Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
KNOX
She saw my face. I let her. And then she moved.
She's between my legs now. My clothes are gone, and her hand is wrapped around me while she looks up at me from under her lashes with an expression that has been dismantling me for the last thirty seconds.
Firelight on her hair. Her grip slow and deliberate and entirely certain.
She is watching my face the way I watch everything.
Cataloguing, collecting, holding onto it somewhere she intends to return to.
She has been thinking about this. Not in the abstract. This, specifically. What I look like when I can't control myself. She wants to watch me lose it. I can see it in her face as clearly as I can see everything else about her, which is a problem I stopped trying to solve one week ago at the rodeo.
Her thumb drags across the tip, slow. A question she already knows the answer to.
I hiss through my teeth.
Then she bends her head and puts her mouth on my cock and I stop being a man who manages anything.
Her mouth is warm and certain and she takes her time with it, her pace, her call, in command of what's happening to me and aware of it.
She sucks her cheeks in and swirls her tongue and my erection swells.
My hand goes to her hair. Not guiding. She doesn't need guiding.
I need something to hold onto and she is what I reach for.
"Christ." Out loud. Past any ability to stop it.
She hums against me, low and satisfied, and the vibration travels up my spine.
I tighten my hand in her hair and say her name in a voice I didn't know I owned.
I watch the ceiling and feel the woodstove heat on my left side and feel her and there is nothing else.
No Blackwater, no investigation, no weight of everything I've burned and buried and decided.
Just the firelight and her mouth and the fact that she wanted this specifically.
That she's been carrying it since the rodeo the same way I've been carrying her.
I can feel the edge building. I am not going to make it.
"Slow down, baby." Rough. Not a command. A confession. "I'm not going to last."
She pulls back just enough to look up at me.
"Don't you want your cum in the back of my throat?"
I stop breathing.
She holds my gaze for one beat, dazzling and absolutely deliberate, and then she takes me back in. Two slow rotations of her lips, one long pull and her cheeks sucking hard, and I am gone.
I erupt.
There is no other word for it. My hand fists in her hair and my hips jerk and I say her name at a volume that has nothing civilized in it.
FUCK, Maren, dragged up from somewhere below language.
She takes everything I give her without moving, without pulling back, and stays exactly where she is until I am finished pulsing.
Then she stays a moment longer, her choice, her pace, her call to the very end.
When she finally looks up at me, I see it.
That's the thing I'm not prepared for. Not the act.
What's on her face after. Private and unmanaged, the look of a woman who got exactly what she came for and found it better than she imagined.
She is looking at me now with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who has just confirmed something she suspected for a long time.
I am as gone as she thought I was. More.
I reach for her face and pull her up to me. Her mouth meets mine and I feel the salt of myself on her lips and I don't care. I pull her closer, my hands in her hair, and she makes a small sound against my mouth that I feel in my chest.
Then she shifts against me. Feels what's already there.
She goes still. Pulls back. Looks down between us and then back up at my face.
"Knox."
"I know."
"You're already—"
"I've been this way since way before the rodeo." The confession rough and unguarded because I have no filters left when it comes to this woman. "But that's when I decided to show you."
She looks at me for one long second.
I get her on her back in one motion, settle between her thighs, and look at her in the firelight. Flushed and breathing hard and watching me with those eyes that go complicated in low light, green-brown and gold and entirely decided.
I push in slow.
We both go still.
Skin to skin. Nothing between us, no barrier, just her, and the feeling of it hits me like a fist. I’ll never get tired of it.
In fact, it’s all I think about. I’ve never had any woman without protection, until Maren.
Slick and impossibly tight, her walls gripping me before I've even started to move, and I drop my forehead to hers, lock my jaw, and breathe.
Three counts. Four. I am thirty-one years old and I am not going to lose my fucking load in the first ten seconds.
"Knox." Breathless. Her nails find my back.
"I know." Somewhere underground. "One second."
"Take your time," she says, and the edge of humor in it, now, here, almost breaks me before I've moved.
I pull back and drive in and she drags her nails from my shoulder blades all the way down. The sensation tears up my spine and nearly undoes me on the spot. I make a sound against her throat that I don't try to swallow.
She's wet and smooth and every stroke she grips me harder, her walls pulling at me like she's trying to keep me there. I put my mouth at her ear and I talk. True things. Things I've been carrying.
"I saw you at the rodeo." Low. My hips finding the rhythm she meets. "Before any of it. I was already watching you walk to the gate."
She makes a sound. Her hands tighten on my back.
"I've known since I was twenty-two." I pull back and drive in and feel her gasp against my jaw. "Talked myself out of it every single time." Watching her face. "Stupidest thing I've ever done."
"Knox—"
"Agree with me." I thrust into her.
"Don't be—" Her breath breaks. "Don't be smug while you're—"
"Agree with me." I thrust deeper.
"Yes." Barely. "Yes, it was — Knox, don't stop—"
I go still.
Not all the way. Still enough. A fraction of the movement she needs, taken away, enough that she feels the absence immediately.
She makes a sound that is not agreement.
"Beg me."
Her eyes open. She looks at me with an expression that has every version of Maren Sullivan in it.
The woman who negotiates from the dirt, the woman who walked around a conference table and blew up my entire life.
And underneath all of it, this. What she is right now in this narrow bed with my weight pressing her into the mattress.
A beat. Her chest heaving. The woodstove ticking. Her walls pulsing around me in a way that tells me exactly how close she already is.
"Please." Quiet. Real. The word costs her something and she gives it to me.
I bury myself in her so deep I feel her clamp down hard around me.
"Wasn't planning to stop," I tell her, and I give her everything.
I find the angle I've been keeping in my back pocket since the conference room, the one that makes her lose the thread of whatever she was about to say, and I work it without mercy.
She goes loud. I don't care. There is no one for miles.
I feel her getting close, her walls tightening in waves around me, pulling at me.
I don't know if I can hold on another second and I'm not planning to.
I drop my mouth to her ear.
"Come for me, baby." I groan. "Come all over my cock.
" My hand drops between us and I circle her clit with my thumb.
She drags her nails from my shoulder blades all the way down my back.
I hiss through my teeth and my grip on the headboard goes white.
"I feel you getting close. I've got you.
" I keep the pressure steady. "Scream my name, Trouble. "
She screams my name. Not the polished version.
The other one. The one from last night that I told her was the only way I wanted to hear it.
When she was thinking about me, when she was coming.
I didn't know if she'd kept it. She keeps everything.
She says it broken in the middle, like a mantra, over and over while she pulses around me, and I follow her over the edge and I stay there a long time.
When I come back to myself, I have my face in her hair and her legs are still locked around me and neither of us is talking.
I don't move for a while. She doesn't ask me to.
At some point I become aware of my left side.
The graze. Still intact, as far as I can tell.
I think about what Maren did with that needle this afternoon and what I just did with those stitches and I decide I am damn lucky.
I'm probably going to feel it tomorrow. Right now I cannot bring myself to care even slightly.
We lie in the dark while the storm finishes. Her back against my chest, my arm over her, her hand slack over mine. Spruce branches drag across the roof in gusts and settle again. The cabin smells like cedar and pine smoke and her.
"I told Laney when we were sixteen that you were the most stunning thing I'd ever seen in my life and then I spent the next fourteen years pretending I hadn't said it."
I go very still.
Then something happens that I have no control over whatsoever.
I smile.
Not the corner-of-the-mouth version I deploy when she wins an argument. Not the rare dry thing that escapes when she catches me off guard. A real one. Full. The kind that takes over my face before I can decide whether to let it.
She feels it against her hair and tilts her head back to look at me.
Whatever she sees makes her breath catch.
"Don't," she says. But she's smiling too, I can hear it.
"You told Laney at sixteen?"
"Knox, I swear to God—"
I pull her closer and put my mouth to her temple.
The grey light finds us tangled together, her back against my chest, neither of us having moved far from where the night left us.
She's awake.
She's been awake long enough to watch me sleep, which I know the way I know everything about her now.
She's too still for unconsciousness, her breathing slightly wrong.
She goes completely boneless when she's asleep.
This is something else. She's been lying here in the dark doing what she does with everything: holding onto it.
I reach for her before I've decided to.
My hand moves over her hip, her waist, the curve of her stomach, slow and deliberate, the way you touch something you have time for. Her skin is so perfect, smooth and soft. She doesn't pretend to be asleep. She turns toward me.
"Morning," she says. Voice groggy from the night.
She settles against my chest, her hand finds my left side. Not the stitches. Just beside them, her palm warm and careful against the skin, light as anything.
I look down at her hand.
She doesn't look up. I press a kiss to the top of her head, warm, solid, brave.
Healing, I think. Despite everything.
The first morning that's been only a morning. That's the only thing I know how to call it.
She takes the propane stove. I take Jacob's envelope.
We don't discuss this. She puts a pan on the two-burner, I bring the envelope to the table and we exist in the same small space with the ease of two people who have stopped negotiating the terms.
I read fast. Most of it confirms what we already found in the driver's house: route records, the shell company, the numbered account. Jacob's handwriting gets smaller toward the bottom of the second page. Speed overriding legibility, a name scratched through so hard the pen went through the paper.
Third page. Fourth. I read past a 1962 survey authorization without registering it. Sixty-year-old bureaucracy. I turn the page.
I don't register the mountain name in the upper right corner.
I don't know I should have.
At the back of the envelope, one loose page folded in thirds. I open it and my hands go still.
A Blackwater account number. Older than the one I found on ranch servers last week. Below it, a Calgary routing code I recognize from a glass building on the Bow River I visited once at twenty-three and never went back to.
Maren sets soup in front of me and sits across with her own bowl.
She doesn't look at what I'm reading. She doesn't push. She trusts me with her room.
I am about to repay that trust with a lie she won't be able to locate.
I fold the page into my palm under the table's edge. The woodstove is behind me. I reach for the salt and feed the page into the fire in one motion and listen to it take and curl without turning around to watch it go.
I set the rest of the documents between us.
She reads. Asks two questions. I answer both. She photographs four pages and I let her.
When she reaches across the table I almost pull back.
I don't.
Her fingers close around mine. Her glasses on. Her soup going cold. My hand smells like smoke.
She doesn't mention it.
I sit with the weight of the burned page and think: I am going to get this wrong. The wrongness is already ash. It is going to find her eventually, because everything finds her. When it does, she is going to take it apart with the patient precision her family built into her before I ever met her.
I'm going to deserve it.
I choose her anyway.
She looks up and finds me already watching her. The glasses come off.
"There's something here," she says. "About the shell company."
"I see it."
"Sullivan Transport used them in 2018."
"I know."
She holds my gaze. "We need to talk to Holt about the Calgary account."
"Tonight. When we have signal."
She nods and lets it sit. Her eyes go back to the documents.
I squeeze her hand once. She squeezes back and lets go. I watch her read and think: I will figure out how to deserve it. That's the only plan I have and it will have to be enough.
I'm still watching her when I hear it.
Footsteps. Not wind, not rain. This is something underneath it. Boots on wet ground, moving fast, then slow, then fast again. Someone circling the cabin who doesn't want to be circling it for long.
I set my hand on the shelf where the gun is.