Chapter 14 #2
She picks up the pen, tucks it behind her ear, and closes the notebook. Then she stands and looks down at me with the expression I first fell for in a diner parking lot, the one that says I see through every wall you've built and I'm coming anyway.
"Lead the way," she says.
We drive to the motel outside Scottsdale where we've been staying since the circuit moved to Arizona.
The room is on the ground floor, dim and cool, with the curtains drawn against the parking lot lights.
I close the door behind us and turn to face her, and the distance between us is a few feet and shrinking.
She moves first. Steps into my space and puts her hands on my chest, palms flat against my shirt, and the contact sends heat straight down through the center of me.
"Colt."
The way she says my name is different from every time before. The journalist's armor is gone. The cover identity is gone. The careful distance she maintained while lying to me about who she was is gone.
What's left is Kenna Corbin, Grant's sister, the woman who fought her way onto a rodeo circuit alone, and she's standing in front of me with her hands on my chest and her eyes wide open.
I cup her face in both hands. My thumbs trace her cheekbones, the edge of her jaw, the spot behind her ear where her pulse flutters rapid and hard.
"Tell me your name," I say.
"Kenna."
"Tell me why you're here."
"Because my brother was murdered, and the man standing in front of me is the only person in the world who loved him the way I did, and I am done pretending that either of those things doesn't matter."
I kiss her. Not gentle. Not asking. The kiss of a man who's been fighting this for days and just stopped fighting.
I take her mouth the way I take a ride, with my whole body committed and nothing held back. My hands slide from her face into her hair. I fist the dark weight of it at the base of her skull and tilt her head back to get the angle I want.
She makes a sound against my mouth, half gasp and half surrender, and her fingers curl into my shirt and pull.
I walk her backward through the room, not slow, not careful, and when the backs of her legs hit the mattress I don't ease her down. I press, and she goes.
Her back hits the sheets and I follow, one knee between her thighs, my hand still tangled in her hair. My mouth finds the hinge of her jaw, the column of her neck, the pulse point that I've been watching since the kitchen in Creede.
She tastes like salt and the desert air and the last traces of whatever lipstick she put on this morning.
I bite down on the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, not hard enough to mark but hard enough that her hips buck off the mattress and her hands fly to my shoulders.
"Tell me your name," I say against her skin.
"Kenna." It comes out breathless.
"Full name."
"Kenna Corbin." Her fingers dig into the muscles of my shoulders. "You going to ask me that every time?"
"Every time. Until it stops being new." I lift my head and look at her. Her lips are swollen from the kiss, her hair is wrecked against the white sheets, and her eyes are dark and defiant and wanting.
"This time, you don't hide. Every time before, some part of you was holding back. The part that knew the lie was between us. That's gone now."
"That's gone now," she repeats, and the agreement is quiet and absolute.
I pull her tank top over her head. She reaches for my shirt and works the snaps open, and the sound of them popping fills the quiet room like small caliber rounds.
She pushes the fabric off my shoulders and runs her hands down my arms, her fingers tracing the scars on my forearms with a deliberate attention that tightens something low in my gut.
I unhook her bra and drag it off her arms and drop it on the floor. The moonlight through the gap in the curtains paints silver across her collarbones, her breasts, the freckles scattered over her skin.
I trace them with my mouth, unhurried, tasting each one, and her back arches off the mattress when I close my lips around her nipple and pull.
"Colt." My name fractures in her throat.
I take my time with her breasts because the sounds she makes are worth the patience. I use my teeth until she gasps and my tongue until she sighs. I learn the difference between the sound that means more and the sound that means I can't take any more, and I push her past both.
Her hands are in my hair, pulling, and the sharp sting of it sends a jolt of heat straight to my cock.
I unbutton her jeans and drag them down her legs. Nothing underneath. She lifts her hips to help, and I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, the soft skin where her pulse thrums close to the surface.
She smells like arousal and clean sweat and something under both that is specifically Kenna, the scent I've been catching in truck cabs and kitchens and borrowed beds for days. I breathe her in and feel my control thin to a wire.
I strip the rest of my clothes, and she watches me do it. The way her eyes track down my body makes my skin feel like it's running a current.
No shyness. No performance. She looks at me the way she looks at everything, with that sharp, evaluating focus that should be clinical but isn't because underneath it her breathing has gone ragged.
I settle between her thighs, skin against skin from chest to hip, and the full-length contact draws a sound from her that I feel in the base of my spine. I brace my weight on one forearm beside her head and use my free hand to tilt her chin up.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Her eyes are blown dark, the pupils swallowing whatever color is there, and the expression on her face is stripped of every defense she's ever built.
"You're mine," I tell her. "I don't let go of what's mine. And I don't care what name you used or what lies you've told or what anyone on that circuit thinks they know about us."
I push into her in one long, steady stroke, and the tight heat of her clenching around me drags a groan from somewhere deep in my ribcage. She gasps at the stretch, and her nails cut into my shoulders, ten sharp points of contact that I will wear tomorrow.