Chapter 20 #3
"Always." The word cracks out of her on a breath, and her hips roll up to take me deeper.
I start to move. Slow and deliberate, pulling almost all the way out and driving back in with enough force to make her gasp.
Every stroke is deep and thorough, and the wet sound of our bodies connecting fills the room alongside her ragged breathing and my own.
Her nails dig into my shoulders and her body responds to mine the way it always has, arching and clenching and pulling me closer.
"You have no idea what you do to me." My mouth drops to the hollow of her throat, my teeth grazing her pulse point. " Being inside you. Feeling you come apart on my cock."
"Jesse." My name breaks in her throat when I hook my hand under her knee and push it higher, changing the angle. The next thrust hits deep enough to elicit a gasp, and her eyes go wide.
"Right there." She says between ragged breaths. “Right there Jesse. Oh God! Fuck me harder.”
I don't let up, holding the angle, driving into her with measured force that has the headboard tapping the wall. "I can feel you squeezing me. You're close."
"I'm so close." Her voice is shattered. Her hand slides between us, reaching for her clit, and I catch her wrist and pin it to the mattress.
"That's mine." I replace her fingers with my own, my thumb circling her clit in time with my thrusts, rough and precise, the way her body has taught me she needs it. "You come when I tell you, and you come on my cock."
Her walls flutter and clamp around me, her breath coming in short, desperate bursts, and the tension in her body coils so tight I can feel it in every muscle pressed against mine.
"You're mine, Raven." The words are pressed into her skin between strokes that have her gasping. "Every part of you. And I am yours. No expiration."
I pull out and flip her over, and the sound of protest she makes turns into a moan when I pull her hips up and drive back into her from behind. The angle is devastating, deeper, tighter, and my hand grips a fistful of her hair and pulls her head back just enough to bare her throat.
"Now." My voice is ragged against her ear, my hips pounding forward, my thumb working her clit. "Come for me, Raven. Right now. I want to feel you fall apart."
She shatters with a scream she buries in the pillow, her whole body seizing around me, her pussy clenching so hard it borders on pain.
Wave after wave rolls through her, and I fuck her through every one of them, relentless, my grip on her hair anchoring us both while her body wrings everything from mine.
"I love you." The words tear out of me as I bury myself to the hilt and let go, spilling inside her with a groan that comes from the deepest part of me, my hips stuttering against her as the release crashes through me.
My arm wraps around her waist and I pull her back against my chest, still buried inside her, still pulsing, my face pressed into the curve of her neck while my breathing comes in harsh, ragged pulls.
We collapse onto the mattress together, sweat-slicked and breathing hard. I stay inside her because I'm not ready for the separation and neither is she, her hand reaching back to grip my hip and hold me in place.
My arm tightens around her waist, my palm flat against her stomach, and I can feel her heartbeat hammering against my chest.
After a long time, I pull out carefully and turn her to face me.
Her eyes carry something I've never seen in them before, soft underneath the heat, open in a way that has nothing to do with her body and everything to do with the walls she just let fall.
Her mouth curves into something that isn't quite a smile but warms a part of me I thought went cold a long time ago.
"That was different," she says quietly.
"Yes." I push a strand of hair behind her ear. "It was."
"The dirty talk stayed, though." Her mouth twitches.
"The dirty talk is non-negotiable."
She laughs, low and real and exhausted, and the sound of it settles into my bones like something I've been starving for. She rolls into me, her head on my chest, her leg thrown over mine, and the sunlight through the plaid curtains turns her hair to flame.
"Tomorrow," she murmurs against my chest.
Tomorrow. The debriefs, the statements, the federal grind. Carmichael will want formal depositions and the Bureau will want Raven's testimony and the long work of dismantling what Harlan and Alvarez built will begin in earnest.
But today, Raven is in my bed and in my life. She chose this cabin, this land, this dangerous man who killed his own father and spent a decade in shadows to keep her safe. She chose me with her eyes wide open, knowing exactly what I am and loving me anyway.
For the first time since I stood on that tarmac and watched Carmichael's plane carry her into the dark, the weight in my chest is gone.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. Knox's name again. The second time since we got back, which means whatever is happening at Devil's Acre isn't getting better.
She locked herself in the bathroom for an hour. When she came out her knuckles were bleeding. She'd been hitting the tile wall.
I stare at the message. Knox doesn't text about women.
Knox doesn't text about feelings. My brother fights, drinks, and runs his operation with the brutal efficiency of a man who turned his father's violent legacy into the only currency he understands.
The fact that he's sending me updates about a woman he supposedly doesn't care about tells me everything his words don't.
What do you need?
I type back.
I don't know.
Then, after a long pause:
She won't eat. She won't talk. She keeps looking at the door like something's going to come through it. Then stand between her and the door. I'm already there.
I set the phone face down and pull Raven closer. She murmurs something against my chest that sounds like my name, already drifting, and the ease of it, the way she lets go without a fight, is worth more than everything I've traded to get here.
Outside the cabin, the Hill Country stretches in every direction, green and gold and patient the way Texas always is, waiting for whatever comes next.
The road to Fredericksburg runs south through the cedar breaks, past the Blue Fork Ranch where it all began, past Devil's Acre where my brother is standing guard over a woman who might just destroy him.
Raven's breathing evens out, slow and deep. Her hand rests over my heart, and the last thing I see before I close my eyes is the light catching the copper in her hair.
For the first time in ten years, she isn't running from Fredericksburg.
She's home.
DELILAH
The lock on the guest house door is flimsy. A solid kick would take it off the hinges, and the man on the other side of it could do it without breaking stride.
I know because I've been listening to him pace for hours.
Knox Hollister. The name sits in my chest like a bruise I keep pressing on, older and deeper than anything the men who held me could reach.
I was seventeen the first time I saw him at a rodeo in Bandera, all broad shoulders and rage barely leashed behind those pale blue eyes, and something inside me recognized something inside him in a way that scared me worse than my father's sermons ever did.
That was before Daddy's debts caught up with him. Before the men came to collect what he couldn't pay and took me instead.
My hands are shaking. The knuckles on my right hand are split open and throbbing from where I hit the bathroom wall until the panic stopped feeling like it was going to eat me alive.
Blood smears across the quilt when I press my fists into the mattress, and some distant part of me knows I should clean the wounds, should eat the food he left outside the door, should do something other than sit here in the dark and listen for the sound of tires on gravel that means they've found me.
They will find me. They always find me.
The only question is how many people I take down with me when they do.
Knox knocked twice about an hour ago, steady and deliberate, the kind of knock that says I'm not leaving without making it a threat.
"Delilah." His voice through the door had been low and rough, like he'd swallowed gravel. "There's food on the step. Water, too. You don't have to open the door. You don't have to talk to me. But you need to eat."
I didn't answer. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and my arms wrapped around my knees and waited until his boots creaked back across the porch.
The food is still sitting there. I can smell cornbread and something with beef, and my stomach cramps hard enough to fold me in half, but the thought of opening that door, of being visible, of existing in a space where someone can reach me, turns the hunger to ash.
I spent twelve months on concrete floors, bound with zip ties, surrounded by men who smelled like sweat and cheap cigars.
Twelve months of learning exactly how much pain a body can absorb before the mind detaches and floats somewhere above it all, watching from a safe distance while the body does what it has to do to survive.
I got out three days ago. I killed a man to do it, drove a piece of rebar through the soft spot below his ear, and I'd do it again without blinking.
I walked for two days through backcountry I barely recognized, moving at night and hiding during the day, following the stars the way Daddy taught me before the world went dark.
My feet carried me here without conscious decision, to the ranch where Knox Hollister runs his fights, because some part of me remembered this place as the last thing that felt safe.
That's a lie, though. Knox Hollister has never been safe.
He's a Hollister, blood and bone and violence all the way down, and the way he looked at me through the barn door when one of his hands found me face-down in the hay told me everything I needed to know about what's going to happen next.
He's going to want answers. He's going to want to fix this.
And when he finds out who took me and what they're connected to, he's going to do something that will get him killed.
I should leave. I should steal a truck, disappear south, and put as much distance between me and Devil's Acre as I can before the men who owned me realize their property is missing. Knox doesn't need my darkness. Nobody does.
But my legs won't carry me to the door, and my hands won't stop shaking, and somewhere on the other side of this wall, a man I've thought about every night for a year is sitting on a porch with his fists clenched, refusing to leave.
They're coming. That was the only true thing I've said out loud in twelve months.
The porch creaks. He's still there.
I pull my knees tighter to my chest and wait for the world to crash through that door. When it does, Knox Hollister will be standing in front of it.
I should warn him to run. I should tell him what's coming, what I've done, what kind of men will follow me here and what they'll do to anyone standing in their way.
Instead I press my bleeding knuckles against my mouth and make myself a promise. When they come, and they will come, I won't let Knox Hollister die for me.
Even if staying alive means becoming the kind of monster they tried to turn me into.
Continue the Bourbon and Blood Series
The war isn’t over.
Not even close.
While Jesse and Raven fought to expose the cartel poisoning Texas Hill Country, another threat was already rising in the shadows.
One tied to old sins.
Old blood.
And a man dangerous enough to burn everything down to protect what’s his.
Coming Next: Sinner’s Brand
A steamy dark western romantic suspense filled with danger, obsession, and enemies who should never have touched what belonged to him.
Don’t miss any books in the series.
Whiskey and Ashes
Raven’s Mark
Sinner’s Brand