Holt #3
When she finally positions herself over me, she doesn't ease into it. She sinks all the way down in one long stroke, taking every inch of me at once. The moan that tears out of her comes from somewhere deep, pure want with nothing held back.
"Talk to me," she says, her forehead against mine, hips already finding a rhythm that doesn't ask permission. "Not the angry words. I've had those all night. I want the other ones. The vault. Give me the dirty-mouthed cowboy I know is still in there somewhere."
"You want to know what I think about every night you fall asleep against me?
" It comes out rough, unpracticed, three weeks rustier than the last time I said anything like this to her.
I feel it land anyway, feel her rhythm stutter and catch.
"I wake up hard as a fence post half the nights, soaked through, still coming down off some dream where I had you tied to my headboard, blindfolded, begging me to let you come. "
A whimper breaks from her, small and helpless, and her hips roll down harder on me, slow and deliberate. Like she's chasing the picture I just put in her head.
"I think about taking my time with you until you can't remember your own name," I go on, watching what it's doing to her.
"Burying my tongue inside your hot cunt until you're shaking, then starting again before you've come down off the first one.
Making you come so many times you go limp and stupid under me and can't do anything but take it. "
Her rhythm picks up, faster now, grinding down against me with a kind of desperation that has nothing careful left in it, and the sound she makes is half plea and half warning.
"I think about fucking you every which way there is. Morning, noon, night. In the shower, in the bathtub, out under the moon and the stars where anybody could walk up on us and I wouldn't care. Every hole in your body, one at a time, until you're begging me to stop and meaning the opposite."
Her eyes cut away from mine for half a second and come back. What was that?
I let it go. I’m buried to my balls in her after weeks of wet dreams and nothing is going to distract me from this ecstasy.
“I love your sweet, wet pussy. So tight.” My voice has gone ragged with how close she's got me, how fast she's moving now.
"There," she says, breathless, grinding down harder to chase it. "God, Holt, right there." Every sound she makes doing it goes straight through the center of me like it's the only thing keeping either of us upright tonight.
I thrust up into her, meeting her frantic pace, and feel her walls start to tighten around me like she's chasing the edge and about to fall over it. "I'm going to come."
We go over together, a sound that isn't a word at all tearing out of me at the same time, my release spilling deep into her, pulsing, endless.
For a few seconds after, neither of us moves. Her forehead drops against mine, both of us breathing like we ran here instead of rocked each other’s worlds and fell apart.
We stay tangled together on that chair long after either of us has the strength to move, my breath slowing to match hers, the bad hand still resting over her heart where she put it.
Not gripping, not failing, just there. Doing the only job either of us asked it to do tonight.
She traces slow shapes against my chest with one finger, like you'd trace something you intend to keep memorizing for a long time.
"Fifteen percent," I say, into her hair, and for the first time all night, the number doesn't taste like poison.
"Fifteen percent of a grip." She lifts her eyes to mine and holds them there. "Everything else is running at about a hundred and fifty. I did the calculations myself, and I'm better at math than you, so the numbers even out just fine."
I almost laugh. It hurts less than it did an hour ago.
She finally climbs off my lap to find her clothes, still half a step out of the moment we just had. She's got one leg back in her jeans, still relaxed in the shoulders, still mine for another few seconds, when her phone lights up on the table, face up.
I watch it happen in real time. I watch her go from a woman who just fell apart on my lap to a federal agent with no badge in about a second and a half, the whole soft weight of the last hour sliding off her like a coat she's decided she can't afford to wear anymore.
"What?"
"Salt Lake." She's already reaching for it, already gone somewhere else in her head.
"The evidentiary window on the McKenna money closes at the end of the week.
If I don't have something solid by Friday, whatever we've built gets buried under a jurisdictional fight that'll take years to dig out of. "
"You don't have a badge."
"No." She looks up at me, and whatever softness was in her face a minute ago is gone, replaced by the same flat certainty I watched her level at my father across his own desk.
"Which means if I break this case, I break it alone, off the books, with nothing behind me but what I can prove. Starting now."