Chapter 7 Jack #2
My hands found the hem of her t-shirt, slipping beneath to touch the warm skin of her waist. She gasped, her nails digging into my shoulders, already trying to pull me closer, already trying to set the pace—because that's what Maggie did. She ran things. Took control before anyone else could.
Not tonight.
I caught both her wrists in one hand and pinned them against the wall above her head. Not rough. Not punishing. Just—mine.
Maggie's breath caught. Her eyes went wide, then dark, then liquid—a progression that told me everything I needed to know about what this woman wanted and had never let herself ask for.
"Here's how this works," I said against her mouth.
"You don't get to manage this. You don't get to rush it.
You don't get to run the show." I pressed my hips into hers, slow and deliberate so she could feel just how hard I was for her, and watched her eyelids flutter.
"Tonight, I'm in charge. And you're going to let me take care of you the way I've been wanting to since I laid eyes on you at that bar.”
She made a sound—not words, just a raw, desperate exhale that vibrated through her whole body.
"Tell me you understand, beautiful."
"I—" Her voice cracked. She swallowed. Tried again. "Yes."
“Yes, what?"
Her chin lifted. Even now—wrists pinned, back against the wall, trembling under my hands—there was defiance in her. Fire.
"Yes, Jack.” Christ. My name in her mouth like that nearly undid me. The woman who didn't bend for anyone bent for me. And there was something about that that made me feel invincible.
I released her wrists. Stepped back just enough to see all of her—flushed, breathing hard, lips swollen from my mouth. Her hands stayed above her head exactly where I'd left them.
That trust—freely given by a woman who didn't give it to anyone—hit me harder than anything physical could.
"Good girl," I murmured, and watched the words roll through her like a shiver.
I took my time after that.
Peeled her clothes off slow. Unhooked her bra while my mouth worked the spot below her ear—the one I'd found in Wild Creek, the one that made her knees buckle. When they did, I caught her, carried her to the bedroom, and laid her out on the bed.
"Don't move," I told her. "Not until I say."
Her hands fisted in the sheets. Her chest heaved. But she didn't move.
I stood at the edge of the bed and looked at her.
Not rushing, not fumbling, not driven by the blind urgency of that first night.
This was deliberate. I wanted to see her.
Wanted her to feel what it was like to be seen—not as the woman who fixed things, not as the sister or the daughter or the operations manager.
Just Maggie. Bare and beautiful and shaking with want she'd been suffocating for a week.
“Do you know just how beautiful you are?” She was a vision spread out in front of me in nothing but her pink panties. Her hair fanned out like a golden halo, her body flushed and trembling with need.
"Jack." My name came out strangled. “Please…”
"Please what?"
"Touch me. God, please just—"
I put my mouth on her hip bone. She jerked like she'd been shocked, and I bit back a grin. This was just how I wanted her: sensitive and needy. Stripped bare of every defense she’d put between us since I started working for her family.
I tugged her panties down her long legs, tossing them somewhere.
I traced a line from her hip to her ribs with open-mouthed kisses, tasting salt and heat and the clean warmth of her skin. Her back arched off the mattress with a moan and her hands reached for me—instinct, need, the inability to stay still when every nerve was on fire.
I caught her wrists again. Pressed them into the pillow above her head. Held them there with one hand while the other traced down her body—collarbone, breast, the soft plane of her stomach, lower.
"I said, don't move."
"I can't—" She was panting, her hips rolling against nothing, her whole body straining toward a touch I wasn't giving yet. "Jack, I can't just lie here while you—"
"Yeah, you can." My hand slipped between her legs, both of us groaning when my fingers found her clit.
I rubbed slow, hard, torturous circles that had her eyes rolling shut.
I lowered my mouth to the hollow of her throat.
Spoke against her pulse. "You can because I'm telling you to.
And because, for once in your life, Maggie Blackwood, you're going to let someone else drive. "
The sound she made—half sob, half surrender—went through me like a current.
She stopped fighting.
Not all at once. In stages. The tension in her wrists went first, then her shoulders, then the rigid set of her spine. She melted into the mattress beneath me, one clenched muscle at a time, until she was open and pliant and trusting me with the full weight of her surrender.
I rewarded every inch of it.
I knew this body now. Not from fumbling in the dark—from one night that had lived in my memory for weeks now, sharp and detailed as a photograph.
The spot below her ribs that made her hips cant sideways.
The inside of her thigh, where the skin was softest, and a scrape of teeth made her moan so loud I felt it in my chest. The exact pressure that turned her breathing ragged, and the exact moment to ease off and let the anticipation build until she was begging.
She begged beautifully. That was something I'd learned in Wild Creek and confirmed now—Maggie Blackwood, who never asked anyone for anything, who would rather chew glass than admit she needed help, came completely undone when she let herself want badly enough.
"Please." Her voice was wrecked. Raw. Stripped of every wall she'd ever built. "Jack, please, I need—"
“Don’t worry, beautiful, I know what you need.” My hand moved faster between her legs. My mouth trailed down her neck, my tongue tracing the shape of one of her nipples before tugging gently with my teeth.
She gasped. Her head tilted back into the pillows, arms straining against my hand pinning them in place. “Right there,” she whimpered. “Oh God, you’re gonna make me come.”
I groaned against her breast, determined to make her shatter. Her moans grew more breathy, her pleases more desperate. She arched into my mouth. Her legs quaked around my hand before snapping shut. Her moan rang through her cabin, loud and uninhibited as she came.
And when it passed, she went limp beneath me. Liquid and pliable, while she caught her breath. “Fuck me,” she demanded, opening her legs wider. “Please, Jack. I need you.”
I told her she didn’t need me, but that didn’t mean hearing her say it didn’t light my insides on fire.
I knelt back on the bed and tore my shirt off.
She sat up and ran her hands up my chest and into my hair, bringing my mouth down to hers.
She kissed me like she was starved, like she’d been suffering just as much as I had these last two weeks since the motel.
Her hands fumbled with my belt and zipper, their movements just as frantic as our mouths.
“Fuck,” I grunted when she wrapped her hand around my cock, stroking slow and hard. I looked down, watching as her hand moved along my length. As good as it felt, I needed inside her more.
I gripped her wrist, my hand shaking, and stopped her. “Lie down.” My voice came out hoarse. Wrecked.
And this time, she listened without hesitation. I tugged my jeans off the rest of the way and followed her like a moth to a flame.
When I settled between her thighs, she tried to rush again—hands on my hips, legs wrapping around me, trying to drag me where she wanted me. I pinned her hips to the mattress with both hands and held her still.
"Look at me."
Her eyes opened. Green and glazed and desperate.
"I want you looking at me when I'm inside you. Not the ceiling. Not the wall. Me. Understand?"
She nodded, her lip caught between her teeth.
I pushed into her slow. Inch by inch. Watching her face the whole time—the way her mouth fell open, the way her eyes went wide then heavy-lidded, the way her body arched to take me deeper like she couldn't get close enough.
“God," she breathed, eyes fluttering. "Jack—"
She felt like heaven. Like finding something you once lost and never thought you’d see again. It took everything in me not to lose myself completely in her.
"Eyes on me, beautiful."
She held my gaze. And I held hers. And when I started to move—slow at first, building, finding the angle that made her breath stutter and her fingers claw the sheets—the connection between us was so raw, so exposed, that it felt like the most intimate thing I'd ever experienced.
This wasn't like Wild Creek. That had been two strangers reaching for escape. This was Maggie letting me past every wall she'd built, and me being careful enough—reverent enough—to deserve it.
I set the pace. Drove her higher with each stroke, controlled and relentless. When she started to shake, I pressed my forehead to hers.
"I've got you. Just let go."
She broke.
Not gently. Not quietly. She broke like a dam giving way—her whole body seizing around me, her cry muffled against my shoulder, her nails leaving marks I'd wear for days.
I held her through it, kept moving, kept my eyes on hers when they opened again, hazy and stunned and so unguarded it nearly wrecked me.
Then I let myself follow, and it hit me with the force of something I'd been holding back for a lot longer than six days.
Afterward, I stayed braced above her, our breath mingling, the cool night air raising goosebumps on skin that was still flushed and damp.
She looked up at me with an expression I'd never seen on her face—soft, cracked open, every defense stripped away.
"You okay?" I asked.
She laughed—watery, half-wrecked, completely real. "I don't know. I think you just broke me."
The corner of my mouth curved with a smirk. Proud and smug. “Good.”
"That wasn't a compliment."
“Yeah, it was."
She smiled. The real one, the one without defenses. The one I'd been chasing since the night she'd walked out of that motel room and taken something with her I didn't know I'd given.
"Stay," she murmured, her hand coming up to rest against my jaw. "Just for a while."
"As long as you want.” Maybe even forever if she asked.
She was asleep in minutes. Body finally loose, face finally soft.
That wasn't nothing.
That was everything.
I left before dawn.
Slipped out of bed carefully, pulling on clothes in the dark. Maggie stirred but didn't wake, her face soft with sleep, one hand still resting on the warm spot where I'd been.
I wanted to stay. Wanted it with an ache that sat heavy behind my ribs.
But this was her call. Her timeline. Her choice about what this meant and who got to know.
Sully was on the porch. He rose when I stepped outside, pressed his shoulder against my leg as we walked through the dark toward the bunkhouse.
Cool air. Stars fading. The ranch still asleep around us.
She'd wake up and rebuild the walls. But last night, she'd asked me to stay. That meant something.
I paused on the bunkhouse porch. Looked back toward her cabin, invisible now behind the trees.
Sarah would have laughed at me. Would have called me a coward for spending six days in a truck and a barn and a storm, two inches from a woman I wanted, saying things like "That was a good day" and "Yes, boss" like some kind of gentleman.
Just tell her, you idiot, she'd have said. Life's too short for noble.
She'd have been right. She usually was.
I went inside. Didn't look back again.
But I slept better than I had in four years.