Chapter 20
POV: Colt
The words left her mouth and something inside me finally settled into place.
“Your move, cowboy.”
I closed the last of the distance and took her mouth the way I had wanted to since the night I cut the ropes off her wrists.
No more almost. No more hovering. Just the full claim of it—deep, hungry, seven years of silence poured into one kiss.
She met me with equal force, fingers already in my hair, body arching into mine like she had been waiting for the same permission.
We didn’t make it to the house.
I backed her against the same support beam that had once held her bound and lifted her.
Her legs wrapped around my waist on instinct.
The skirt of the simple dress she had worn down here rode up.
My hands found bare skin—warm, real, mine.
I growled against her throat and she answered with a sound that went straight to the base of my spine.
Clothes became an obstacle we solved with impatience.
Her dress hit the hay-strewn floor. My shirt followed.
I got my belt open one-handed while I kept her pinned, mouth moving over the fading bruise on her collarbone, the healed cut at her temple, every mark the last weeks had left on her.
Reverent and rough at the same time. She deserved both.
When I finally pushed inside her the world narrowed to heat and the broken noise she made against my shoulder. Tight. Perfect. Home. I held still for a second that felt like forever, forehead pressed to hers, breathing her in.
“Look at me,” I said.
She did. Eyes dark, lips swollen, the gold band I had given her already warm on her finger where it rested against my neck.
I started to move—deep, deliberate strokes that dragged another sound out of her every time I bottomed out.
The beam creaked. Hay shifted under my boots.
I fucked her like I was trying to rewrite every night she had spent reading my texts alone, every mile that had kept us apart, every second she had walked toward another man in a dress that was never meant for her.
She took it. Gave it back. Nails scored my shoulders.
Her mouth found my ear and the filthy, aching things she whispered there nearly ended me.
I shifted the angle, got a hand between us, and watched her come apart with my name in her mouth and her eyes locked on mine.
The sight pulled me under right after her—hard, complete, the kind of release that felt like something permanent locking into place.
We stayed like that for a long minute, breathing hard, her legs still around me, my face buried in the curve of her neck.
When I finally set her down her knees were unsteady.
I kept an arm around her until she found her balance, then tugged my shirt over her head because the night air had turned cool and I wasn’t ready to let the rest of the world see what was mine.
We didn’t speak while we pulled the rest of our clothes back on. Didn’t need to. The silence felt full instead of empty for the first time in years.
I led her to the open barn doors and we sat on the threshold as the sky over Shadow Creek began to lighten.
Pink first, then gold, spilling across the pastures and the distant ridge where the old hunting cabin still stood.
Her head rested on my shoulder. My grandmother’s ring caught the new light every time she flexed her fingers.
“The only ride that ever mattered,” I said quietly, “was the one that brought you home.”
She turned enough to look at me. Then she took my hand—the same one that had held a branding iron at fifteen, that had killed for her, that had thrown a Blackthorn ring into the dark—and pressed it flat over her heart. The beat under my palm was strong. Steady. Certain.
“Still beating for you,” she said. “Always was.”
I kept my hand there while the sun finished clearing the ridge.
Somewhere behind us a horse shifted in its stall.
The wind moved through the open doors and carried the clean scent of morning grass and the faint memory of smoke that would fade with time.
I reached back with my free hand and pulled the heavy barn door closed.
The soft click of the latch sounded louder than it should have—final, quiet, the sound of a past that no longer got to dictate the terms.
We sat like that until the light was full, her heart under my palm and the rest of our lives stretching out across the quiet land in front of us.