Chapter 14 #2
I didn’t know what to do with the relief of it, or the strangeness. Every crisis I’d faced since my divorce, I’d processed in private and walked back in as if nothing had happened. This time, I hadn’t walked away.
The receipt ran out of space. I put down the pen and looked up.
Logan was leaning against the doorframe a few feet away, arms loosely crossed. He was looking at me, not at the list I’d scrawled, and he didn’t look away when I caught him.
The barn was full of its usual noise, dogs shifting in kennels, the goats thumping against something, but all of it had gone distant.
I opened my mouth. I could have said something about his handwriting or Clarence’s dietary choices, literally anything to put the comfortable distance back between us.
Nothing came out.
He stepped forward, slow enough that I could have stopped it, slow enough that I saw it coming. His hands settled on my waist, and my palms found his chest and I felt his heartbeat under my fingers, steady and unhurried while mine hammered.
This kiss had weight and intention. Unlike the other times, we both saw it coming and we both walked into it, and when his mouth met mine, I wasn’t caught off guard.
I was choosing this. He tightened his arms around my waist. I slid my hands and curled them into the fabric of his shirt, and the kiss went deeper, his tongue against mine, and his thumb traced a slow line along my hip bone that made my breath catch hard enough to hear.
“HOLY SHIT!”
Clarence. He screamed it at full volume from his perch, setting off a chain reaction: three dogs barking, Princess Whiskers flattening her ears, Pepper headbutting the pen wall.
Logan and I broke apart, both breathing hard, his hands still on my waist and mine still fisted in his shirt.
“That bird is a menace in more ways than one,” Logan muttered.
I snorted out a laugh and looked at Clarence. He had his head cocked sideways, entirely self-satisfied.
“Not here,” I said.
“Your place or mine?” His voice was rough, but the delivery was bone-dry.
“Either.”
I let go of his shirt. Smoothed the wrinkled fabric with my palm, which was pointless and also meant I was still touching his chest. I pulled my hand back.
“Yours. It’s closer.” He squeezed my hips once, then let go and stepped back.
“Perfect.”
Neither of us spoke between the barn and my front porch. Neither of us touched, both knowing if we did, we probably weren’t going to make it inside.
I pushed through the front door and turned around. “You know, Clarence and Beckett are neck and neck when it comes to bad timing—”
Logan’s mouth was on mine before I finished the sentence.
His hands were in my hair and mine were pulling at his shirt and my back found the hallway wall, and I stopped caring about anything except his mouth and the heat of his body pressed against mine.
We moved down the hallway in a tangle of hands and mouths, knocking into the wall twice, and I barely tracked where we were until I pulled him through the door of my bedroom. My bedroom that no man had ever been inside.
This was my room, my space, my choice.
I pulled my shirt over my head before I could think about it.
Thinking would mean hesitating, and I was done hesitating.
The scar was right there, four inches of raised skin along the inside of my left forearm, pale against freckled tan.
He’d glimpsed it at the fence line, but this was different.
This was my body offered in the light of my own bedroom, and the scar was part of the offering, whether I wanted it to be or not.
His eyes found it. His hand came up, and he traced the full length of it with his thumb, one slow pass, his calluses rough against the sensitive skin.
Then his hand kept going, up my arm, over my shoulder, to the back of my neck.
He didn’t linger at the scar or look away or handle me like something damaged.
He just kept touching me.
I pushed his shirt up and over his head.
My hands went to his chest, and I touched him the way I’d wanted to since almost the first moment I’d seen him.
The hard planes of muscle that contracted under my fingertips as they moved over his abdomen, the warmth of his skin, a scar on his left shoulder I hadn’t known about.
My fingers traced it, and his breath caught under my hands.
We undressed each other the rest of the way.
His belt gave me trouble, and I swore at it under my breath and he laughed, low and quiet, and the sound of Logan laughing in my bedroom while I wrestled with his buckle shifted something in my chest that I’d thought was permanent.
We were clumsy and human and half dressed and laughing.
None of it was graceful, and all of it was ours. It was perfect and real. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
He lowered me onto the bed. His mouth found my neck, and I felt the heat of it spread under my skin, radiating downward through my chest and my stomach and settling low in my belly.
He kissed along my collarbone, and I arched into him, wanting more pressure, more contact, more of the warmth his mouth was leaving everywhere it touched.
When he ghosted his lips over my breast and closed them over my nipple, my whole body tightened.
His tongue was slow and deliberate, and when he flicked it back and forth, every nerve ending I had narrowed to that one point of contact until the sound that left me was raw and unguarded and I didn’t try to contain it.
His hands moved ahead of his mouth, testing what made me gasp before his lips followed. When he grazed the underside of my other breast with his thumb, my whole body lifted toward him. He did it again, slower, and my fingers dug into his shoulders.
He kissed down my ribs, my stomach, the jut of my hip bone.
His mouth was unhurried and thorough, and every place his lips touched left a trail of heat that spread through me until I was trembling with it.
He slid his hands along my inner thighs, his callused fingers causing me to shiver, and I opened for him without thinking, my body making the decision before my brain caught up.
His mouth followed the path of his hands to my core, and he spread me wide.
He flicked his tongue back and forth over my clit in slow sweeps then he wrapped his lips around my clit and sucked.
A low moan crawled up my throat, my hips came off the mattress, and my hand found the back of his head and held on.
He was patient and specific and devastating.
He found what made me shake and stayed there, his tongue working in slow, deliberate strokes that built something almost unbearable low in my belly.
He added his fingers, thrusting and curling, and I could feel something building deep within me.
My thighs tightened around his head and my breathing went ragged, and I was making sounds I’d never heard from myself, high and desperate and completely beyond my control.
I clawed at his shoulders and pulled him back up because I needed his weight and his mouth on mine and my hands on his skin.
I kissed him hard, tasting myself on his lips, and I wrapped my hand around the length of him.
He was hard and pulsing and warm. I glided my hand up and down in firm strokes, adding a light twist of my wrist and running my thumb over his tip, spreading the wetness there.
His whole body shuddered against me, and the groan that came out of him went through me like a current.
His forehead dropped against my temple, and his breathing fractured and my name left his mouth rough and undone.
He pulled back just long enough to reach over the edge of the bed for his jeans. I heard foil tear, and then he was back, his skin against mine, and the brief separation had only made the wanting sharper.
I guided him to me. His eyes found mine and held, a question in the space between us that didn’t need words. I answered by wrapping my legs around his hips and pulling him close.
The first moment was everything at once, my body adjusting to the stretch of him, his breath ragged against my skin, the slow push of him pulling a gasp from somewhere deep in my chest. We found each other in increments, his hips moving against mine, mine rising to meet him, the rhythm building between us like something we’d been learning for weeks without knowing it.
His full weight settled over me, and I felt my body tense, waiting. I’d braced for this, for the flinch that came with a man above me, the old panic that screamed closeness was a trap.
It didn’t come.
Logan’s body above mine was warm and solid and entirely absent of demand. He moved with me, not against me. When I shifted, he followed. When my nails dragged down his back, he pressed deeper and I cried out against his mouth.
He gripped my thigh and hitched it higher on his hip. The angle changed, and I heard myself say his name in a voice I didn’t recognize.
His forehead found mine again, our eyes meeting. Holding. Our breaths becoming one.
He slid his hand beneath my hip and tilted me. My vision went white at the edges. The tension that had been winding tighter with every thrust crested and held for one suspended second.
“Logan.” Just his name, and it came out like a plea. Desperate for him to tip me over the edge. “More.”
He changed the angle again. His forearms resting on the mattress on either side of my head. His movements became sharper, grinding against my clit on each upward stroke. His chest brushing against the hard tips of my nipples.
I broke. I came with my hands gripping his back and his name still in my mouth.
The release moved through me in waves, slow and deep, reaching places I’d shut away so long ago I’d forgotten they existed.
I felt him follow a moment later, his breath shuddering against my neck, his arms pulling me closer. His lips against my skin.
I closed my eyes, listened to him breathe, and enjoyed the stillness.