Chapter 5 #3
I reach for his belt again and this time he lets me.
My hands are still unsteady but I get it open, get the zipper down, and he kicks free of the rest of his clothes.
I get my hand around the hard length of him.
He is thick and hot against my palm and when I stroke him from base to tip, his whole body goes rigid above me.
"Fuck," he breathes against my jaw, and the single word sounds like it cost him something.
I stroke him again, tighter, twisting at the head, and his hips thrust into my fist. The control he wears like armor is cracking and I want to watch it break. I want to be the one who breaks it.
He pulls my hand away and his forehead drops against mine and his breathing is ragged.
"I need to be inside you," he says. "Now."
"Then stop talking."
He notches himself against me and pushes in, slow and relentless, inch by inch.
The stretch of him fills me so completely that my mouth opens on a silent gasp and my fingers dig into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
He holds himself there, buried to the hilt, his jaw clenched and the tendons in his neck standing taut while my body adjusts to the size of him.
"Look at me," he says.
I open my eyes. The controlled mask he wears is gone. What I find underneath is feral and consumed and entirely, terrifyingly focused on me.
He pulls back slow and drives in deep, and the sound I make is half moan and half something closer to a sob.
He does it again, watching my face, cataloguing every flicker of sensation the same way he catalogued my body with his hands, and when he finds the angle that makes me cry out he locks into it and doesn't let go.
The pace he builds is punishing and precise. I match it, lifting my hips to meet each thrust, wrapping my legs around him, pulling him deeper. He responds with a groan that fractures against my collarbone, and I feel the vibration of it all the way down to where our bodies are joined.
My nails score lines down his back and he responds by pinning both wrists above my head with one hand, holding me there while his hips drive harder.
The weight of him, the grip on my wrists, the relentless depth of every stroke, all of it builds into a pressure so intense that my whole body starts to shake.
"Give me that," he says, and his voice has dropped into something low and absolute.
The orgasm hits like a whiteout. Every muscle in my body locks tight around him and the release tears through me in waves so strong that my vision goes dark at the edges. I hear myself say his name, once, twice, and then his mouth covers mine and swallows the rest.
He lasts three more strokes. His rhythm breaks, his grip on my wrists tightens, and he buries himself as deep as he can go.
The groan he lets out against my throat is the most unguarded thing I've ever heard from him.
It sounds like it starts in his chest and rips its way out, raw and wrecked and close to anguished, like surrender is a language his body speaks but his mind has never learned.
He stays there, pressed deep, his face against my neck and his breath coming in harsh, uneven pulls against my skin. His hand releases my wrists and his fingers lace through mine instead, and that small shift from control to connection hits me harder than anything that came before it.
We lie there, tangled together on the ruined sheets, and his body is still inside mine and his heartbeat slams against my ribcage where our chests are pressed together, and neither of us moves to separate.
Afterward, we lie on the ruined motel bed in the thin light leaking through the curtains, and neither of us speaks.
His arm is across my waist, proprietary even in the quiet. His breathing is evening out, but he's not asleep. The tension in his fingers against my hip gives him away, the way his thumb traces absent circles on my skin.
I stare at the ceiling and feel the lie sitting between us like a third body in the bed.
I am Grant Corbin's sister.
I am lying to a man who just pinned me against a door and then took me apart with his hands and his mouth and the weight of his body.
A man who carries my brother's death like a debt he can never repay. A man who probably won't forgive himself for not saving Grant, or me for using Grant's death to crawl into his bed and his investigation under a name that isn't mine.
I don't regret what just happened. My body is still humming with the aftermath, my skin still warm where his hands mapped it.
Colt's breathing deepens.
His arm tightens around me, reflexive, pulling me closer even in the drift toward sleep.
The AC unit cycles on with a rattle. A truck door slams somewhere in the parking lot. The motel room settles into the particular stillness of a place that holds too many strangers' secrets, and now it holds ours.
I close my eyes and let the warmth of him pull me under, and the last thought I have before sleep takes me is that I should be scared.
Instead, I press my face into the hollow of his shoulder and let the smell of cedar and sweat and spent adrenaline fill my lungs, and the guilt and the want curl together in my belly until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.