Chapter 8 #2
“Tell me to stop.” His eyes on mine. Desperate. Burning.
The eyes of a man standing at the edge of a cliff he’s been walking toward for weeks, needing someone to either pull him back or push him over.
“Tell me this is wrong. Tell me she’d hate us for it.
Tell me whatever you need to tell me to make me walk away, because I can’t do it on my own anymore. I’ve tried. I can’t.”
I should say the right thing.
The responsible thing.
The thing that protects us both from the wreckage this will cause—the guilt, the grief, the complication of two people bound together by a dead woman falling into each other’s bodies like it’s the only place left to fall.
I don’t say the right thing.
“I’m not going to tell you to stop.”
He makes a sound. The same sound from the stall—low, broken, involuntary.
The sound of a man’s control snapping.
And then his hands are on me.
Both hands. My hips.
Gripping—not gently, not carefully, not the tender, tentative touch of a man testing the waters.
This is a man who’s been drowning and just found something solid.
His fingers dig into the curves of my hips—my full hips, the wide, heavy hips of a woman built for labor and endurance—and he pulls me into him with a force that knocks the breath out of both of us.
His mouth finds mine.
Not like the first kiss.
Not electric and brief and severed by guilt.
This is a flood. A dam breaking.
His mouth opens against mine and he kisses me like he’s trying to consume me, like the hunger he’s been starving for years has finally been given permission to feed and it wants everything.
His tongue slides against mine, and I grab the front of his shirt with both fists and haul him closer because closer isn’t close enough, nothing is close enough. I want to climb inside him and live there.
He walks me backward.
My boots scuffing the concrete, his boots driving, his hands on my hips steering me without breaking the kiss.
My back hits the wall of the tack room—the same tack room where he bandaged my hand, the same small warm space that smells like leather and saddle soap—and the solid surface behind me means he can press forward without restraint.
He presses forward without restraint.
His body against mine.
The full length of him—chest, hips, thighs—pinning me to the wall with a pressure that is possession, that is claiming, that is a man who has decided he is done fighting and is now taking.
I can feel him. All of him.
The hard planes of his chest through his shirt, the belt buckle pressing my stomach, and lower—the unmistakable evidence that Lee has wanted this as badly as I have, pressed against my hip, hard and insistent and sending a bolt of heat through my core that makes my knees melt.
His hands move. From my hips upward, sliding under my shirt, and the contact of his palms on my bare skin—rough, calloused, burning—makes me gasp into his mouth.
His hands spread wide across my waist, my ribs, mapping territory with a desperate urgency that says he’s been imagining this.
His thumbs press into the soft skin below my ribs and I arch into him because the touch is electric, because his hands are everywhere and it’s not enough, because I have been starving for this man since the moment he wrapped my hand in a tack room and I felt his ring against my pulse.
His ring.
I feel it now.
Cool gold against the heated skin of my ribs as his hand slides higher. Rose’s ring. On Rose’s husband’s hand. Touching me.
I don’t stop. I don’t want to stop.
The wrongness and the rightness are so tangled together I can’t separate them, and I’ve stopped trying.
His ring is on my skin and his mouth is on my neck and it’s like Rose is in the room, and I am choosing this anyway.
I’m choosing him.
He pulls back just enough to look at me.
His eyes are dark. Wrecked.
The pupils blown so wide the blue-hazel is just a thin ring around black.
He’s breathing hard—ragged, uncontrolled—and his hands are trembling against my skin.
“Bex.”
“Don’t stop.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Low. Wrecked. The voice of a woman who has been lit on fire and does not want to be put out. “Lee. Don’t stop.”
Something in his face fractures.
The last wall. The last restraint.
I watch it fall—the exact moment he stops fighting himself and surrenders to the thing that’s been pulling us together since I walked into a feed store and saw a man I had no business wanting.
His hands go to the hem of my shirt and pull it over my head.
Not slow. Not careful.
A single, decisive motion that leaves me bare from the waist up except for the plain cotton bra I wore because I’m a farrier, not a seductress, and I didn’t plan for this.
I didn’t plan for any of this.
He looks at me.
My body. The body that is not Rose’s—not slim, not willowy, not delicate.
Full breasts. Soft stomach.
The broad shoulders and muscled arms of a woman who bends iron for a living.
Scars on my hands. Calluses on my palms. Sun-dark skin.
Everything about me is heavy and strong and built for function rather than beauty, and he’s looking at me like I’m the most devastating thing he’s ever seen.
“Christ.” The word leaves him on an exhale.
Reverent. Wrecked.
His hands come back to my waist and this time they’re shaking openly, his fingers tracing the curve of my hips, the swell of my stomach, moving upward to cup my breasts through the cotton.
His thumbs sweep across the peaks and my head falls back against the wall and a sound comes out of me that I will deny making until the day I die.
I pull at his shirt.
He reaches back with one hand and drags it over his head and now it’s my turn to look and my turn to lose the ability to form coherent thoughts.
He’s lean and hard, the body of a man who works with his hands and rides horses and doesn’t sit still long enough to soften.
Tattoos. MC ink across his chest and down his arms—I can’t process the details, I’ll map them later. Right now all I register is skin and heat and the ridges of muscle across his stomach and the trail of dark hair that disappears below his belt.
I put my hands on him.
Flat palms on his chest.
He hisses—a sharp intake of breath through his teeth, like my touch is a brand.
I can feel his heart slamming under my right hand.
Feel the shudder that runs through him when I drag my nails down his ribs. Feel the way his entire body goes taut, every muscle rigid, when my fingers find his belt buckle.
“Bex.” Warning. Or begging. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
I undo the buckle. The button. The zipper.
My hand finds him through the cotton underneath and he makes a sound that is not a word—a guttural, raw, primal sound that vibrates through his chest and into my palms and settles between my hips like a fist of heat.
He’s hard. Thick. Straining against the fabric.
When I wrap my fingers around him, he drops his forehead to the wall beside my head and says my name into my hair like it’s the only word he remembers.
He doesn’t let me keep the advantage.
His hands go to my jeans—fast, urgent, the button and the zipper and then he’s pushing them down my hips with both hands, the denim catching on my thighs because my thighs are thick and strong and nothing comes off them easily.
He goes to his knees to pull them the rest of the way, and the sight of him on his knees in front of me, his hands on my calves, his face level with my stomach—it does something to me that I feel in the marrow of my bones.
He presses his mouth to my hip, just below the bone.
An open-mouthed kiss on the soft skin there that makes my hand fly to his hair and grip.
His lips drag across my stomach—slow, devastating, a counterpoint to the urgency of everything that came before.
He’s tasting me. Learning me.
The texture of my skin, the curve of my belly, the line where hip becomes thigh.
His breath is hot against me and I’m shaking, actually shaking, my thighs trembling under his hands.
He stands.
Lifts me.
Just—lifts, hands under my thighs, picking me up off the ground like I weigh nothing, and I am not a woman who weighs nothing. But he does it like it’s easy, like my body is a thing his body was designed to carry.
My legs wrap around his waist by instinct and the contact—the heat of him pressed against the center of me, separated by two thin layers of cotton—pulls a moan from my throat that fills the tack room.
He pins me against the wall.
Holds me there with his hips.
One hand braced on the wall beside my head, one gripping my thigh, and he’s looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on anyone’s face before—hunger and anguish and want so raw it looks like it hurts.
“I need you.” His voice is destroyed. Gravel and glass. “I need you right now. If you tell me to stop I will, but it might kill me.”
I take his face in both hands.
His jaw is rough with stubble under my palms.
His eyes are wild and dark and terrified.
“Then don’t stop.”
The last barriers come off in a tangle of hands and desperation.
He reaches between us and I lift my hips and then he’s there—right there—and when he pushes into me the sound we make is one sound, shared, the same broken exhale torn from two bodies that have been empty for too long.
He fills me, full and deep and aching.
My back arches off the wall and my fingers dig into his shoulders and I can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t do anything except feel him inside me—the stretch, the pressure, the overwhelming fullness of being connected to another person after years of being alone.
His forehead drops to my shoulder and his body shudders and he stays still for one perfect, devastating second.
Holding. Feeling. Here.
Then he moves.
Not gentle. Not careful.
He drives into me with a force that pushes the air from my lungs and presses me harder into the wall and sets a rhythm that is grief and hunger and fury all at once.
This is not lovemaking. This is collision.