28. Clara #2
He turned me toward the railing and stepped in behind me, his chest to my back, his mouth finding the side of my throat.
One arm banded around my waist. The other gathered the skirt of my dress, slow, inch by inch, until the night air touched my thighs.
His palm followed the fabric up, over bare skin, higher, until his fingers brushed the lace I was wearing and he exhaled like he’d been punched.
“You’re already wet.” It wasn’t crude. It was wonder. His voice had gone low and rough against my ear. “Is that for me? For coming home?”
“Yes.”
He stroked me through the lace. I gripped the stone railing and let my head fall back against his shoulder.
His fingers slipped beneath the fabric and found me properly, slick, swollen, aching, and he made a quiet, broken sound that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with relief.
“God, I missed the way you feel.” Two fingers slid into me, deep and easy, and my knees nearly went. He held me up with the arm around my waist and worked me slowly, curling, stroking, his mouth open against my neck. “Missed how warm you get. How you open for me. How you try to be quiet and fail.”
“Quin…”
“I know.” He kissed my shoulder, the strap of my dress, the top of my spine. “I’ve got you. Let me take my time. I spent months wanting this. I’m not going to rush the first night I get you back under our sky.”
He withdrew his hand only long enough to ease the lace down my legs. I stepped out of it. He tucked it into his pocket like a secret, and the intimacy of that, of him keeping it, sent another pulse of heat through me. Then he was on his knees.
I looked down. Quin Fleming, on the balcony of the house he’d built, on his knees behind me with my dress gathered at my hips and his mouth already at the small of my back.
“Hold the railing,” he said.
I did.
He kissed his way down. The dimple at the base of my spine.
The inside of one thigh, then the other, spreading me with his hands, and then his mouth was on me from behind and I had to bite my lip hard enough to hurt.
His tongue was slow and devastatingly thorough, licking through the wetness his fingers had already drawn, sealing over my clit, sucking until my arms shook.
He didn’t hurry. He ate me like he was saying grace.
Like coming home had a taste and he intended to memorize it.
“You taste like mine,” he murmured against me, and the words vibrated through the most sensitive part of me.
“You always did. I used to think about this out here. You. Open. Letting me have you while the whole ranch went on not knowing.” His tongue pushed into me, then withdrew, then found my clit again with a patience that was almost cruel.
“I am never taking this for granted again.”
I came on his mouth with my forehead pressed to the stone and his name trapped in my throat. He stayed with me through it, licking me through the aftershocks until my thighs trembled and I had to reach back and find his hair.
“Up,” I managed. “I need you up. I need you in me.”
He rose. I heard his belt. The low sound of his zipper. Then the thick, hot press of him against the small of my back, and his mouth at my ear again, gentler now.
“Tell me you want this here.”
“I want this here.”
“Tell me if it’s too much. The night. Anyone…”
“It’s not too much.” I reached behind me and wrapped my hand around him. He was hard, heavy, already slick at the tip, and he hissed when I stroked him once, slow, from base to head. “I want you inside me looking at our land. I want to come home that way.”
“Then that’s how you’ll have me.”
He lifted my dress the rest of the way to my waist. I felt him notch against me, the blunt heat of him parting me, and then he pushed in from behind in one long, controlled slide that stole the air from both of us.
I was soaked from his mouth, from his fingers, from months of missing him, and still the stretch of him made my mouth fall open. He filled me to the hilt and held there, shaking, his hands gripping my hips hard enough to leave a memory.
“Christ.” His forehead dropped between my shoulder blades. “You feel like coming home. You feel like every night I stood out here and asked for you back.”
“Then move,” I whispered. “Show me you got the answer.”
He did.
Slow at first, deep. The kind of rhythm that had nothing to do with finishing and everything to do with claiming the ground we’d almost lost. Each thrust pushed me into the railing; each withdrawal left me aching for the next.
The night air cooled the places he’d made wet.
His body kept me warm. I could see the barn lights, the dark line of the hills, the stars smeared above the pasture, and I could feel him, thick, relentless, so deep it bordered on too much, dragging over that place inside me that made my vision go white.
“That’s it,” he breathed. “Take me. Just like that. You were made for this. For me. For this house. For the way we fit.” One hand slid around to my front, down, and his fingers found my clit again, circling in time with his hips.
“I want to feel you come on me with our whole life in front of you. I want you to remember this every time you walk onto this balcony.”
“I will.” It came out wrecked. “Quin. Harder. I can take it. I want to feel you tomorrow.”
He gave me harder. Still controlled and precise.
The slick sound of us was obscene against the quiet of the ranch, and neither of us apologized for it.
His mouth opened on my neck. His other hand palmed my breast through the dress, thumb finding my nipple, rolling it until I arched back into him and he groaned like I’d hurt him in the best way.
“I love you.” He said it into my skin, into the thrust, into the night. “I love you in this dress. I love you choosing this bed and this house and this stubborn, impossible life with me.” His fingers on my clit pressed firmer. “Come for me, Clara. Come home. Let me feel it.”
I shattered around him with my eyes on the stars and his name in my mouth.
It pulled through me in long, rolling waves, my body clamping down on his cock so tightly he cursed, and then he followed, burying himself to the root, pulsing inside me, filling me while his arm locked around my waist like he was afraid the night might take me back.
We stayed like that.
Him still inside me. Me still trembling against the stone. The ranch breathing below us as if nothing in the world had changed, when everything had.
He kissed the nape of my neck. Twice. Soft now. His hand splayed over my stomach, holding me to him while he softened, while both our heartbeats came back down.
“Welcome home,” he murmured into my hair.
I laughed, shaky, wrecked, happier than I had any right to be with my dress around my waist and his spend starting to slip down my thigh.
“I’m home,” I said. “For good.”
He eased out of me carefully, turned me in his arms, and kissed me like the gentleman he still was, slow, thorough, tasting himself on my mouth without shame.
Then he lifted me as if I weighed nothing and carried me back through the French doors, into our room, into the bed someone had made with lavender under the pillows.
He cleaned me with a tenderness that made my throat tight. Drew the quilt up over both of us. Pulled me into the shape of him like I had never left it.
Outside, the balcony held the night we’d just given it.
Inside, I fell asleep to the sound of my husband breathing, in the house that was ours again, and did not dream of leaving.