His hands move to loose on my hips, not guiding, just holding, and I find my rhythm.
He is watching me with his chest heaving and his jaw tight and something on his face that has nothing managed in it at all.
"God," he says, low. "Look at you."
I roll my hips and his grip tightens.
"Your hair." His eyes move over me, wrecked and reverent at once. "Your —" He swallows. "Christ, Mags, you're going to kill me. You know that."
"Working on it," I say.
He laughs, rough and real, and his hips drive up to meet mine. I brace my hands on his chest and ride him harder, and he watches every second of it, jaw tight, eyes on my face and my hair and my body moving over him like he is making sure he never forgets any of it.
"You feel so good," he says, rough. "Don't stop."
"Wasn't planning to."
His laugh breaks into a groan as I move and his hands grip and his body drives up and we find it together, the rhythm, the heat, the thing that has been building since a gate in June and a woman with permits and a man who moved a fence in the dark and never said a word about it.
My whole body goes tight and he says, low and breaking: "There you are. Come on, Red. Let go —"
I do.
It rolls through me in waves and he follows me, pulsing and jerking, with my name on his lips and his hands in my hair pulling me down to him. I collapse on his chest, draped over him like a blanket and we stay there, tangled and breathing.
I am almost asleep when I say it.
"My contract ends in October."
He is quiet long enough that I think he has crossed over. Then:
"Your boots are by the door."
I look at the ceiling. "They are."
"Leave them."
One breath. Two.
"My boots?"
His voice is low and settled and there is not a single question anywhere in it.
"Anything you want."