6. Chapter 6
Beckett
Ikissed her.
I kissed the woman who’s reorganizing my barn and building a program on my land and making my horses better than I ever could.
I kissed her in the dark with Rebel breathing behind us and her legs around my waist and her hands in my hair and a sound coming out of me that I didn’t know I was capable of making.
I’m sitting on the edge of my bed at five AM staring at the wall and replaying every second.
Her mouth. The way she tasted. The way she kissed me back just as hard. The way she wrapped her legs around me.
I get up. I dress. I go to the barn.
I need to put the wall back up.
This is what I do. This is what I’ve always done. You let someone in, you feel something, and then you build the wall higher and thicker because behind the wall is safe and outside the wall is where you lose things.
Friday morning. Brynn comes into the barn at six. I’m filling water buckets. She walks toward me with two coffees and a look on her face that’s soft and open and still carrying last night in it.
“Morning,” she says. Holds out a coffee.
“I already had one.” I don’t look at her. I keep filling the bucket. The water hits the plastic and the sound fills the silence where a thank you should be.
She stands there for three seconds. I feel her eyes on me. Then she sets the coffee on the feed bin and walks away.
That afternoon she finds me in the tack room. “Can we talk about the conditioning schedule for next week? I want to adjust Josie’s lateral work.”
“Email it to me.” I’m reorganizing bits. They don’t need reorganizing. “I’ll review it when I have time.”
“Beckett.”
“I’m busy, Hartley.”
Hartley. Not Brynn. I watch the name land. I watch what it does to her face. A flicker. Then nothing. She nods once and leaves.
Saturday. She’s in the round pen with Hank. I walk past without stopping. She calls out a question about the footing in the north paddock.
I answer her. I even stop walking when I do it. But I don’t look at her.
She’s quiet for a second. “Thanks,” she says. Then she goes back to the horse.
She doesn’t try again.
That’s the thing that guts me. She doesn’t chase. She doesn’t corner me or demand an explanation or bring up the kiss. She goes back to work. She trains horses. She refines the program. She gives me exactly what I’ve been asking for.
Distance. I wanted the wall back. I got it. And the wall feels like a coffin.
Two days.
I last two days.
It’s almost midnight Saturday when I’m doing rounds and I hear familiar footsteps. She’s checking on Rebel.
Her voice low and warm.
“Hey, buddy. How you doing tonight?”
Rebel nickers.
“Yeah, me too. It’s been a long couple of days.”
I should leave.
I walk to the stall.
She’s sitting on the floor. Cross-legged. Rebel is standing over her with his nose near her shoulder.
She looks up. Her eyes find mine in the dim light.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
I open the stall door and sit down on the floor beside her. Rebel looks at me. Looks at her. Goes back to his hay.
We sit in silence.
“I’m sorry,” I say. The words feel like gravel. “For the last few days.”
“I know why you did it.” Quiet. Not angry. Understanding. Which is worse than anger because anger I can fight. Understanding walks right through the wall. “You got scared.”
I should deny it. I should say something about professionalism and how the kiss was adrenaline and crisis.
“My mother left when I was twelve,” I say instead.
I don’t know why. I’ve never told anyone on this ranch. But the words come out like they’ve been sitting in my chest for nineteen years waiting for someone safe enough to hear them.
I tell her. Not all of it. Not the worst parts.
But enough. “She didn’t even tell me goodbye.
She just wasn’t there one morning. Coffee pot cold.
Her side of the closet empty. A note on the kitchen table that said ‘I’m sorry’ and nothing else.
Then my father started drinking more after she left.
The ranch we lived on wasn’t ours. It was owned by a man named Harding who let us stay because my father was useful with cattle when he was sober.
But he finally had enough and told us to leave when I was fourteen.
My father dropped me at my uncle’s place in Wyoming when I was fifteen and drove away.
I was sixteen when I stopped expecting him to come back.
“This ranch is the first place I’ve belonged,” I say. “The first place where I wake up and the ground is still under me. And then you showed up and everything shifted and I don’t know how to want someone without waiting for them to leave.”
She’s quiet for a long time.
“It wasn’t a mistake,” she says. “The kiss. For me it wasn’t.”
“For me either.”
“Then stop acting like it was.”
I move before I know I’m moving. My hands on her face. My mouth on hers. Rebel startles and then settles and Brynn’s hands are in my hair and she’s kissing me back with the steady certainty of someone who knew I would break.
I stand. I pull her to her feet. She’s looking up at me, breathing hard, her lips swollen from the kiss, and I’m done thinking. I’m done being careful. I bend down and throw her over my shoulder.
She laughs. The sound bounces off the barn walls and Rebel snorts and Birdie lifts her head from the next stall to see what the commotion is about.
“Put me down!”
“No.”
“Beckett Cole, I swear to God...”
“My office has a couch.”
She stops struggling.
I carry her down the barn aisle. She’s light and warm and her laughter has turned into something breathless. Her hands grip the back of my shirt.
I kick the office door open. It’s small.
A desk, a filing cabinet, a worn leather couch that’s been here longer than I have.
I set her down on her feet and her hands are already on my shirt, pulling, yanking, and I’m pulling at hers and our mouths crash together.
It’s desperate and messy and three weeks of wanting compressed into the need to get closer.
Her shirt comes off. My shirt comes off. Her jeans. My jeans. Her bra. I’m pushing her back toward the couch and she’s pulling me with her and we fall onto it together.
I press her into the cushions. She arches up against me and the contact of skin on skin makes us both groan.
I kiss her throat, her collarbone, the freckles on her shoulders.
My hands are on her breasts, squeezing, my thumbs raking over her nipples.
Then I hook my fingers under the waistband of her panties and pull them down.
I kiss my way down her body. I kiss the scar on her hip.
She props herself on her elbows and watches me with eyes that are dark and daring.
“You don’t have to...”
“Shut up, Hartley.”
“Make me.”
I drag my mouth along her inner thigh and suck hard enough to leave a mark.
Mine.
The thought hits me before I can stop it. Primitive and possessive and completely fucking unreasonable. I want my mouth on every inch of her. I want to leave evidence. I want her walking into this barn tomorrow with my mark on her skin and both of us knowing exactly who put it there.
I want to brand her.
Not with iron. With me.
I put my mouth on her center and her head falls back and the challenge dies on her lips. I use my mouth and my tongue and my fingers and I pay attention to what makes her gasp and what makes her shake and what makes her grip the cushion so hard her knuckles go white.
I’m not tentative. I’m thorough and deliberate and the sounds she makes are low and urgent and better than any sound I’ve ever heard.
“Beckett.” My name spilling out of her. “Oh God. Don’t stop.”
I grip her thighs and hold her open and give her everything and when she comes, she’s loud. Her whole body tightens and she cries out and the sound echoes in the small office and I feel it in my chest.
I don’t give her time to recover. I stand. I strip off what’s left. She looks at me and her eyes go wide. Then I kneel on the sofa.
I lift her ankles to my shoulders. She’s still catching her breath. Her hair is everywhere and her cheeks are flushed and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I line myself up and start to push in. Slow. She gasps and her hands fly to the cushions and her body resists and then yields.
“You can take it,” I tell her. My voice is wrecked.
I push her knees forward against her chest. She’s pinned under me and I look down and watch myself disappear into her. Her body stretching around me.
“Look at you,” I say. “Taking my cock so well.”
She whimpers. Her eyes are squeezed shut and her mouth is open and her fingers are digging into the couch.
I pull out. Slow. Wet with her. The sight of it snaps something in my brain. I slam back into her and she screams.
“Yes.” She gasps. “Oh God, yes.”
I thrust. Faster. Harder. She likes it rough.
Of course she does. Of course this woman who fights me on everything matches my intensity here too.
She meets me stroke for stroke, her body demanding more.
Sweat drips down my back as she moans in pleasure, biting her lip as if that’ll stop the sounds from spilling out.
I flip her over. She goes willingly, scrambling onto her hands and knees.
I grip her hip with one hand and fist her hair with the other as she looks back at me over her shoulder, eyes full of hunger and need.
I drive into her from behind. Deeper this way.
So deep she drops to her elbows and presses her face into the cushion.
“Beckett. Yes. Yes.”
I can feel her tightening around me. I pull her hair and her back arches and I thrust harder and she is loud when she comes. The kind of loud that fills the barn. The kind of loud I want to hear for the rest of my life.
I thrust one final time. Deep. Pushing her forward into the cushions as I come inside her. The release tears through me and I grip her hips and hold her against me and the sound I make is not a word. It’s something primal.
We collapse. The couch is too small for two people but we don’t care. I flip us again and she’s on top of me, her cheek against my chest, both of us slick with sweat. The office smells like leather and us and the hay that never leaves this barn.
Her finger traces a circle on my chest.
“Beckett?”
“Yeah.”
“You taped my schedule to the door.”
“Tape holds better.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her eyes are dark and soft and satisfied and there’s something in them that feels like coming home.
“I’m not leaving,” she says. “I know that’s what you’re afraid of. But I’m not.”
I pull her closer. Her body fits against mine in the narrow space. Small and warm and solid.
The barn is quiet. The horses are sleeping. My office smells like a woman I can’t stay away from.
For the first time, the wall being down doesn’t feel like exposure. It feels like breathing. Like I’ve been holding my breath for nineteen years and this woman is the exhale.