Chapter 16 #2
"Tell me about the bronc rider," she said. "The one who scored the seventy-four. You said his rhythm went stiff. What does that feel like from the horse's perspective?"
I blinked. Nobody had ever asked me that.
I told her. About the way a horse feels the rider's tension through the saddle, through the legs, through the subtle shifts in weight that the animal reads the way I read a room.
About the contract between horse and rider that's renegotiated with every jump—the horse asking are you still with me?
and the rider answering with his body, and when the answer changes, the horse knows before the scoreboard does.
Lou listened the way she did everything—completely, with her whole attention, asking questions that went deeper with each one. Not surface questions. Structural questions. The questions of a woman who thought in systems and wanted to understand how the pieces connected.
It was comfortable. It was normal.
For a man who hadn't done normal in years—who'd lived inside the machine and the mission and the abnormality of a life organized around the management of violence—the normalcy of this was staggering.
Two people in a warm room, drinking good bourbon, talking about horses and the mechanics of staying on something that was trying to throw you.
No briefing. No objective. No clock counting down to extraction.
Just conversation, and food, and a woman who was easy to be with in the way that the best people were easy—not because she demanded nothing, but because what she demanded was exactly what I wanted to give.
"This is nice," I said. The words came out simple and honest and I didn't try to complicate them. "Just—this. Talking. Eating food I didn't have to unwrap from a foil packet. Sitting in a chair that isn't bolted to the floor of a transport aircraft."
Lou smiled over her glass. "Is that a low bar or a high compliment?"
"Both."
"I'll take it." She set her glass down. "Thank you, Grant."
"For what?"
"For sticking around long enough to let us have this."
The tease was gentle. Almost invisible. The kind that only landed if you'd been paying attention to the whole evening—the walking away, the running, the tactical withdrawals that had brought us here by the longest possible route.
She was acknowledging all of it, lightly, without cruelty, the way you tease someone you've decided is worth teasing.
I took it. Gratefully. The way you take something offered in good faith by someone who's earned the right to offer it.
"You're persistent," I said.
"I'm from Kentucky," she said. "We don't quit on things."
"I've noticed."
She held my gaze. I held hers. The fire crackled. The bourbon sat between us, warm and amber and catching the light.
A lull settled in. Not the uncomfortable kind—the kind that happens when two people have run out of the easy words and are standing at the edge of the real ones.
The room was warm. The food was mostly demolished.
The bourbon was working its way through both of us, not toward intoxication but toward the loosening that good booze provided—the softening of edges, the lowering of guards, the quiet agreement between body and brain that tonight, the usual rules didn't apply.
Our eyes met.
The fire reflected in the brown of hers—those bourbon-colored eyes that had started this whole thing, that had derailed me at a bread stall and sent me running and then brought me back, twice, because, apparently, I was incapable of staying away from something that looked at me like that.
"Time for dessert," we said.
Both of us. Same words. Same beat. Same meaning that had nothing to do with the strawberries still sitting on the plate.
The synchronicity hung in the air like a struck bell.
Then I was on my feet.
I grabbed her hand. Her fingers laced through mine and she was up, matching my stride, the leather chair left behind, the lounge left behind, the fire and the bourbon and the demolished spread all left behind.
The hallway. The elevator. I hit the button and the doors opened immediately, which was either the universe cooperating or the hotel being very good at its job. We stepped in. The doors closed. The car started to rise.
Lou looked at me in the elevator light. Her hair was wild. Her eyes were bright. The smile on her face wasn't the composed, measured smile she'd worn at the market or the bar or even the rodeo. It was the smile of a woman who'd stopped calculating and started wanting, openly.
I backed her against the elevator wall. Kissed her—deep, slow, the kind of kiss that made promises about what was coming next. She kissed me back with both hands in my hair and a sound against my mouth that the elevator had no business hearing.
The doors opened. Third floor. My floor.
We moved fast. My hand found the key card in my back pocket. The door. The reader. The green light.
The room opened in front of us—dark, the curtains still half-drawn from this morning, the city lights coming through in long pale stripes across the bed I'd slept in for exactly one hour this morning before my internal alarm had kicked me awake.
The door clicked shut behind us and the rest of the world disappeared.
Lou turned. The city lights through the half-drawn curtains painted long gold stripes across the bed, across her face, across the black top that still carried the faint crease from the storage room. She looked at me—direct, unflinching, that stare that measured everything and found nothing wanting.
I didn't speak. Words would have shrunk this.
I crossed the room in two strides, caught her face between my hands, and kissed her the way I'd wanted to since the moment she'd grabbed my arm at the rail.
Slow. Thorough. The kind of kiss that said I was done running and I was done pretending I hadn't been waiting for her all day.
She tasted like bourbon and strawberries and the salt air that had been clinging to both of us since morning.
My tongue stroked hers and she opened for me like she'd been waiting for exactly this.
Her hands slid under my shirt, palms flat against my stomach, then higher, mapping the muscle like she was memorizing terrain. I let her. For a moment. Then I broke the kiss just long enough to pull the shirt over my head and drop it on the floor.
She looked at me—really looked—the way she'd looked at the bull in the chute. Assessing. Appreciating. Hungry.
"Off," I said, voice low, nodding at her top.
She didn't tease. She reached back, peeled the black fabric over her head, and let it fall. Her nipples had already tightened under the cool air from the window. She quickly removed her bra, freeing her full, supple breasts.
I took my time.
I walked her backward until her thighs hit the edge of the bed. Then I dropped to one knee and unbuttoned her jeans with deliberate fingers. The zipper sounded loud in the quiet room. I slid the denim down her legs, taking her panties and boots with them, and she stepped out, naked.
I rose slowly, letting my hands trail up the backs of her thighs, over the curve of her ass, up her spine. When I reached her shoulders I turned her, guiding her down onto the bed on her back. She went willingly, eyes never leaving mine.
I stood at the foot of the bed and undid my belt. The Pendleton buckle clinked as I set it aside with the same care I always gave it. Jeans followed. The rest after that. I was hard—painfully so—and the way her gaze dropped and darkened told me she knew exactly what she was looking at.
I wrapped a hand around myself and stroked once, slow, letting her watch. Letting her see what she did to me.
Her knees fell open.
I climbed onto the bed between her thighs.
Settled on my knees, gripped myself again, and dragged the head through her folds—slow, deliberate, watching the way her slickness coated me on every pass.
Up. Down. Circling her clit once, twice, until her hips rolled up and she made that soft, broken sound I was already addicted to.
I lined myself up and pushed in—inch by inch—watching her body open for me. The stretch. The heat. The shine of her wetness as I withdrew almost to the tip, then sank back in deeper. Slow. Controlled. Every inch a claim I didn't have to say out loud.
She whimpered. Her hands fisted the sheets.
I kept the pace torturously slow. Pulling out until only the head remained, then sliding back in to the hilt, her walls fluttering around me. Over and over. Every wet sound. Every pulse of her body trying to pull me deeper.
Her back arched. "Grant—"
"I know," I said. Low. Rough. "I've got you."
I dropped my weight onto my forearms, caging her, and started to move with more purpose. Each thrust rolled through her entire body. I watched her face, watched her eyes flutter, watched her lips part on every exhale.
I kissed her—deep, claiming, swallowing every moan while I fucked her like I had all night to do it. Because I did. Because tonight there was no mission clock, no extraction window, no reason to hold back anything except the need to make this last.
I shifted my angle until I hit the spot that made her cry out against my mouth. Held it. Ground against her clit on every downstroke. Felt her start to tighten around me in rhythmic pulses that told me she was close.
"Not yet," I rasped against her lips.
Her nails dug into my back. Her boots scraped the sheets. She was shaking.
I reached between us, found her clit with my fingers, and stroked it slow and firm.
She broke.
Her orgasm hit hard—body locking, walls clamping down around me in long, rolling waves, her cry muffled against my shoulder. I fucked her through it, slow and steady, drawing it out until she was trembling and gasping and whispering my name like something she'd found at the bottom of herself.
Only then did I let myself go.
I buried myself to the hilt, hips stuttering, and came with a groan that felt ripped from somewhere I'd forgotten existed. I stayed deep, grinding slow, pushing everything where it belonged.
When the last aftershock faded, I didn't pull out.
I stayed inside her, forearms braced on either side of her head, forehead resting against hers. The way a man rested against something that had become essential without asking permission first.
Her breathing slowed. Mine did, too.
I brushed my lips across her temple, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth.
She smiled—small, soft, real. And for the first time in years, the stubborn part of me that had been holding on for eight seconds at a time finally let go.
Because I'd found something worth the ride.