Chapter 17
LUKE
Shirt, bra, jeans, everything, my mouth leaving a wet trail down her skin as each piece goes. Her throat, her breasts, her stomach, her hands in my hair the whole time holding on.
When she's buck naked in the moonlight I sit back for one second and look at her, all of her, every curve.
That's all I allow myself before I spread her thighs and put my mouth exactly where I've been thinking about putting it for days.
Her pussy, wet and warm and so fucking ready for me.
The sound she makes the second I get there goes through me like a current I don't try to ground.
"Luke." Her hand in my hair, not pulling me away.
I don't answer. I'm busy.
"Luke, I —" She loses the sentence. Finds a different one. "You need to — oh god, right there, don't you dare stop —"
I don't stop.
She comes the first time with both hands yanking my hair and my name in her mouth, loud enough that the granite is going to remember it, and I take her through all of it, patient, thorough, until she goes heavy and her grip loosens and she lets out a breath like she's been holding it.
I don't move.
"Luke." A warning. Or a question. Hard to tell. "I need a minute."
"No you don't."
"I really —" She inhales sharply, her stomach tensing, as I start again, slower this time, deliberate. "That is not fair —"
"Wasn't trying to be fair."
"I swear to god if you don't —" She stops. Swallows. Starts over in a different register. "Please."
There it is. I've been waiting for that word.
I take my time. I have been thinking about doing this to her with an intensity that would embarrass a different kind of man. She is loud the second time. Louder than the first. It echoes off the granite and the timber doesn't care.
I care about nothing except the sound she makes when she's completely undone, which I am going to be hearing in my sleep for the rest of my life.
She is absolutely limp when I finally lift my head.
"I hate you," she says, to the sky.
"No you don't," I smile.
"I strongly dislike you."
"Also no." I get an arm under her knees and one at her back and stand up with her, which she does not see coming.
"What are you —" She grabs my neck. "Luke."
"Tent."
"I can walk."
"I know." I carry her anyway. She weighs nothing. She is also not complaining, which is information.
Inside, she's warm against me, her braid coming apart in a mess across the bedroll, and she looks up at me with an expression doing several things at once. Part scientist recalculating. Part something else she hasn't named yet. Entirely the most devastating thing I have looked at in my adult life.
Then she sits up and reaches for my belt buckle with her bottom lip caught between her teeth, focused, like she's solving a problem she's been looking forward to, and I groan before she even gets it open.
I'm so hard it's been a problem since the first time she came on my mouth, and she looks up at me through all that red hair as the belt comes free and the expression on her face tells me she already knows exactly what she's doing to me.
She smirks, slow, satisfied, her eyes moving over me in the firelight like she's been thinking about this all night and has been patient about it.
"I've been wanting to do this to you since the last time I had you," she says, low and unhurried. "You're going to feel everything." Her hand wraps around me as she says it and I get harder in her grip before she even moves.
Then she licks her lips, slow, looking straight at me, and I say something that is not a word.
"Hands off," she says.
I put my hands behind my head. A concession. She works the rest with the same precision she uses on equipment in the field, no fumbling, no hesitation, like she took the problem apart in her head first and already knows where every piece goes. My boots are gone. Then the rest.
Her mouth on me is spectacular, her tongue working in slow swirls and long strokes, then sucking, hard and deliberate, while her hand holds the rest of me in a steady grip that moves with her.
I am staring at the roof of the tent with both hands locked behind my head and my jaw clenched so tight it aches, trying to hold on to something, anything, because she does not do anything halfway and she is proving it thoroughly.
Her red hair falls forward across my stomach and the moonlight catches it and I have a religious experience that I will never in my life tell anyone about.
She takes me apart the way I took her apart. With focus. With patience. With zero mercy.
"Mags." Rough around the edges. "You need to stop."
She pulls back and looks up at me through all that hair, her eyes dark, her mouth dripping, and she looks deeply pleased with herself, which is accurate. "Problem?"
"Keep going and this ends early." Fuck. I'm so close. The thought lands like a warning I'm not sure I can follow.
She considers this. Crawls up the length of me, slow, and I get both hands on her hips before she finishes the trip because I am not a man who lies still when he has options.
She hovers above me, her thighs straddling my hips and the look on her face is pure heat, no armor, no banter, just her wanting me. I get a fist in her hair and pull her mouth down hard and kiss her like I mean it, and she makes a sound that is pure need and my cock pulses with wanting her.
When I let her up she's breathing in short pulls. "I want you," she says against my mouth. "Right now. Stop making me wait."
That works.
I reach between us and position her and she sinks down and takes me in slow and I stop breathing.
She is perfect. She is an absolute nightmare, and she has been driving me insane since the first night at the Rusty Spur. She is on top of me and her breasts are hand-sized and perfect, and I get both hands on them and she arches into it and the sound she makes goes straight through me.
I groan, low and helpless, her name breaking apart in my throat.
"Luke," she breathes.
Her hands press into my chest and she starts to move.
She sets her pace and I let her for about thirty seconds before my hands take over at her hips and I start driving up into her and the only thought in my head is more and harder and mine.
"Red." Low. She feels my hands tighten and keeps moving.
"This is what I thought about," I tell her, and it's partly true and partly calculated.
I'm so close I need her to slow down and talking is the only thing I have. My hands are gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks and I know it, and I know she's already wearing my beard on her inner thighs, red and raw from earlier, and something deeply unreasonable in me is satisfied by both.
"You on top of me. That hair. That sound you make when you can't stop it." Her hands press harder into my chest. "You thought I wasn't noticing. I was noticing everything."
"I hate that you're talking right now." Her voice has dropped into the register she has no control over. She hates that I know about it. I know about everything.
"No you don't."
"Say one more thing like that and I'll —"
"You'll what?" My hands tighten and I drive up into her, once, deliberate, and she gasps and loses the threat entirely. "That's what I thought."
"That was —" She has to stop and breathe. "That was not —"
"Red." I sit up, get an arm around her back, pull her chest against mine, my mouth to her ear.
I am so far gone it isn't recoverable and I want her to feel every bit of it.
"I want to feel you come around me. I want to hear what it sounds like up here where nobody else can. " I feel her shudder. "Give me that."
She bites my shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, which I take as agreement.
She comes with her face pressed to my neck and my name in her teeth and I cry out and follow her and the mountain holds all of it and the Buck Moon doesn't tell anyone. I don't let her go for a long time after.
She's asleep before I finish pulling the sleeping bag over her, or close enough that the distinction doesn't matter. She curls into herself, loose and warm, and I watch her for a moment in the blue light through the nylon.
She said his name tonight. Adam. Said it flat, exact, the way she reads data she doesn't like. Said it like she'd been carrying it for years and decided up here, on this mountain, with me, was a reasonable place to set it down.
I wanted to pick it up and burn it for her. I still do.
I get my jacket from outside and lay it over her without waking her. She pulls it close and settles back under it on instinct, some deep-running thing in her that reaches for warmth in the dark.
It's cold out.
It's fine.
I sit outside in my shirt and watch the bright July moon track across the ridge where Eleven stood tonight and howled, and I stay there until the cold drives me in.
I wake her at five-fifteen.
"There is not enough coffee in the world," she says into the bedroll.
"There's some." I hand her the tin cup. She takes it without opening her eyes, which I find impressive. "Kill site needs working. Ninety minutes before the scent data degrades."
A pause. She opens one eye. "You know about scent data degradation windows."
"I've been listening to you for thirty-four days."
She closes the eye. Something moves at the corner of her mouth that isn't quite a smile.
"You are a fundamentally unreasonable person." She squints at me. "Why are you like this at five in the morning?"
"Ranch hours." I've been up for forty-five minutes. I also slept better than I have in five years, which I am not going to say out loud. "Kill site needs working."
Outside the tent the western mountains are going pink in the early light, outlined with gold, the timber dark against it. She registers it through the door and goes still for just a breath, the way she always does when the mountain decides to be beautiful.
I watch her instead of the light, her hair down, sleep-loose around her shoulders, and god, she's something in the morning, and I don't see any reason to stop.
We break camp fast and work the kill site until the sun clears the eastern ridge. The boot print is there, same tread, same wide-set lug pattern we've followed from the east ridge to the rodeo to Viv's cattle guard. Now at nine thousand feet above the south pasture drainage.
Mags photographs before she touches anything, always.
Her shoulder brushes mine when she crouches over the bait line between the lodgepoles, snapped clean at the near end, professional-grade monofilament, not hunter's twine, and I catch the smell of woodsmoke in her hair and have to put my attention somewhere else before I lose the thread entirely.
The camera housing at the tree line has a cracked lens and a pried housing and a missing memory card.
I find the shell casing on the granite shelf to the east.
.308. Recently fired. I pick it up with the glove from my back pocket and hold it up so she can see.
She looks at it for a long time. Then at the orientation. South. Toward the ridge. Toward the boundary post Dave placed in 1987 and never explained.
Neither of us says what we're both thinking. We don't need to.
I bag it. She photographs where it was.
"The pattern is directional. Every piece of suppression points west. Away from this ridge. Away from the south pasture drainage. He's not trying to hurt the wolves. He's trying to erase them from this ground" she says on the way back to the horses
"Witnesses," I say.
She stops.
"The wolves keep coming back to this ridge because it's their corridor. And someone has spent months making sure nothing documents them here." I look at the ridge. "Whatever's on that ground up there, the pack already knows. They've been standing on it the whole time."
The wind moves through the timber above us.
"Cutter knows what your father put there," she says.
"Yes."
"And you don't."
"Not yet."
She looks at the ridge, then back at me. "When we know what we're looking for, we're going to find it."
Not today. But she means it.
I believe her.
We mount up. The horses point downhill and I let mine go. My phone gets signal when we break the tree line at the lower meadow, 7:02 in the morning, three texts from Cal already waiting.
Cutter's at the diner. Saying a calf went down on Durrell's north lease last night. Saying wolves.
Half the room believes him. Kip Durrell has a photo.
They're asking for your comment. Where are you?
I look up. Mags already sees it on my face. She reaches for her collar app by instinct and the screen shows her exactly what it's shown since the rodeo.
Nothing. No receiver. No signals.
She can't put Eleven on this ridge. She can't put the pack anywhere except where Cutter's photo puts them.
"Mags."
She looks at me.
"Cutter put a calf down last night," I say, "and was at the diner with a photo before seven."
The math moves across her face clean and fast.
"Same time he files everything," she says.
"Yeah."
She looks at the useless collar app. Then at the ridge above us where the boot print is bagged and the casing is bagged and the wolves are alive and undocumented and entirely, temporarily, invisible.
"Gina," I say. "She'll go to the calf. She has never signed a false cause of death in this valley and she's not starting today."
Mags looks at the ridge one more time. Then at me. Her jaw sets.
"Ride fast," she says.
Already am.