Chapter 16 Jesse
SIXTEEN
JESSE
I groan deeply the next morning when I wake up and Aubree is still in my arms. She’s got her ass pressed against my cock, and it’s standing at attention. The palm of my hand grazes down her front, stopping at the peaked nipple.
She moans, pressing the engorged tip into my flesh. When she pops her ass back, grinding against my length, I latch onto her neck and use my free hand to grip her thigh.
“Jesse,” she says breathlessly.
“Yeah, you’re not getting out of this bed yet.” I push the words out of my tight throat, use my hand to lift her thigh, and then slide my cock home.
“Fuck…” She tosses her head back against my shoulder.
I take her lips, tongues twisting as I press my cock into her pussy, still wet with my cum from last night. Her hands are tangled in the sheets, pulling them as she anchors herself to push herself harder onto my length.
“You’re so fuckin’ hot,” I growl, letting go of her thigh and moving my hand between her thighs. With the tip of my finger, I worry her clit, strumming a rhythm meant to make her come again.
With her head tilted against my shoulder, I can see her mouth is open, hissing as I bottom out and hold still for a split second before I turn her underneath me, and then mount her. My forearms shake as I come up on my knees and thrust so hard I could rip holes in the sheets.
“Oh god, Jesse. Don’t stop,” she breathes, her nose flaring.
“Look at me,” I instruct her. “Look at me when I spill into you. Look at me when you come on my cock.”
Those eyes of hers open, the brown depths wet with some emotion I don’t want to name just yet. But I need her. I need her to tell me that I’m the one making her fall apart this way. “Who’s making you come? Whose cock is owning this pussy?”
“Yours,” she whines, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. “Yours.”
And that’s when she lets go, her body tightening on mine. I can’t hold it anymore. I come, shooting deep inside her, hoping with everything I have she’s not on birth control. That I can make her mine forever. But that’s a different conversation for a different day.
In the aftermath, we’re quiet, and I lazily drag my finger up and down her arm.
When we’ve lain there for longer than we should’ve, she turns over, looking at me. “What were you and Truett doing last night? You didn’t bring anything home. Be honest with me. I can’t help you—or trust you—unless you’re honest.”
“I don’t want you involved in any of this,” I tell her, my stomach aching at the thought of her getting caught up in the aftermath.
“Then y’all should’ve thought about that before this even started. Why did it start?”
I stare at the ceiling for a long moment, feeling the weight of everything pressing down on my chest like a boulder.
The morning light filtering through the curtains casts long shadows across the room, and I can hear the distant sound of the guys heading to their trucks.
The engines turn over, and they leave to head toward Grizzly River.
Normal sounds of a normal morning on what should be a normal ranch.
But nothing about our lives has been normal for a long time now.
“You remember when our parents died?” I finally ask, my voice rough.
She nods against my shoulder, her breath warm on my skin. “Of course I remember.”
“What you don’t know is what we found out after the funerals. About the money.” I take a deep breath, steeling myself for what I’m about to tell her. “There wasn’t any.”
She lifts her head, those dark eyes searching my face. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we were broke, Aubree. All of us. Your daddy, my daddy, they’d been struggling for years.
The ranches were mortgaged to the hilt, there was no life insurance worth a damn, and the bank was breathing down our necks from day one.
” The words taste bitter in my mouth. “You know how all the smaller ranches around here have been selling to those big corporations? There’s a reason for that.
There’s no help coming from anywhere. We were on our own.
Me and Truett against the fuckin’ world. ”
She’s quiet, processing this information, and I can see the wheels turning in her head. I keep tracing patterns on her arm, needing the contact to ground me.
“So what did you do?”
“At first? We tried to do everything legal. Truett and I, we worked our asses off trying to make the numbers work. We sold equipment and cut expenses everywhere we could. But it wasn’t enough. We needed cattle to sell, needed them fast, or we were going to lose everything our families had built.”
The memory of those early days still makes my jaw clench. The desperation, the fear of failing everyone who’d been left in our care. “We needed about twenty more head to make our payment to the bank. Just twenty cattle to buy us some time to figure out a real solution.”
“Where did you get them?”
“That’s when things got…complicated.” I roll onto my side to face her properly, needing to see her reaction.
“We found ten head that had wandered off from their herd, looked like they’d been missing for months.
Thing is, when cattle wander like that, sometimes the brands get weathered, hard to read. ”
Understanding dawns in her eyes, but she doesn’t say anything yet.
“It wasn’t hard to change those brands. Make them look fresh again. Took them to market, sold them as our own.” I pause, watching her face carefully. “Made enough money to keep the bank happy for another month.”
“Jesse…”
“I know how it sounds. But it worked, Aubree. It actually worked. And when you’re drowning, when you’re watching everything your family built about to disappear, you’ll grab onto any lifeline you can find.”
She sits up, pulling the sheet around herself, and I immediately miss the warmth of her skin against mine. “So you kept doing it.”
“We kept doing it.” I sit up too, running my hands through my hair. “Started small, always from the big corporations that were buying up land left and right. Figured they wouldn’t miss a few head here and there. And they didn’t, not at first.”
The guilt that’s been eating at me for years rises in my throat. “We told ourselves we were just taking back what those companies had stolen from smaller ranchers. That we were evening the score somehow. But the truth is, we were desperate, and it was easy money.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Started right after the accident.” I lean back against the headboard, suddenly feeling exhausted.
“We’ve been careful, never taking too many at once, never hitting the same place twice in a row.
But those big organizations, they’ve gotten wise.
They’ve moved their cattle further out, hired more security. It’s not as easy as it used to be.”
She’s looking at me like she’s seeing me for the first time, and I hate it. But I also know she deserves the whole truth.
“We’ve been saving every penny. We’ve each decided to sell off portions of our land, both ours and yours, the parts that aren’t central to the ranch operations.
But we need one more job to set us up for the rest of the year, give us enough cushion to make this land sale work without going under before we find buyers. ”
“And that’s what you were doing last night at the Morrisons.”
“That’s what we were doing last night at the Morrisons,” I confirm. “Scouting. The Morrison Corporation bought out the old Fletcher place about six months ago, moved a decent-sized herd in there. We were seeing how many they had, what their security looked like, planning our route.”
She’s quiet for a long time, her eyes focused somewhere beyond me. I can practically hear her thinking, weighing everything I’ve told her against whatever she thought she knew about me, about us.
“You don’t have to do this,” she finally says, her voice soft but firm. “There has to be another way.”
Something hot and fierce rises in my chest at her words. Not anger, exactly, but something close to it. Something that’s been building for months as I’ve watched everything slip through our fingers despite our best efforts.
Before she can react, I reach out and wrap my hand around her throat, not squeezing, not hurting, but firm enough to make my point clear. Her eyes widen, but she doesn’t pull away.
“Listen to me,” I say, my voice low and steady. “Either we do this job, or we’ll never be able to break away from this life. We’ll be stuck in this cycle forever, always one step away from losing everything. I’m asking for you to understand, but I’m damn sure not asking for your permission.”
Her pulse is racing under my palm, but her gaze doesn’t waver from mine. There’s something in her eyes—fear, yes, but also something else. Something that looks almost like respect.
“This isn’t just about money anymore, Aubree.
This is about proving that we’re not victims of circumstance.
That we can take control of our own destinies instead of waiting for someone else to save us or destroy us.
” My thumb strokes along her jawline, gentle despite the firmness of my grip.
“Your parents and mine, they played by all the rules. They did everything they were supposed to do, and it got them nothing but debt and early graves.”
“Jesse…”
“I’m not asking you to like it. Hell, I don’t like it. But I am asking you to trust that I know what needs to be done to secure our future. To secure your future.”
The weight of responsibility sits heavily on my shoulders. Not just for my own land, my own legacy, but for hers too. She’s tied to this life, whether she admits it or not. And if I fail, if we lose everything, she loses everything too.
“This one job, and we’re out. We take our share, sell the land we need to sell, and we go legitimate. Build something real and lasting instead of just surviving day to day.”
I can see the conflict in her expression, the war between what she thinks is right and what she knows is necessary. It’s the same war I’ve been fighting with myself since all this started.
“What if you get caught?”
“We won’t get caught.” My voice carries more confidence than I feel, but she needs to hear it. “We’ve been doing this for years without so much as a close call. We know what we’re doing.”
I don’t mention the situation with Noah last night. She doesn’t need to know about that.
“And if something goes wrong anyway?”
I release her throat, letting my hand slide up to cup her face instead. “Then at least we went down fighting instead of just rolling over and accepting defeat.”
She leans into my touch, closing her eyes briefly. When she opens them again, there’s a resolution there that wasn’t there before.
“How much do you need? From this one job?”
“Enough to make our land sales work. Enough to pay off the immediate debts and give us breathing room to build something legitimate.” I pause, studying her face. “Why?”
“Because if this is really the last time, if this really gets us out of this hole we’re in, then I need to know what we’re risking everything for. I need to know the exact number that stands between us and freedom.”
The fact that she’s asking, that she’s thinking in terms of us and we, sends something warm through my chest. Despite everything I’ve just told her, despite the moral complexity of what we’ve been doing, she’s still here. Still willing to stand with me.
“Thirty thousand. That’s what we need to clear our debts and have enough left over to make the land sales work without going under in the meantime.”
She nods slowly, like she’s doing calculations in her head. “And you think you can get that from one job?”
“The Morrison herd is big enough. If we’re selective, take only the best cattle, we can make thirty thousand easy. Maybe more.”
“When?”
The simple question hangs between us, loaded with implication. She’s not trying to talk me out of it anymore. She’s asking when, which means she’s accepting it. Maybe not liking it, but accepting it.
“Soon. Within the next couple of days. Tonight, if we can make it work. We need to move while the conditions are right, before they change their security protocols or move the herd again.”
She’s quiet again, and I can see her processing everything, weighing the risks against the potential rewards. It’s the same calculation Truett and I have been making for months, but somehow having her go through it too makes it feel more real, more significant.
“I don’t want to know the details,” she finally says. “I don’t want to know when exactly, or how, or any of it. But Jesse?” She looks directly into my eyes. “If this goes wrong, if something happens to you or Truett, I’ll never forgive either of you for leaving me to pick up the pieces alone.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to us.”
“You can’t promise that.”
She’s right, and we both know it. But I can promise something else.
“I can promise that everything we’re doing, every risk we’re taking…it’s all for this. For us. For the chance to build something together that nobody can take away from us.”
She leans forward, pressing her forehead against mine. “Just promise me that after this job, that’s it. No more. Whatever happens, we find another way.”
“I promise.”
And I mean it. This one job, and then we go clean. We sell the land, pay off the debts, and start over with whatever we have left. It might not be much, but it’ll be honest, and it’ll be ours.
She kisses me then, soft and sweet, and for a moment I can almost believe that everything is going to work out exactly the way we’ve planned. That in a few weeks we’ll be free and clear, building a legitimate future together.
But as I pull her closer, as she melts against me in the morning light, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re balanced on a knife’s edge. One wrong move, one piece of bad luck, and everything we’re fighting for could disappear in an instant.
Still, as her hands slide up my chest and her lips find mine again, I know I’d make the same choice. Because sometimes the only way forward is through the darkness, and sometimes you have to be willing to risk everything to gain anything at all.