Chapter 19 #2
The interior of the house smells like cedar and leather and the sunbaked warmth of stone walls that have absorbed a thousand afternoons.
The rooms are spare and masculine throughout, with a kitchen that has open shelving and a butcher block counter, a small room and bath off the kitchen that Colt says is Emmett's, a living room anchored by a stone fireplace and a leather couch that's seen hard use, and a bedroom at the end of a short hallway with windows facing the mountains.
His trophies are here. Championship buckles line the hallway wall, catching the afternoon light, and beside them hang photographs.
One stops me. Him and Grant at an event, both grinning, both young, both looking like the world owed them something and they planned to collect.
Grant's arm is slung over Colt's shoulder, and they're both covered in arena dust. The easy, unguarded joy on their faces is the kind that only exists between people who haven't learned yet that the world takes things away.
I touch the frame. The glass is warm from the sun.
"When was this?" I ask.
"Scottsdale. He'd just scored big and I'd gotten bucked off before the buzzer, and he wouldn't shut up about it for the rest of the weekend." His voice roughens at the edges. "He was the most annoying winner I ever met. I miss it every time I ride."
I look at the photograph and see my brother the way Colt saw him.
The rival, the friend, the man who grinned like the world was a joke only he understood.
The version of Grant that existed on this circuit, the one I only knew from phone calls and holidays, is preserved on this wall in a hallway in West Texas.
Colt is behind me in the hallway, close enough that I can feel the heat off his body.
The space between us has been shrinking since the cemetery, since the word love in the morning light, since the drive through West Texas where his hand found my thigh over the center console and stayed there for miles.
"Kenna."
I turn. He fills the hallway with his shoulders and his height and the intensity that radiates from him like heat from stone.
"This is home," he says. "And if you want, it can be yours too."
The words don't need a ring or a ceremony. They're an open door, offered by a man who keeps his locked.
"I want," I say.
He kisses me.
The kiss starts slow, his mouth moving over mine with a care that's different from every other time. There's no desperation in it, no anger, no adrenaline. Just the steady, purposeful intention of a man who has decided this kiss means something new, and he's going to take his time with it.
His hands come to my face, thumbs tracing my jaw, fingers threading into my hair. He tilts my head back and deepens the kiss, and I taste coffee and dust and the faint sweetness of the hard candy he's been working on during the drive, and underneath all of it, the taste that's just him.
"Bedroom," I say against his lips.
"What happened to food first?"
"Priorities shifted."
"They shifted fast."
"Blame the hallway. And the buckles. And the thing you said about home."
His hands drop to my hips, and he lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist, and he carries me to the bedroom with the mountain view and the bed that's never held anyone but him.
He sets me on the edge of the mattress and steps back. He looks at me sitting on his bed, in his house, in the place he built with his own hands and keeps separate from the world.
"You sure?" he asks.
"Colt."
"I need to hear it."
"I'm sure. I've been sure since Albuquerque. I was sure when I was lying to you, and I was sure when you found out, and I was sure in a storage yard in Tucson when someone was shooting at you and the only thing I could think was that I hadn't told you yet."
He pulls his shirt over his head. The scar tissue across his ribs catches the late afternoon light, and the muscles of his stomach tighten as he breathes. His body looks different here, in his own space, framed by his own walls, carrying a weight and permanence it didn't have in motel rooms.
I reach for his belt. He catches my wrist.
"Not yet." His voice has dropped to the register that does things to my pulse that should probably concern me. "I have a plan."
"You have a plan for sex?"
"I have a plan for this." He kneels between my legs and puts his hands on my knees, pushing them apart with a pressure that's firm without being rough. "This is different."
"Different how?"
"Every other time, we were running from something or toward something. Tonight we're here." He looks up at me with steady, focused heat and nowhere to be behind it. "I want to take my time."
"And if I don't want you to take your time?"
"Then you can try to rush me." The corner of his mouth lifts. "I'd enjoy watching that."
"Is that a challenge?"
"It's an invitation."
He starts with my boots, pulling them off and setting them beside the bed.
Then my jeans, his fingers working the button and zipper with the same efficiency he brings to a bull rope.
He slides the denim down my legs and drops it on the floor, and his hands trace back up, palms flat against my calves, the outside of my thighs, the curve of my hips.
"Lift up."
I lift. He pulls my shirt over my head, and I'm left in my bra on his bed.
"You're staring, Holloway."
"I'm admiring. There's a difference."
"Is this the plan? Admiring?"
"This is the overture. The plan comes later."
"An overture. You're full of surprises."
"You have no idea." He unhooks my bra with one hand, and the fabric falls away. His mouth finds the curve of my neck, and the sound I make is involuntary and completely undignified and I don't care even slightly.
He is thorough. Slow and intent and touching everything with the focus of someone cataloging what he's been given and refusing to miss a detail.
His mouth maps a path from my throat to my collarbone to the space between my breasts, and his hands hold my hips still when I try to arch into him, pinning me to the mattress with a pressure that's immovable.
He takes one nipple into his mouth, and the flat of his tongue drags across the peak slow enough to make me hiss through my teeth.
He gives the other the same attention, working each one until they're swollen and sensitive and every brush of his lips sends a current straight down through the center of me.
"Colt. Please."
"Not yet."
"You keep saying that."
"And you keep trying to rush." He lifts his head, and the look in his eyes has enough heat to char timber. "Let me have this."
"You're enjoying this."
"Immensely."
"You're enjoying making me beg."
"I'm enjoying making you wait. The begging is a bonus."
His mouth moves lower, down the plane of my stomach, teeth grazing my hip bone, tongue tracing the hollow beneath it.
He presses his mouth to the inside of my knee, then works higher, the inside of my thigh, higher still, his breath warm against skin that's already oversensitive. I can feel the cruelty of his pace in the way my hips try to lift toward him and his hands hold them flat.
"Colt, if you don't—"
"Patience."
"I'm going to kill you."
"After." He looks up at me from between my thighs, and then his mouth is on me, and I stop forming words.
His tongue moves in slow, flat strokes, learning the terrain before narrowing his focus. He finds the spot that makes my spine arch and stays there, alternating pressure and pace with a maddening accuracy that accounts for every response and adjusts accordingly.
My fingers twist into the sheets and then into his hair, and the sounds I'm making have abandoned anything resembling dignity.
He slides two fingers inside me, curling them forward, and the dual sensation of his tongue and his hand working together undoes every boundary between my body and my brain.
The orgasm builds from a low heat to something I can feel in my teeth.
When it breaks, it breaks hard. My thighs clamp against his head, my back leaves the mattress, and the sound that comes out of me fills the bedroom and probably carries to the pasture where the horses are going to have opinions about it.
He works me through it, easing the pressure but not pulling away, drawing out every tremor until I push at his shoulder because the sensitivity has crossed from pleasure into something I can't take.
He lifts his head and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
The look on his face is pure satisfied male, and under any other circumstances I'd take issue with the arrogance, but he earned it and we both know it.
"That was the overture?" My voice is wrecked.
"That was the overture."
"What's the plan?"
"I'll show you."
"Give me a minute. You broke something."
"I'll wait."
I don't give him a minute. I push myself upright and put my hands on his shoulders and shove him back until he's sitting on the edge of the mattress.
The surprise on his face is worth cataloging. Colt does not get pushed. Colt does not sit where he's told to sit. The fact that he lets me move him tells me more about what's shifted between us than any words he's said today.
I drop to my knees between his legs. His stomach tightens, and I watch the muscle jump as I run my hands up his thighs.
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to." I work his belt open and pull it free, then the button, the zipper. He lifts his hips and I pull the denim down, and the hard length of him is thick against his stomach. "I want to. I've been thinking about this since Creede."
"Since Creede?"
"You walked out of the shower and I had a very detailed internal conversation about what I wanted to do to you." I wrap my hand around the base of him, and the breath he lets out is rough and raw. "You were oblivious."
"I was not oblivious. I was exercising restraint."
"How's that restraint treating you now?"
His answer dies when I lower my mouth over him. I take him in slowly, letting my tongue press along the underside, and the sound he makes is the first truly uncontrolled sound I've ever heard from him.