Chapter 11
LUKE
She goes still.
That's all it takes. One low sentence in her ear and her whole body stops. I've been hard since she leaned across the table to follow my finger on the overlay data, her shoulder against mine, and I have been managing that fact with everything I have, and I am done managing it.
I pull back far enough to see her face.
Her mouth is parted. Her eyes have gone dark.
I'm pressed close enough to feel the heat off her skin and I want her so badly my hands are not entirely steady.
I have wanted her like this since the gate.
Since she stood in my south pasture mud and demolished my stress fracture argument and I had to look at the mountains and remind myself that I do not do this.
I don't want things I can't keep. I don't start what I can't finish.
I pull her up out of the chair and into me, and her breath catches against my mouth, and I am finished being responsible.
She tastes like the Rusty Spur and late coffee and the argument she was about to win.
I have been thinking about this mouth since the night of my birthday, when I stood close enough to kiss her and chose to walk away.
That choice has been costing me every day since.
Every time she worked my land. The afternoon I aimed the heat vent at her in my truck cab just to watch her flush, and she did, and I spent the drive home so hard I could barely think straight.
"Tell me something," I say, rough, against her mouth.
"What?"
"Every time you were on my land and I was watching from the barn?—"
"What about it?"
"Tell me you were thinking about me too."
Her chin tilts up. That specific angle that means she is deciding whether to make me work for it. I wait. She knows I'll wait. The knowing is visible in her face.
"Every day," she says, a little breathless. "Every damn day I was on your property."
"How long?"
"From the gate."
I close my eyes for one second.
"Luke."
"From the gate," I repeat, and my voice does something I cannot help.
"The morning I came with the permits and you read every page and didn't look at me once." She sounds almost aggrieved about this. "That was not helpful."
"I was trying to be professional."
"You were infuriating."
"I moved the fence."
"At four in the morning!"
"The land required it."
She laughs, and the laugh lands in my chest and takes up space that was empty . Then she grabs the front of my shirt with both hands and says, close and specific, "Your mouth. Now. I have been thinking about it for a month and I would like to stop thinking about it."
I am going to be thinking about the way she just said that for a very long time.
"The table," I say.
I clear the end of it in one motion. Folders hit the floor. The maps go with them.
I get her shirt off and she gets her hands under the hem of mine and shoves it up, and I yank it over my head and toss it. The second it's gone she looks at me the way she looks at evidence. Taking inventory. Her hands settle flat on my chest and I feel them down to my boots.
Her bra clasp gives on the first try and she raises an eyebrow.
"Ranch work," I say against her collarbone, and she laughs.
Then I get my mouth on her and she stops laughing. I work down to the freckles across her shoulders I have been cataloguing for a month, and she makes a sound against the side of my neck that travels straight down my spine.
She gets her hand between us and palms me through the denim and I lose two full seconds.
"Jesus," I say. Against her temple.
"You've been like this all night."
"I've been like this for a month."
I get her jeans open and push them down. She reaches for my belt and I catch her wrist because if she does that now this will be embarrassing for me, and she reads my face and her mouth curves and she pulls her wrist back slow, and that look is going to live in my head on repeat.
I lift her onto the cleared end of the table.
"I want your mouth," she says, the exact voice she uses when she is reading a collar signal, plain, specific, no decoration, no apology. She tells me where. I go still for one second and she looks at me with something that is approximately one percent uncertainty and ninety-nine percent dare.
I drop to my knees in front of her kitchen table.
"You want to know what I was thinking about," I say, low, my mouth against her thigh, "when you came through my gate with your permits in order and your professional face on?"
"Yes." Her voice has lost its edges.
I press her thighs wider with my palms. She resists for a half-second, a small instinctive tension I feel against my hands, and then she opens for me, and I feel my cock kick hard against my jeans.
I tell her. Specifically. The pink at her throat from the heat vent. The drive home with my jaw locked and my hand white-knuckled on the wheel.
How I went straight to my shower when I got back and fucked my fist with my forehead against the wall, thinking about that flush, about how much pinker she'd go with my stubble between her thighs, about every sound she might make that I had not yet earned the right to hear.
"Oh," she says. Barely a word. More a breath. Her hand finds my hair.
"Still want the rest?"
She tries to be quiet for about thirty seconds. Then she stops trying.
She gets her heel hooked over my shoulder and her hand fisted in my hair and she says, "Fuck, Luke," low and broken, the way people say things they have been holding in for a long time, and I do not stop.
She arches off the table and her thighs shake against my face and I keep my mouth on her, working her through it, slower now, easing, steady, then quiet, until the tension drains out of her in stages and her hand loosens in my hair and her breath comes back in long, even pulls.
It is the best thing I have heard in so long.
I press kisses up her stomach, between her breasts, her collarbone, her neck, as I rise to my feet. She is still flat on the table, chest rising and falling, one arm thrown over her eyes. She lowers it. Looks at me like she has been taken apart and put back together one degree off-center.
"Where," she says, "did you learn to do that with your tongue?"
"You want the answer now?"
"Eventually."
"Eventually." I lean down, one hand on the table beside her hip, and get my mouth at her ear. "Right now I'd rather tell you what comes next."
She makes a sound that is half laugh, half something that tightens my whole body.
She is breathing hard again. Her red hair is tumbled across the table. She sits up and reaches for my belt.
She gets it open and my jeans and boxers go down in one motion. When her hand closes around me, I have to brace both palms on the table and breathe.
"Luke." Her voice drops to something awed. Her thumb traces the underside of me, slow. "Christ."
"That's what you do to me. Every time you walked onto my ranch. Every time I saw your ass in your tight jeans."
"You walked around like this all month?"
"Yes."
"Hidden under jeans?"
"Mostly."
She strokes me once, slow and deliberate, and the noise I make is not a noise I have made before. My voice is reverent when I find it. "Month of watching you."
"Bed," she says. "Now."
I dig the condom from my wallet and toss the wallet on the table.
Step out of my jeans. Get one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and lift her clean off the table.
She makes a small, surprised sound and her arms go around my neck and her mouth finds my throat, and the apartment is small enough that her bedroom is six steps away.
I lay her down and she reaches for me. I shake my head once and hold up the condom.
She drops back against the pillow, propped on one elbow, that small private smile at her mouth, the one I’m certain she hasn’t used in front of anyone else in this valley.
She watches me roll it on. The second it's on, she pulls me down between her long, pink legs.
I line myself up against her and stop. Forehead to hers. Holding. She opens her eyes.
"Don't be careful," she says.
"Mags."
"I have been waiting since the gate. Don't be careful."
I am not careful.
Her thighs wrap around my waist and I get one hand under the small of her back to angle her up and push into her in one brutal thrust. She is so fucking wet for me, and I tell her so, low against her ear, and she swears, reverent, the same way she swore the morning she found the fence moved, and I have to stop and breathe and not end the entire evening in the next ten seconds.
"Luke."
"Give me a second."
"No."
She moves. One excruciating circle of her hips. Just once. Teasing.
"Mags."
"No." The precise voice she used at the gate the morning she handed me her permits. It undoes the last useful thing about me.
I move. Slow at first, then not. I get my mouth at her ear between thrusts and tell her what she does to me.
What she has been doing to me. The truck.
Every night since the gate, alone in my bed with my hand around myself and her voice in my head.
I tell her she is the only thing in years that has gotten me there.
Her breath stutters against my jaw and her nails dig into my back and she says my name three times in a row, each one quieter than the last.
"Tell me you did the same," I say, against her ear. "Alone. Up here. While I was watching you from the barn."
"Yes." Just the one word. "Luke. Yes."
I almost finish from that alone.
I last long enough to get my hand between us and find her clit, circling it slow, and she comes apart the second time with her mouth open against my throat, her whole body pulling tight and then releasing in one long shudder, and the sound she makes when she goes, broken and bright and finally, finally, is going to live in my chest for the rest of my life.
I follow her orgasm immediately with my own, pulsing and driving down, my face in her hair and her name in my mouth. When I come back to myself she is still wrapped around me, breathing hard, her hand at the back of my neck, holding on.
The first time my head had gone quiet in so many years.
The Rusty Spur cuts off at midnight. The street goes quiet.
Montana summer fills the apartment through the open window, grass and pine and the faint, clean smell of the river.
Mags Kelly is in my arms in her bed above The Rolling Pin and I am looking at the ceiling with nothing to think about and not knowing what to do with that.
She traces the scar on my ribs.
I go still.
"How," she says.
"Fence wire. 2019. North pasture. I was moving faster than I should have been."
Her fingers stay where they are, light and steady, not performing sympathy. Just there with the information. Same as she was in the truck when I told her about my father. She receives things and stays, and I did not know how much I needed that until right now.
"You moved your fence before sunrise," she says. "Made sure the land was right before I could ask."
"The data required it."
She laughs, small and warm, and I feel it move through her ribs into mine.
I slide my fingers through her soft hair, working the tangles out one at a time. It is the most domestic thing I have done in so long.
Outside, a truck rolls slow down the alley below the window. I clock it without moving, thirty-three years of field instincts, same as breathing. It idles.
Then a flash in the dark. Brief, white, angled at this window. Gone.
The truck moves on.
"Luke?"
"Nothing," I say. "Go to sleep."
She turns her face into my shoulder. Her breathing evens out in under three minutes.
She is exhausted, access logs and field hours and weeks of not eating enough until I show up with food, and she drops like a woman who has been braced against something for a long time and has finally let it down. I wonder if there’s more to it.
I stay awake.
That was not a passing phone. The angle was wrong, the white too sharp, the truck too deliberate for someone who happened to be in an alley behind The Rolling Pin at midnight.
I run through who knows she is here. I run through who has been watching the south pasture long enough to know her survey schedule, her camera positions, every gap she didn't know she'd left.
I get to one name.
I lie there with it for a while, the full weight of it, and then I put it somewhere I can pick it up tomorrow.
Not tonight.
Tonight I stay put.