Chapter 3 #2
“Then I will meet him at the marker and he will not come up this hill.”
My body liked that sentence too much. Meet him at the marker. The same dirt. The same smell of river. I would stand there with a rifle I would not need and pretend I wanted a conversation about cattle.
I stood up before the council could smell what was happening in my pants. “Edward, eat. Marshall, send two scouts west, not south. No contact. I want numbers, not a fight. Idony, tell Gareth the date is not set.”
“He will write again.”
“Let him write.”
I left the hall and went back to my rooms because I had a patrol report to write and because I was not going to make it through the next hour without putting my hand in my clothes.
I locked the door.
I did not make it to the desk.
I sat on the edge of the bed, opened my belt, shoved my pants and underwear down to my boots, and spread my knees.
I was so wet it had gone through to the pants.
I put three fingers in this time, fast, no patience, and clapped my other hand over my mouth.
I fucked myself and thought of the contract line with his name on it and thought of his cock stretching me on that floor and thought of the knot catching and catching and then shoving in.
I put my thumb on my clit and rubbed hard, sloppy, the way he had used his tongue, and I got closer than I had in months.
“Owen.”
It came out into my palm. I hated it. I said it again anyway and pushed my fingers deeper and pretended they were thicker.
I squeezed my own breast through the shirt and binding, not enough, tore the shirt up and yanked the binding down so I could twist a nipple the way he had.
Pain and wet. I rode my hand and the bedframe knocked the wall.
I almost had it.
The bond pulled, west and close, like he had turned his head toward the ridge.
My orgasm rose and broke apart at the same time.
I kept going, frantic now, wrist hurting, cunt gripping nothing that satisfied it, and I came a little, a thin, mean clench that was not enough and left me angrier than before.
Come on my fingers, not enough of it. Clit too sensitive to touch and still throbbing for more.
I sat there with my pants around my boots and my binding around my waist and my pulse in my cunt and laughed once, ugly, at the desk I had not used.
Then I washed my hands, dressed, retied the binding over nipples that would not go down, and went back out like the acting Luna of Landers Ridge was a person who had spent the morning on grain levies.
The scouts would take hours. The contract copy sat in my head whether it sat on Idony’s table or not. Owen Tillson. Western range. Twenty-odd wolves. No banner. No Luna.
I had rejected him in the yard with his come still in me and I had meant every word because the pack was the pack and a Tillson on this ridge was a gift to Hillsford.
I still meant it. Meaning it had not stopped the heat.
Meaning it had not made my body finish for anyone else.
Meaning it had not kept his name off a piece of paper that was now in my hall.
I stood on the ridge at full morning and looked west.
I could not see him. I could feel the line of him anyway, stretched and sour and alive. If he was on my river I was going to have to look him in the face and talk about terms like I had not spent dawn with my wrist in my teeth.
I went down to the yard and saddled a horse I did not need for a patrol I had already done, because if I stayed in the hall I was going to lock the door a second time.
Marshall found me there. “Scouts are out.”
“Good.”
“Reilly.”
“Don’t.”
He didn’t. He looked at the west like I had. He had been in the yard when I said the rite. He had heard Owen make me say it three times. He had the decency not to remind me.
“If it’s him,” Marshall said, after a minute, “you should not go to the marker alone.”
“I won’t be alone.”
That was a lie I had not committed to yet. I swung up anyway. The saddle put pressure right where I was still swollen and I breathed in through my teeth and made it look like wind.
Three years.
The cabin was still under the ridge. We used it for storage now. I had not gone inside since the morning I walked him into the yard. I could have burned it. I had not done that either.
I rode as far as the first bend, where the hall could not see me, and stopped.
I put my hand between my legs over the pants, one hard press of my fingers, not enough to finish, enough to take the edge off so I could think.
It didn’t take the edge off. It made me drop forward on the horse’s neck and swear.
I sat up. I took my hand back. I turned the horse toward home because going farther west today, wet and stupid and wearing his name in my mouth, was how a Luna got herself caught by the exact man she had sent away.
The contract would still be there in the afternoon.
So would the heat.
I rode back to the hall with my wrist throbbing under the cloth and my underwear ruined and the bond pointed west like a finger on a map I had already read.