Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
Millie
Gage took a three-day break from the ranch.
And he didn't. Stop. Breeding me.
I lost track of time slowly, then all at once. The first day I was still aware of the hours. The second day I wasn't.
By the third I had stopped being a person with a schedule and become something simpler. Something that ran on heat and hunger and the specific sound of his footsteps crossing the floor toward me.
He fed me. That was the thing I remembered in fragments—his hand at my jaw tilting my head back, a glass of water, half a sandwich I didn't taste, something warm in a bowl that I finished because he stood there until I did.
He was methodical about it, the same way he was methodical about everything. Fuel. Rest. Then back to it.
Back to it.
God.
The bench was first, or first again—I'd lost count of how many times we'd started there. He strapped my wrists and left my legs free and worked me open so slowly I was begging before he'd done anything I could have named out loud.
"Please," I said. "Gage, please—"
"Please what." Not a question. He already knew.
"Inside me. Please, I need—"
"You need to wait," he said. "You haven't been waiting long enough."
I had been waiting for approximately my entire life. I told him so. He laughed—that low, brief exhale—and pressed two fingers inside me and held them still.
"There," he said. "That better?"
It wasn't. It was worse and it was perfect and I told him that too, and he did something with his fingers that made me sob against the padding.
"You're so wet," he said, almost to himself. His fingers worked slow, spreading, and I felt myself clench around nothing every time he pulled back. "Every time. Three days and your pussy still gets this wet for me this fast."
"Please—"
"I'm going to fill you up," he said. Conversational. Like he was telling me the weather. "Going to put my cock in you and keep it there until you've taken every drop. You understand?" His thumb found my clit and pressed and I cried out. "Answer me."
"Yes—"
"Yes what?"
"Yes, I understand, I want—Gage, please—"
He pushed inside.
I came immediately, clenching around him before he'd even finished the stroke, my whole body arching against the bench's padding. He stopped. Held. Pressed his palm flat across my lower back and waited me out.
"Again," he said, when I'd stopped shaking.
"I just—"
"I know." He pulled back and drove forward. "Again. Want to feel you come on my cock before I give you what you need."
"What I—" I lost it when he did it again. "What I need—?"
"My come," he said simply. "Deep as I can get it. That's what you need." His hips rolled and I gasped. "That's what's going to give us our baby."
I came again so hard I bit the padding.
He held himself deep when he finished, one hand splayed across my lower back, the other pressed warm and certain against my belly. Keeping me in place. Keeping everything exactly where he'd decided it was going to stay.
"Good girl," he murmured. "Stay just like that."
I wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to.
The wedge pillow changed the angle.
I hadn't known about angles. I'd thought angles were something people talked about in magazines, theoretical, and then he'd arranged me on that wedge and pushed inside and hit something so deep and specific that I made a sound I'd never heard come out of my own body before.
"There," he said. Satisfied. Like he'd located something he'd suspected was there.
"What—" I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Right there." He rolled his hips, deliberate, and found it again. And again. "That's where I want to be. That's where it's going to take."
"Gage—"
"You feel that?" He pressed deeper, held. "Feel how deep I am?"
"Yes—" The word came out wrecked. "God, yes—"
"That's where my baby's going to be." His hand slid around to spread across my lower stomach, pressing slightly, and I felt him through the pressure from both sides and made a sound that was almost embarrassing.
"Right here. Already might be." His hips pulled back and drove forward and I grabbed the quilt. "But we're going to make sure."
He stayed there. On purpose, methodically, for a very long time.
His hands on my hips, tilting the angle fractionally every few strokes to map exactly what made me lose my mind, cataloguing it the way he catalogued everything about this land—carefully, permanently, like information he intended to use for the rest of his life.
I came so hard my vision went white at the edges.
He kept going.
"Gage—" I gasped. "I can't—"
"You can." His thumb found my clit and I choked on a sound. "You're going to give me one more. Want to feel your pussy milking me. Want to make sure you get everything."
I gave him two.
Afterward he pressed the cup into place himself, careful and deliberate, and I felt the warmth of it and of him held deep inside me and thought dimly that I would never recover from this man.
That there was no version of me that came out the other side of this unchanged.
That I had walked into a fertility clinic in a marigold mask with a spreadsheet and a plan and I had ended up here, on a wedge pillow in the Hill Country dark, being taken apart and put back together by a man who knew exactly where every piece went.
You're going to be pregnant, he'd said.
Probably already are.
I pressed my face into the quilt and let my body do what it was supposed to do.
The window was his idea.
Late on the second night—or maybe early on the third morning, time had become a suggestion—he pulled me out of bed and walked me to the east window. Hands flat on the glass. Looking out at the dark hills.
The creek glittered somewhere below. The sky was enormous.
He pushed in from behind and I gasped—cold glass under my palms and his heat at my back, the contrast so sharp it knocked the breath clean out of me.
"Look," he said, against my neck. "Look at it."
The Hill Country spread out below us, dark and ancient and endless. Twenty-four hundred acres. Three generations of Holts. The creek winding silver through cedar and limestone.
His hands came around to spread across my stomach.
"This is yours," he said. Low. Certain. His hips moved slow and I pressed back to meet him, fogging the glass. "All of it. You and whatever we made."
"Gage—"
"Say it."
"It's—" He drove forward and I gasped. "It's mine—"
"And whose baby are you carrying?"
The question hit somewhere low and deep and I clenched around him involuntarily and heard him exhale hard against my neck.
"Yours," I said. "Gage—yours—"
"That's right." His mouth found the curve of my neck, teeth grazing.
"Mine. In my house, in my bed, carrying my baby.
" One hand stayed spread across my stomach.
The other slid down. Found me. I jerked against the glass.
"This land isn't going anywhere." His fingers moved and my legs shook.
"You're not going anywhere." He drove forward and I cried out into the dark. "Say it."
"I'm not—" I lost it when he did it again. "I'm not going anywhere—"
"No." His arms tightened around me. "You're not."
He took me apart against that window with the whole sleeping ranch spread out below us and his mouth in my hair and his hand on my stomach and when I came he held me through every second of it, watching the hills over my shoulder like a man who had just confirmed something he'd always known.
The bath was slow.
My legs had stopped working properly somewhere in the middle of day two and he'd filled the tub without asking, helped me in, settled behind me in the water. I floated back against his chest. His arms came around me.
We stayed like that for a long time.
I was aware, distantly, that I was in some state I didn't have a name for.
Past exhausted. Past oversensitive. Through the other side of it into something quiet and loose and completely, stupidly content.
My body felt like something he'd worked over carefully and put back together even more carefully, and he was still holding all the pieces together with his arms and the hot water and the solid certainty of his chest against my back.
His hand spread flat across my stomach.
He did that constantly. Had been doing it since the first night, since before there was anything to feel, his palm pressing warm like it could will something into being.
Maybe it could. Maybe it already had.
"How do you feel?" he said.
"Like you've been breeding me for three days."
A low sound from him. Satisfied and unapologetic. "Good."
"That wasn't a complaint."
"I know." His thumb moved slow across my stomach. "How do you feel?"
I thought about it. My body, the weight of it in the water.
The specific ache that had stopped feeling like ache and started feeling like proof.
The way his hands on me had started to feel not like want but like right, like where they belonged, like something that had been true for longer than I'd known him.
"Different," I said.
He didn't answer. His hand just pressed a little warmer.
I let myself lean into it. Into him. Into the enormous quiet of the ranch outside and the steam and his arms and the specific stupid terrifying hope of it all.
I was twenty-six years old. I'd had a plan and it had fallen apart and I'd made a different plan and this had happened instead. A man I'd met in a waiting room. A contract that had become something that didn't have a name yet. A piece of land that had started feeling like mine.
I pressed my hand over his on my stomach.
"Gage."
"Mm."
"I'm going to take a test in the morning."
His arm tightened fractionally. "Okay."
"Whatever it says—"
"I know."
"I just mean—" I stopped. Started again. "I know you said you knew. But I don't want you to—I don't want it to be—"
"Millie." His mouth pressed to my temple. "Whatever it says, you're still in this bed tomorrow night."
I exhaled.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said back. Matter-of-fact. Like it was already settled. Like it had been settled for weeks and I'd just needed to hear it.
Outside the creek ran over limestone in the dark.
I closed my eyes and let the water hold me and thought: this is what I was making room for. All those spreadsheets. All that planning. I was making room for this, even though I didn't know it.
He kept his hand on my stomach all the way until the water went cold.