Chapter 9 #3
"Make me."
His pupils blow wide and his breathing changes, and he enters me in a single hard thrust that drives the air from my lungs.
The fullness of him stretches me to the edge of pain, and the sound I make is raw and loud and nothing I'd want anyone else to hear.
He doesn't wait. He pulls back and drives in again, setting a pace that's faster and harder than last time, each thrust shoving me up the mattress until my head hits the wall.
I brace one hand against it and use the leverage to push back into him, meeting every stroke, and the wet sound of our bodies colliding fills the bunkhouse.
"Say it," he growls against my ear. His hips snap into mine, and his free hand grips my hip hard enough to leave marks.
"I'm yours." The words spill out on a moan, and I mean them more than I want to admit. "I'm yours, Colt."
"Damn right you are."
He hauls my hips up, changing the angle, and the next thrust hits so deep I cry out.
He holds there, buried to the hilt, grinding against my clit with a slow, circular motion that rebuilds the pressure from the base of my spine upward.
I'm shaking, my thighs trembling around his hips, and he watches my face with the focused intensity of a man who's memorizing exactly what breaks me.
He starts to move again, and this time there's no control left. The headboard slams against the wall in a rhythm that would be embarrassing if I cared about anything beyond the feeling of him driving into me, hitting the spot that makes my vision go dark around the edges.
My nails rake down his back, leaving welts I can feel rising under my fingertips, and the sound he makes when I dig in is half pain, half pleasure, and entirely animal.
My second orgasm doesn't build. It detonates.
One second I'm climbing, the next I'm falling apart, my body clenching around him so hard that he groans through his teeth.
The orgasm rolls through me in waves that start in my core and radiate outward until my fingers are tingling and my toes are curled and I can feel my pulse in places I didn't know had a pulse.
He follows me over, and the way he comes is nothing like the controlled man I’ve seen before.
His hips stutter, his breath cracks, and he buries himself as deep as he can get and holds there while his body shudders against mine. The sound he makes with his face pressed into my neck is low and broken and the most honest thing I've ever heard from him.
After, we lie tangled in the striped blanket, the bunkhouse cooling around us, and the silence is different from every silence that's come before.
It isn't avoidant or loaded. It's the silence of two people who've left marks on each other that go deeper than the scratches on his back and the bruises on my hips.
Colt's arm is across my waist. His thumb traces the curve of my ribcage in a slow, absent rhythm. The tenderness is back, the same quality he showed me in the truck when he took my hand, and it sits alongside the possessive dominance like they're two sides of the same coin.
"Grant's name was in that ledger," I say into the dark.
His thumb pauses, then resumes.
"Handled." The word comes out jagged. "Like a line item. Like a task on a to-do list."
"We photographed everything. We have it. They can't take it back."
"Colt." My voice cracks, just once, a hairline fracture in the composure I've held together since I walked onto this circuit. "They wrote Grant and Tyler's names next to a word that means they murdered them, and they kept it in a filing cabinet like it was inventory management."
His arm tightens around me. His mouth finds my temple.
"We're going to take every photograph we shot tonight and hand it to the FBI," he says. "Merrick. Thornton. Every person who put a pen to that page. They're going to spend the rest of their lives behind a wall. That's what writing Grant and Tyler's names in that ledger buys them. A cage."
I press my face into his shoulder and breathe. He smells like dust and sweat and the cedar soap I've started associating with safety. Nothing about Colt is safe, but the feeling persists, stubborn and irrational and exactly the kind of complication that's going to detonate when the truth comes out.
Next, we find Rainey and then get the evidence to Torres.
I should sleep. My body has been running on adrenaline and spite for hours, and the crash is pulling at my edges.
But sleep means waking in the dead hours, the same time every night, the hour Grant's body gave out in the Las Cruces dirt while I was in Austin packing boxes and believing he was fine.
I don't know the exact minute. The coroner's report gave a window, and my body picked a time inside it and made it permanent.
Every night. Eyes open, heart slamming, reaching for a phone that has no new messages and never will.
Tonight, the man holding me in a borrowed bunkhouse on a dark ranch in the middle of nowhere doesn't know my real last name, and every hour I spend in his arms makes the lie harder to survive.