Chapter 11 #2
Breathless, surprised, the kind of laugh that breaks the tension just enough to make what comes next survivable. “Then stop being polite.”
I release her wrists and pull my shirt over my head.
Her hands are on me immediately—palms flat on my chest, fingers tracing the ink, the muscle, the scars.
Her touch is sure and unhesitating and the feel of her calloused hands on my skin sends a current through me that settles low and hot and insistent.
I reach behind her and unclasp the bra, pull it away.
And then her breasts are in my hands—full, warm, heavy, nipples hardening against my palms as I cup and squeeze.
She arches into the touch and the sound she makes goes straight to my cock, a low moan that vibrates through her chest and into my hands.
I drop my mouth to her neck and kiss the hollow of her throat where her pulse is hammering.
Trail lower—collarbone, the slope of her chest, the swell of her breast.
When I take her nipple into my mouth she gasps and her hand flies to the back of my head, fingers gripping my hair, holding me there.
I suck. Bite gently. Feel her hips rock against mine in an involuntary roll that nearly breaks me.
Nearly. Not quite. Because tonight isn’t about losing control. Tonight is about taking it.
I undo her jeans, slide them down her hips with both hands, following the fabric with my mouth—kissing her ribs, her stomach, the soft skin below her navel.
She kicks the jeans off her boots and stands against the stall wall in nothing but her underwear and I drop to my knees in front of her.
She looks down at me.
Dark hair falling forward, chest heaving, her hand still in my hair.
The look on her face—God.
Desire and disbelief and the raw vulnerability of a woman who isn’t used to being worshipped.
“Lee—”
I hook my fingers in her underwear and pull them down, pressing my mouth to her hip bone.
Then lower. Then exactly where she needs me.
The sound she makes isn’t a moan.
It’s a fracture—sharp, shattered, the sound of a woman’s knees giving out.
I grip her thighs—her strong, thick, powerful thighs—and hold her up as I taste her.
Slow. Deliberate. Learning what makes her shake, what makes her grip my hair harder, what makes her hips roll against my mouth in that desperate rhythm she can’t control.
She’s wet. Soaked.
The taste of her spreads across my tongue and I groan against her because the intimacy of this—of being on my knees for this woman, of making her come apart with my mouth, of feeling her thighs tremble around my head—is the most present I’ve felt in years.
I’m not in the past. I’m not in the grief. I’m right here, in this stall, with this woman, and I am going to make her scream my name.
I find the rhythm she needs. Steady. Relentless.
My tongue moving in flat, firm strokes while my hands grip her hips hard enough to bruise.
She’s gasping—incoherent, beautiful, her head thrown back against the boards and her body shaking under my hands.
When I slide two fingers inside her and curl them forward she shatters.
Her whole body locks—thighs clamping, spine arching, her hand fisting in my hair—and she comes against my mouth with a cry that fills the stall and spooks the mare and I don’t give a damn about anything except the way she pulses around my fingers and the way my name sounds in her throat.
I stand before the aftershocks have finished.
My belt, my jeans—off, fast, the urgency finally overtaking the patience.
She reaches for me and I let her this time, let her wrap her hand around me, and the contact of her calloused palm on my cock makes my forehead drop to the wall behind her and a sound tear out of me that I didn’t know I could make.
I lift her.
She knows the choreography now—legs around my waist, arms around my neck, the trusting surrender of a woman letting a man hold her weight.
I pin her to the wall and position myself and look at her face.
Her eyes are on mine.
Black. Bottomless. No fear. No guilt.
Just want, pure and clean and uncomplicated by ghosts.
“You’re mine.” I say it against her mouth. Not a question. A fact. A vow.
“Prove it.”
I push inside her in one long, devastating stroke.
She takes all of me—opens around me, pulls me in, her body gripping and hot and perfect—and the sound we make together is guttural, primal, the sound of two people becoming one thing.
I hold still for a heartbeat. Buried. Feeling her around me.
Feeling the life in it—the pulse, the heat, the fierce aliveness of being inside a woman I chose.
I move. Deep, steady, controlled.
Not the frantic collision of the tack room—this is possessive.
Each thrust deliberate. Claiming.
I pin her hips with mine and set a rhythm that is slow enough to feel everything and hard enough to make her nails score lines down my back.
She meets every stroke—rolling into me, gripping me tighter, matching possession with possession because Bex Dalton does not surrender, she conquers back.
“Harder.” Her voice in my ear. A command, not a plea. She bites my earlobe and the spark of pain goes straight through me. “Stop being careful, Lee. I won’t break.”
The last leash snaps.
I drive into her. Hard. Fast.
The stall wall shuddering behind her back, the bedding shifting under my boots, my hands on her hips pulling her into every thrust.
She’s loud—God, she’s loud—her voice echoing through the barn, my name and profanity and half-finished sentences that dissolve into moans.
I bury my face in her neck and give her everything I have—every ounce of strength, every year of want, every claim I’ve been building since she walked into my barn with her tools and her braid and her hands that fix broken things.
“Mine.” Against her throat. Between thrusts. The word a punctuation mark on every stroke. “Mine. You’re mine. Say it.”
“Yours.” She’s breaking. I can feel it—the trembling, the tightening, her body winding toward the edge. “I’m yours. I’ve been yours, Lee—God—”
She comes. Devastating. Clenching around me so hard my vision whites out.
Her whole body shakes and she screams—actually screams, raw and unrestrained—and the sound and the feel and the overwhelming reality of this woman unraveling in my arms pushes me over after her.
I bury myself deep and let go, and the release is seismic, a full-body shudder that starts at the base of my spine and tears through me in waves.
I press her into the wall and hold her against me and pour everything I have into her—the grief, the want, the choice, the claim.
We slide to the floor.
The pine bedding is soft under us.
The mare has moved to the far corner and is eating hay, profoundly unbothered.
The barn is quiet except for our breathing—ragged, slowing, the shared rhythm of two bodies remembering how to function independently.
I don’t pull away.
That’s the difference.
That’s the whole, seismic, earth-shifting difference from last time.
I pull her into me instead.
Her back against my chest, my arms around her, my face in her hair.
The shavings are in her braid and her skin is flushed and damp and she smells like sweat and sex and the sweet hay scent of the barn and I hold her like I’m never letting go because I’m not.
She takes my hand, laces her fingers through mine and pulls my arm tighter around her.
My ring presses against her knuckle.
She feels it. I feel her feel it—the small hesitation, the faint tension in her fingers.
But she doesn’t let go. And neither do I.
The ring is there. It’s always there.
But tonight, against Bex’s hand, it feels less like a shackle and more like an artifact.
Something from before. A relic of a man I was, carried by the man I’m becoming.
“Stay,” I say. Into her hair. Against the back of her neck.
A word I haven’t said to anyone in five and a half years because saying it means wanting someone to be there in the morning, and wanting someone to be there in the morning means admitting you can’t do this alone anymore. “Stay with me tonight.”
She turns in my arms. Looks at me. Searches my face for the thing she’s been looking for since she walked into that feed store—the proof that I’m here, that I mean it, that the man holding her isn’t going to disappear into the silence when the sun comes up.
Whatever she finds is enough.
“Okay.” She presses her mouth to my jaw. Soft. Sure. The kiss of a woman who has decided to trust. “I’ll stay.”
We get dressed and walk to my quarters, fall into my bed tangled together, too tired and too wrung out for anything except the simple, staggering intimacy of sleeping next to someone.
Her head on my chest. My hand on her hip.
The barn outside, the horses settled, the Texas night wide and dark and full of stars I haven’t looked at in years.
She falls asleep first.
Her breathing evens out, slow and deep, and the weight of her body against mine is the heaviest and lightest thing I’ve ever held. I lie awake in the dark and feel her heartbeat under my hand and I don’t think about the past.
I think about Sunday.
About Earl’s east fence.
About the bay’s hooves and Lockhart’s paper trail and the way Bex takes her coffee and the sound she makes when she laughs.
I think about the future.