Chapter 15
LOUISA
The next bull came out of the chute like something had been holding it against its will for years.
I felt it in my chest—that concussive surge of crowd noise, the vibration of the bleachers through the soles of my boots, the collective intake of breath from thousands of people who'd just watched two thousand pounds of fury launch into the arena. But I wasn't watching the bull.
I was watching Grant's hands on the rail.
They were extraordinary hands. Large, calloused, the knuckles scarred in the way that came from work rather than fighting—or maybe both.
The veins ran prominent along the backs of them, standing out against tanned skin, and when he leaned forward to track the ride, his forearms flexed in a way that I catalogued with the focused attention I usually reserved for fermentation data.
I wanted those hands on me.
I'd wanted it since the bread stall, if I was being honest, which I was trying to be about things that mattered.
There was something about the way he moved—deliberate, unhurried, every motion economical in the way of a man who'd learned to conserve effort for when it counted—that made my brain construct very specific scenarios involving dark rooms and no audience.
The Western shirt was doing things. The jaw was doing things. The low, even quality of his voice when he talked about the rodeo, about the bulls, about his mother crying at Pendleton—all of it had been doing things and my body was running out of patience with the slow burn.
He straightened beside me, something releasing in his shoulders as the buzzer fired.
"Seventy-nine," he said. "Maybe eighty."
I turned to look at him and he turned at the same moment and we were close—closer than the distance required, six inches between us, the arena lights catching the dark of his eyes and the line of his jaw and the way he looked at me that made me feel like a problem he'd stopped trying to solve and started trying to understand instead.
"Grant," I said.
"Lou."
My name in his mouth at that register. Like he'd been saying it for years.
"I'd like to get out of here," I said.
Something moved in his face. Not surprise—he didn't do surprise easily. More like a calculation arriving at a number he'd been hoping for.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
We didn't go far.
The crowd was thick near the main concourse and Grant moved through it the way I’m sure he moved through everything—direct, certain, no wasted motion—and I followed in the channel he opened, his hand finding the small of my back somewhere in the press of bodies and staying there.
His palm was flat and warm through my top. I was aware of it the way you were aware of a lit match in a dark room—completely, immediately, with the understanding that something was about to catch.
He steered us left, down a service corridor that ran along the back of the arena. The crowd noise muffled as we moved, the announcer's voice fading to a murmur, the air cooling from the warm press of bodies to something that smelled of hay and motor oil and the metal tang of arena infrastructure.
We passed a tack room, a door marked ELECTRICAL, a door marked STORAGE.
Grant pushed the storage door open.
Inside: stacked bleacher pads, coiled ropes on hooks, a folding table, a single caged bulb overhead throwing warm functional light. Not romantic. Honest, which was better.
The door clicked shut behind us.
Grant turned.
I was already there.
I kissed him first—reached up with both hands and pulled his face down to mine before he could think or retreat or execute the tactical withdrawal I'd watched him run twice today. His mouth was still for exactly one second. And then it wasn't.
He kissed me back like something had snapped.
His hands found my waist, then my hips, gripping with a certainty that made my breath catch—not rough but absolute, the grip of a man who'd made a decision and had stopped arguing with himself about it.
He walked me backward until my shoulders met the wall and his body followed, pressing in, and the full length and weight of him against me short-circuited every coherent thought I had.
I made a sound into his mouth I didn't recognize as mine.
He pulled back an inch. His forehead not quite touching mine, his breathing audible and uneven in a way that was enormously satisfying given how controlled he'd been.
"Lou." My name at that register. Rough. Stripped. “Tell me to stop.”
The words were calm. The grip on my hip was not.
"Don't stop," I said.
The corner of his mouth lifted—just a fraction, just enough to look dangerous. “Good.”
His mouth came back to mine—deeper, his tongue stroking slow and deliberate, one hand sliding up under my top to find bare skin at my waist. His palm was hot against my ribcage and I felt it spread outward from the point of contact, reaching places his hand wasn't yet, and the yet was doing something to me.
He kissed me like he’d been starving for the taste of my mouth since the moment we met. I made a sound I’d never heard myself make—half moan, half plea—and he swallowed it like it belonged to him.
I pulled at his shirt, working the buttons open by feel, and when I found skin underneath—the hard, warm plane of his chest, the density of a body that had been used hard for a long time—I pressed my palms flat against him and felt his heartbeat going as fast as mine.
He groaned. Low, involuntary, the sound of a man losing the last of a grip he'd been white-knuckling all day.
His hands moved to the hem of my top. He pulled it up and over and dropped it somewhere to our left, and then he looked at me—not a glance, a look, unhurried and complete—and something in his expression went quiet and fierce simultaneously.
"Christ," he said. Quiet. Like it escaped.
I reached back and unclasped my bra myself, let it fall, and watched his jaw tighten and his eyes go very dark.
He touched me with both hands—learning, thorough, his fingertips tracing slow circles over my nipples until they peaked under the contact and I stopped trying to be quiet about what that did to me.
He bent his head and replaced one finger with his mouth and I forgot the rodeo, the city, the notebook on my apartment floor, every single thing except his mouth and his hands and the wall at my back and the warm swaying light overhead.
My fingers found his hair. He worked my jeans open without lifting his head—button, zipper, the denim pushed over my hips with a practicality that was somehow more devastating than ceremony would have been. I stepped out of them. Kicked them somewhere.
Under the weight of his eyes, I felt not exposed but chosen.
That was the difference. Nine years of invisible and he was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"Your turn," I said, and reached for his shirt.
I finished the buttons. He shrugged it off. Then it was him—broad through the chest and shoulders, lean at the waist, a scar along his left ribs that was old and faded and told a story I intended to hear. His stomach tensed when I dragged my fingers across it.
He undid his own belt. The Pendleton buckle caught the light as he set it on the folding table with careful, instinctive respect. Something about that small gesture, the tenderness of it in the middle of this, hit me somewhere unguarded.
Then his hands were back on me and there was no more room for tenderness or tenderness-adjacent thoughts.
He went to his knees in front of me.
I made a sound that was half shock and half desperate agreement as cool air hit wet heat.
He hooked my leg over his shoulder and looked up at me once—the question in his eyes already answered before I could form the word—and then his mouth found me and language became genuinely unnecessary.
“Fuck, you’re soaked.”
My head fell back against the wall with a dull thud.
He was thorough. Focused. No teasing. No gentle licks. He devoured.
Tongue fucking into me, then dragging up to suck my clit hard enough that my vision whited out. Applying precision and patience to exactly the things that made my hips roll forward and my fingers tighten in his hair and my voice come out unguarded and honest.
“Grant—”
“Say it again. My name. Just like that.”
“Grant.” It came out broken.
The sounds—wet, filthy, obscene—filled the small room. I slapped a hand over my mouth, but he reached up, caught my wrist, and pinned it to the wall above my head.
“Don’t,” he rasped against my pussy. “I want to hear every fucking sound you make for me.”
I came like that—fast, violent, legs shaking so hard I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me up. He didn’t stop. He licked me through it, slower now, like he was savoring the way I pulsed.
When the aftershocks finally eased, he rose, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand like a man who’d just finished a meal. He kissed me again and I tasted myself on him and felt the next wave building before the first had finished.
He freed himself—thick, heavy, the head already glistening—and stroked once, eyes never leaving my face. “You still with me?”
I nodded, throat too tight for words.
He lifted me like I weighed nothing, back against the wall, my legs wrapped around his hips. The blunt head of his cock nudged my entrance. He paused there, breathing hard against my neck.
“Last chance, Lou.” His voice was gravel and smoke. “Once I’m inside you, you’re mine. Understand?”
The possessiveness in the words should have terrified me. Instead it lit something feral in my chest. I dug my nails into his shoulders and rolled my hips, taking just the tip.
“Then take what’s yours.”
He slammed home in one brutal thrust.
I felt every increment, the stretch and heat and the fullness of a body making space for another, and my mouth opened against his shoulder and what came out was his name and something else entirely.
He held still.
Both of us—just breathing. His forehead dropped to mine. In the dim light with his face this close and his body inside mine he looked undone, and I understood it because I was undone in the same way and for the same reasons.
Then, he moved.
Long, deep, unhurried—building heat without rushing it, his hips finding a rhythm that was entirely his and entirely right, one hand at my thigh and one braced against the wall above my shoulder. I moved with him. Matched him. The arena roared somewhere behind the walls and neither of us was there.
He picked up the pace.
His mouth at my ear, rough words that I felt in my spine, about how I felt and how long he'd been—and I answered without words, honest and unedited, the sound of a body getting what it had been wanting since a bread stall at nine forty-five in the morning.
The second orgasm was slower, deeper, gathered from everywhere and arrived all at once, and when it did, I had my face pressed to his throat and his name in my mouth like the only word I knew.
He followed—rhythm fracturing, body pulling taut, a sound low in his chest that was private and real and mine in the way those sounds only ever belonged to the person who drew them out.
We stayed there afterward. Neither of us in a hurry to be separate things again.
The bulb stilled. The arena crowd roared in the distance, muffled and irrelevant.
After a while, he set me down, steadied me when my legs weighed in with their opinion.
He handed me my top from the floor with a quietness that felt like care.
While I dressed, he worked his buttons in order, retrieved the buckle from the table and threaded it back through with the same respect he'd set it down with.
We didn't fill the space with words. I was grateful for that. Some moments got smaller when you talked over them.
When I was dressed, he looked at me. The full look.
"You good?” he asked.
"Yes." I looked back at him steadily. "You?"
Something moved in his face—the slightly undone expression of a man who hadn't been asked that in a while and wasn't sure what to do with it.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his thumb grazing my cheekbone, and the gentleness of it after everything else undid something the rest hadn't touched.
"Yeah," he said. "I am."
I believed him.
We found our way back to the concourse, back into the noise and the heat and the last of the evening's events. Grant's hand was at my back again—the same placement, the same warmth, but landing differently than it had an hour ago. Not a question anymore.
Izzy was waiting at the base of the VIP stairs. Her bag across her body, her expression composed in the careful way of a woman who had very strong opinions she was choosing not to voice yet.
She looked at me. Looked at Grant. Looked at the general state of both of us.
"Well," she said.
"Don't," I said.
Her mouth curved. She looked at Grant.
"I'm Isabel," she said. "You can call me Izzy. Lou's friend.”
"Grant." He shook her hand. "I gathered."
"Are you two—" she gestured between us, a gesture that managed to encompass approximately everything that had happened in the last hour without naming any of it.
"We're going back to his hotel," I said.
Izzy's eyebrows rose a fraction. "The Palmetto Rose?"
Grant nodded. Something shifted in her expression—there and gone, the flicker I'd seen at the market when I'd asked about the Dominion Defense men, the careful management of something she knew that she wasn't going to say.
"Then you're in good hands," she said, and the words seemed to carry two meanings and she intended both of them.
She hugged me—quick, genuine, her mouth near my ear. "Call me tomorrow," she murmured. "About the sourdough. And everything."
I pulled back and looked at her and she was smiling the way she'd smiled when she said men who walk away like that usually come back.
The quiet, satisfied smile of a woman who'd been right about something and was too gracious to say so out loud.
But only barely.