16. Bryn
SIXTEEN
Bryn
I was holding the news back from him.
Not because I was planning some great surprise…not because I was excited, per sé. It was more because I was scared.
Scared this was another false alarm. That this one would destroy my other ovary, my only chance of having a biological child.
Because I was pregnant…and Stetson didn’t know.
I told him I needed to go to the university for a day and I went to a clinic in San Antonio on my own.
The scan took twenty minutes. The relief took longer to land — intrauterine, good placement, a flicker of heartbeat where a doctor's careful voice told me everything was exactly where it should be.
Eight weeks. I sat in the parking lot after with the little black-and-white photo propped against the wheel, crying the good kind of tears for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, and didn't manage to pull myself together enough to drive until the light outside had shifted.
By the time I got back to the cabin, dusk was settling over the ridge line, and I still didn't have the first idea how to say any of it out loud.
I let myself into the cabin, country music playing from a little bluetooth speaker I’d insisted on adding to our shopping list. Stetson was in the living room, on his knees in front of my worktable, and it took me a second to realize what I was looking at.
He’d gotten me a desk.
An actual desk—secondhand, clearly, scuffed at the corners, but sturdy, with a proper shelf underneath for my field notebooks and a spot cleared for the printer that didn't involve balancing it on a stack of USGS reports.
He was carefully, methodically arranging my equipment across it, lining up pipette boxes like they mattered, setting the pink watering can on the windowsill exactly where I always left it.
"You're home early," he said, not looking up.
"Was gonna say the same to you."
"Finished the fence line faster than I figured." He nudged a stack of notebooks square with the edge of the desk. "Saw your corner was fallin' over itself. Figured you needed somewhere that wasn't a chair nobody could sit in anymore."
"Stetson."
"Got it off Wyatt. Barely a scratch on it." He finally looked up at me, and whatever was on my face must have shown, because his hands went still on the desk. "You okay?"
I didn't answer right away. Just looked at him—kneeling there in the middle of a mess he'd built into something that actually worked, doing something so quiet and so entirely him that I hadn't even had to ask.
“I’m actually fantastic,” I said, letting out a short laugh that I knew didn’t quite reach my eyes—mostly because I’d already started crying. “I’m pregnant.”
He didn’t stand up. He didn’t say anything—didn’t laugh, or shout, or even move for a second.
Just watched me cry and blinked, like it took him that long to believe I’d really said it. His hands stayed braced on the desk the whole time.
Then he scrubbed at his face and made a sound that could have been a laugh or a cough.
“Seriously?” he said.
I held up the photo, the proof, the little suggestion of a person soon to be. “I have paperwork,” I said, and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “It’s all real.”
He stood up so fast his chair scooted back and rattled against the wood floor.
“You sure?” he said, low, a whisper that came out strangled. “Not a mistake?” I managed, “I saw the heartbeat.” He closed the space between us.
Big hands on my arms, grounding me. He looked at the paper, then at me, then at the paper again. I couldn’t stop crying, not even when he thumbed softly over the hinge of my jaw, his own eyes red and wet.
Then he laughed, a single sharp breath that seemed to split him open.
He kissed the top of my head, then my nose, then right on the mouth, and my body answered with a flush that caught me by surprise, sudden and bright and embarrassing.
I let myself be pulled in, wrapped up in his arms, and I breathed in the honest, living smell of him—sun and horse and sweat, the world he’d made for us out here.
“That’s mine in there?” he rumbled.
“Couldn’t be anyone else’s,” I laughed. “Unless this is some…immaculate conception—”
He grabbed me up with both arms, hard enough that my toes left the floor for a second, and kissed me again, with a heat I only half-remembered from those first nights, before everything else had gotten complicated.
His hands were rough and wide and he ran them over my ribs, down my waist, up and under my shirt until he was holding bare skin.
I couldn’t stop laughing, which made him laugh too, until he pressed his forehead to mine.
“Do you want to sit down?” I managed.
He shook his head. “Don’t want to let you go. Not for a second.” His hand splayed over my abdomen, just above the line of my jeans. “That’s really in there?”
“Yeah,” I said, and it came out so shaky I barely recognized myself. “It’s in there.”
He bent to his knees, hugged my hips, and pressed his mouth to my belly…then turned his head to press his cheek there, just listening.
“You can’t hear it, you know,” I laughed.
“Yeah I can.”
He didn’t move for a long minute. Just held his face there, hands heavy at my hips.
Then he looked up at me with a rawness in his eyes that made my stomach flip—made it impossible not to reach for him, to run my fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair and tug him back to standing.
I barely got the word “Stetson” out before he was kissing me again, harder now, his hands sliding up my back and under my shirt. He lifted it clean over my head. My hair caught in the collar and he grinned, untangling it gently, smoothing it down before his hands found my sides again.
He pressed me up against the edge of the new desk, crowding me in until the wood dug into the small of my back. His palm moved over my stomach, then drifted lower, thumb rubbing slow circles along the top button of my jeans.
He exhaled—a deep, shaky sound that vibrated against me, then—
“Wanna fuck my woman,” he said. “Can I?”
“Please.”
He mouthed at the seam of my jeans, rough fingers undoing the button slow.
Then he leaned up, close enough to speak straight into my skin: “Been thinking about you all damn week,” he said, “but this—all I can think about now.” His hand spanned my stomach again, broad and careful.
“Didn’t know I could want anything this much. ”
I tried to laugh but it broke in my chest. “Gonna get sentimental on me, Holt?”
His eyes never left mine. “No, ma’am,” he said, and his thumb slid along the waistband. “Just proud.”
He tugged my jeans down to mid-thigh, coaxed my legs apart, and without warning picked me up to put me on the brand new desk.
It was a pretty good desk, but it was an even better vantage. Stetson’s hands bracketed my knees, pushing them wide, steadying me in case I might shatter or tip. He tugged my jeans off the rest of the way, my bare ass now on the edge of the desk as he knelt between my knees.
“You know what I told Wyatt when he handed this desk over?” His shoulders crowded my thighs, his mouth right above the wet heat of me. “Told him I planned to put it to work. Didn’t say how.”
His voice got low, nearly a growl. “Lay back for me.”
When I did, his hands caught behind my knees and bent them up, spreading me open. He pressed his face in without hesitation—like he’d been waiting all week, all his life, to taste me again.
“Missed this pussy,” he said, “but you remember what I like best? I want you wet. I want you loud enough they hear you out at the barn.”
The first pass of his tongue was slow enough to make me beg, but all I could do was moan.
He laughed—“Still sensitive, huh?”—and did it again, slower, holding my thighs down when I tried to twist away. “You ever get this greedy for me before?” His voice roughened, tongue moving in lazy circles. “Knew you needed it. Knew you’d drip for me the second I got your jeans off.”
He closed his mouth over my clit and sucked hard, nothing gentle about it, and the sound that ripped out of me was a full-body, animal thing.
My heel scraped the desk edge and he didn’t stop, didn’t even slow up.
He pulled back just enough to blow a warm breath over the wet, throbbing place he’d left behind.
“Goddamn, look at that,” he said, voice loaded and dark.
“That’s mine. Been mine since the first day I fucked you out on the trail.
You gonna give me more?” He tongued hard and deep, then licked up everything leaking onto his tongue, making a meal of it.
“Fuck, you taste even better, I swear. That baby’s making you sweeter. ”
My head thudded against the desk, but it was nothing compared to what he was doing between my legs. He fucked me with his tongue, fast and then slow, then just held still, eyes flicking up to dare me, to see how long I could hang on.
My breath went ragged, all sense of cleverness or ego gone, just a raw ache in my belly and the want to let go.
He knew exactly how near I was.
Stetson had always known, always read me faster than I could read myself, and there was nothing in the world that would make him back off now.
He locked his arms around my hips, held me flat to the cool wood, and worked tight, slick circles with the flat of his tongue until my whole body went brittle. My fingers shot out to brace against the wall behind the desk, nails scraping out useless patterns on the old paint.
It was fast and sharp and too much. I tried to warn him, but the words tangled up in my throat, came out as a whine.
He only pulled me closer, mouth closing hard around me, and I broke open, the heat rolling me under until my vision went white, my toes numb and my whole body shuddered through a finish that left me ruined on the desk.
Stetson didn’t let go. Not for a second. He held me steady through every aftershock, every little tremor, until I was forced to tug at his hair, to beg him to give me a break because my nerves were haywired, every muscle jumping, even my teeth threatening to chatter.