16. Fifteen
I was halfway to the arroyo trail before I let myself admit I was leaving.
My feet had decided back at the guest bedroom doorway.
My body was already out along the east fence in the dark, and it wasn't out there to check the fences.
Four hours before sunrise. The trail dropped into the arroyo past the second barn and left the ranch without crossing open ground.
The cave down there held a bedroll, rope, tins, and ammunition.
I could reach the river by morning and his chain-link by tomorrow night.
Walk in on my own feet with my hands empty and give him what he wanted.
The truth was, I wanted to kill him so badly my teeth ached.
I'd trade myself for the ranch, let him hunt me, and somewhere out in that dark, on ground I knew better than he did, I'd turn around and open his throat.
Nobody else dead. Nobody else in danger.
It was a fair trade, as long as I didn't think too hard about the part where I might lose.
Every day I stayed, John was in danger. The ranch was in danger. One walk in the dark and I could put my body between all of it and him for good. Wasn't that what I was for?
Nimue lay around my throat, drawn so tight I felt my own pulse beating against her belly. She knew. She always knew before I did.
I stopped at the trailhead and stood there hating myself, because I already knew what stopping meant.
I'd given John a map of every way off the property, the cave included, so he'd always know the way out.
Then I'd promised him that if I ever went, he'd know where.
I ran it through every way it could go. If I told him the direction, he'd come after me with his ribs half healed and his kit over his shoulder.
Then Zaroff would have both of us, and the trade would buy nothing.
If I went without telling him, that was a lie.
I didn't lie to John anymore. Lying to John cost more than I had.
And under all of that, at the bottom, was the thing I'd been walking around all night: I didn't want to die alone on Zaroff's ground with nothing of John to hold. I wanted Zaroff dead, and I wanted the ranch safe, and I wanted John more than both.
I turned around.
The guest bedroom light was still on when I came up behind the kitchen garden.
Sierra sat with a blanket over his knees, and Miguel's chest rose and fell under the sheet, easier than at dusk.
The fever had peaked and broken, the way John said it might.
Good. The kid had taken a bullet and walked a day and a half to warn us. He got to live.
I crossed the yard and let myself into the equipment shed.
John lay on his bedroll with one arm behind his head, eyes open and already on me. He woke whenever I came in, no matter how quiet I was.
"How far did you get?" he asked.
I shut the door behind me. "The arroyo trail."
"And?"
"I stood there for a while." I crossed the boards and knelt on my own bedroll, an arm's length from his. "I was going to trade myself. Walk onto his ground and give him his prize. He'd have no reason to touch this place again."
He didn't move, but his breathing changed. I'd done that to him, and I hated it. "What stopped you?"
"The promise." I lifted Nimue from my shoulders and set her on the folded horse blanket she'd claimed by the wall.
She took her time sliding off my hands, sulking about it.
"If I tell you where I'm headed, you’ll follow me and he gets both of us for free.
If I don't tell you, I've lied to you." I sat back on my heels.
Even in the dark, he was watching me. "I couldn't find a way through it that didn't break something I said to you. So I came back."
He sat up, wincing as his ribs pulled. His hand crossed the space between our bedrolls and found my wrist, and two fingers settled on my pulse.
"Your pulse is racing," he said.
"I know." It had been hammering since the doorway, up under my jaw, behind my teeth. "It's what that kid said. He made it sound like Zaroff thinks I belong to him." I scooted closer. "I'm not his. I'm not anybody's unless I say."
"I know that, little one."
Something under my ribs came loose, the way it did every damn time he called me that. I used to flinch from it. Now I'd started needing it, and I couldn't decide which one of us that made pathetic. It made the next part possible to say, anyway.
"I decided something."
"Oh?"
"I want to bite you. Not like before. I want to bite you so that it scars. I want you to have a piece of me on you always, right here, above your heart." I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart was going fast, too. Good. "And I want you to do the same to me. So I always have a piece of you."
He sighed. "Little one. I don't know if I can do that. I don't want to hurt you."
"Every mark I carry, somebody put there to hurt me." I shook my head. "Bites. Burns. Knives. All of it from people who wanted me small. I want one mark on this body that got put there on purpose, by somebody who—"
Somebody who loves me. The words stuck in my throat. He watched me fight it and didn't finish it for me, didn't cheapen it by saying it first. My jaw worked once.
"By you," I finished. "That's not hurting me for the sake of hurting. That's hurting me because I'm yours. Same as you're mine. It's like..." I looked around the shed like the word might be sitting out on a shelf. "Like a wedding ring you can't take off."
He let out a long breath through his nose. Then his fingers left my pulse, and his hand closed around the back of my neck. He hauled me across the arm's length between our bedrolls, and his lips came down on mine.
He took his time kissing me. He took his time with everything, and it drove me half out of my mind.
I let him have it for as long as I could stand it.
Then I climbed onto him, knees on either side of his thighs, and pressed him back into the saddle stack, careful of the right side, my palm flat over his dressing.
He laughed low into my mouth. "Playing doctor?"
"Checking my property."
He dragged my shirt over my head. Then his hand came up and closed around my throat where Nimue rides, thumb settled under my jaw on the pulse, and held.
Not squeezing. Holding what was his. My cock jerked in my jeans.
His hands went down my back, over the old scar lines, without stopping, without asking, without being too careful.
My skin warmed everywhere they passed. Nobody else's hands had ever crossed those scars like they were just skin.
I worked his shirt open and pushed it off him and took a second to look, because I was allowed to now, and I still couldn't quite believe it.
His chest was one of my favorite things about him: big and sun-browned, silver hair scattered across it, nothing carved or showy anywhere.
He wasn't built like Linc or Joe, and he wasn't soft either. He was just big and warm and mine.
I put my hand flat over his heart and felt it beat against my palm. "Right here," I said.
"I figured."
I stripped out of the rest of my clothes and helped him out of his, making him lift instead of twist. The lube sat in the crate beside his bedroll, between the gauze and the spare batteries, because after last time neither of us pretended it belonged anywhere else.
I slicked my fingers and reached back and worked myself open, kneeling over his lap, where he had to look at it.
He looked. Jaw tight, breath gone ragged, cock hard and heavy against his belly and leaking onto his own skin, both hands running up my thighs and staying there, gripping.
I went fast and rough, less than I needed, because I wanted the burn waiting for me, and he knew me well enough not to tell me to take it easy.
"Now," I said.
He held himself steady for me, and I sank down onto the head of his cock.
The stretch punched a groan out of me. Fuck, the burn of it.
I wanted more of it. I wanted it to hurt going in so my body would remember him tomorrow, mid-stride, halfway down a fence line, wanted to feel exactly where he'd been.
He was so damn big and so damn patient, holding still under me while I took him an inch at a time, his hands wrapped warm around my thighs, holding me steady.
Mine. That was all I was thinking. Not the trade, not Zaroff, not the boy sweating out his fever across the yard.
Just mine, mine, this big warm man splitting me open and letting me set the pace like I was something worth waiting for.
By the time my ass came down flush against his balls, I was shaking all over and leaking on his belly without a hand on me.
I ground down there and felt them draw up tight under me, and he said fuck into my hair.
I dropped my forehead to his collarbone and breathed him in, sweat and antiseptic and horse, and thought, let Zaroff come. Let him see what I go home to.
"All right?" he said into my hair.
"Quiet."
I rode him while he kissed me, chest to chest, one arm hooked around his neck.
I kept my lips on his the whole time, dragging, breathing what he breathed, catching his bottom lip in my teeth every time I came down.
It was a mistake, and I made it on purpose.
Fast burns off. This built. Every drop of my hips dragged him over my prostate and set my thighs shaking, and my cock rubbed slick against his stomach.
The heat pulled up out of my thighs and knotted low in my gut until I was whining into his neck, thin and high, a sound nobody else would ever have heard out of me.
He kept his ribs still and let me do the work, his hands flexed hard on my thighs every time I sank down.
His breath was harsh and broken near my ear. I did that to him. Me.
"Little one." His voice came out rough. "When you're close."
"I know."