Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Presley
For a couple of nights running now I've told myself I'm not going to do this, and now I've ended up crossing the dark ranch to his door.
Tonight I don't even bother with the lie.
I wait until my own cabin's gone too empty and too big around me, until the loneliness of it sits on my chest heavy enough that driving to the back of the property in the dark feels less like a choice and more like gravity.
Then I get in my truck and I go, headlights off the last stretch out of habit I'm not proud of, and I let myself in the way he told me to, through the mudroom door he leaves unlocked for me now.
That ought to scare me more than it does.
For me.
He leaves a door unlocked for me.
Somewhere in the last week we stopped being a secret I was ending and turned into a habit I'm keeping, and I can't for the life of me find the moment it happened.
The cabin's dark and warm and smells like him.
Down the hall, Raine's door is shut, a night-light glowing soft under it, the cat a gray lump on the floor outside her room where he sleeps every night now like a guard dog.
I toe my boots off at the door so I don't make a sound.
And I go to Thunder's room, where he's awake, propped up against the headboard with his phone dark on the nightstand, waiting for me like he knew I'd come.
He always knows I'll come.
"Raine's out cold," he says low, before I can ask. "Went down at eight, slept every night this week straight through. But the walls in this place are thin, rattlesnake."
His eyes travel down me, slow, and my whole body answers before my brain does. "So, you're gonna have to be real quiet for me. Can you do that?"
"I'm always quiet."
His mouth curves in the dark. "You are the furthest thing from quiet I have ever put my hands on, and we both know it. Get over here."
I go.
I climb up onto the bed and into his lap, careful of the hip out of habit even though it's better this week, and he lets me settle there.
Then he just looks at me a second, one hand coming up to push my hair back off my face, and the look on him strips me down worse than his hands ever have.
Because this is the part that changed.
Back in the spring it was all heat and rules and no feelings stamped on everything we did.
Now he looks at me like this, steady and wide open, and there's no rule left to hide behind, and it terrifies me more than the choking ever could.
"There she is," he murmurs. "You gonna let me have you tonight?"
"Yes."
"Then give me your hands."
He reaches over to the nightstand and takes up his belt, the wide worn leather one he had looped over the bedpost, and my breath goes short before he's even touched me with it.
"This okay?"
Always the question.
Even now, even with his voice gone dark. "Same as before. Two taps and I stop, everything stops, no questions. You remember?"
"I remember." My voice isn't steady. "Yes. Do it."
He loops the belt around my wrists, snug, practiced, and draws my arms up over my head and anchors them to the slat of the headboard.
The second I test it and find I can't move my hands the whole rest of me goes molten.
He knows what it does to me.
He's always known.
He gets me stretched out under him and I'm helpless and it quiets the part of my brain that never stops running. The part that's been screaming about my family and the secret and everything I can't fix, and for once, bound to his headboard in the dark, that voice just—goes silent.
"There it is."
He watches my face change. "That's my girl. All that noise up there finally shut off?"
I nod, because I can't talk.
"Words, rattlesnake."
"Yes." It comes out cracked.
"It's quiet. You made it quiet."
"That's what I'm for."
He kisses me, deep and unhurried, and then he settles his weight over me and I feel exactly how much better the hip is this week.
How much more of him there is when he's not fighting his own body.
God help me I've missed this, the sheer size of him, the way he cages me in and takes his time.
He works me over slowly.
That's the cruelty of the forced quietness—he knows I have to stay silent, so he makes it as hard as he possibly can, drags it out, his mouth on my throat and my breasts and lower, his beard rough on the inside of my thigh, and every time a sound tries to climb out of me he stops and waits until I swallow it back down.
"Quiet," he breathes against me. "You wake my kid, this ends. You want it to end?"
I shake my head frantically, wrists pulling against the belt. "Then keep it in."
And then his mouth is on me and I have to.
I have to keep it in, biting down on my own lip, turning my face into my bound arm, while he takes me apart with his tongue slow and merciless, praising me the whole time in that low filthy voice, “good girl, that's it, look at you holding it in for me, so pretty when you're trying not to scream,” until I'm shaking and soundless and right at the edge.
And he stops.
Pulls back.
Leaves me hanging there, wrecked and silent and furious, and I could cry with how bad I need it.
"Not yet," he says, and there's the dominance, all the way back now, no wound in it, just a man who's decided he owns every second of this. "You come when I say. That's how tonight works."
When he finally pushes into me I have to bite the meat of my own arm to keep from crying out.
He feels it, feels me clamp down, and he groans low against my ear and goes still a second to get himself under control.
Then he sets a pace that's nothing like the tub—this is him healed enough to take what he wants, deep and hard and deliberate, one hand coming up to close around my throat, thumb and fingers at the sides, that familiar grounding pressure that pulls me down to nothing but him and this.
"Feel that?" His voice is wrecked and quiet at my ear. "That's me. That's us. No rules on it this time, nothin' in the way, only you and me and the truth of it. You're mine, Presley. Say it."
"I'm yours."
A breath, barely sound at all.
"Again."
"I'm yours, I'm yours?—"
His hand tightens just so, and his hips drive into me.
He keeps me pinned and bound and full of him.
I’ve never in my life felt so completely held and so completely undone at the same time.
The belt bites my wrists.
His weight crushes me down.
And under all the filth and the force there's something so tender running through it that my eyes sting even as my body climbs.
"You can let go now." His thumb strokes my jaw. "Quiet as you can. Come on my cock, rattlesnake, let me feel it. I've got you."
I break apart without making a sound.
It's the hardest I've ever come and the quietest, forced inward with nowhere to go.
He follows me a few strokes later with his face buried in my neck and his groan swallowed against my skin.
We lie there after in the dark, both of us shaking, his heart slamming against mine, his weight a warm anchor holding me to the earth.
He unbuckles my wrists after and rubs the feeling back into them, slowly, pressing his mouth to the faint red marks the belt left, and neither of us says anything for a while.
This is the part I'm not ready for.
The after. The tenderness.
The sex I could always tell myself was just sex, but this—him cradling my wrists and kissing where the leather bit, checking me over like I'm something precious—this is the part that's going to wreck me when it all comes apart.
Because it is going to come apart.
That's what I can't ever quite forget, even here, even now.
"Stay till the alarm," he murmurs into my hair. "Slip out before Raine's up. I know the drill by now."
"Yeah."
"One of these days you won't have to."
I don't answer that. I can't.
He knows I can't, and he lets it go, and he pulls me in against his chest and I let myself have a few hours of pretending, the way I do every night now, the way I swore to Mitch's ashes I'd never let myself do with a man in this life again.
I'm getting really good at pretending.
It's starting to scare me how good.
* * *
Grace comes out to the pens the next afternoon to check on Number 68.
I didn't call her this time.
She texted me first, said she was on the ranch anyway and would swing by and take a look.
I stood there holding my phone a full minute after because Grace texting me first isn’t something that's happened since the hospital.
Small.
But it landed in my whole chest.
She's warmer today.
Not warm.
Not us-from-before, not love you see you at supper.
But she gives me a real nod when she gets out of the truck, and she asks how my week's been like she halfway wants to know.
When she looks the heifer over she talks me through what she's seeing instead of working in silence.
"Lungs sound clean now." She straightens up, peeling off a glove. "You did good with her. But I'd give her another couple days in quarantine, away from the herd, before you turn her back out. Just to be safe. No sense risking the whole group over a few days' patience."
"Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Grace."
"It's my job."
But she says it without the ice, and she lingers a second at the rail instead of heading straight for her truck, and I know my sister well enough even now to know when she's got something sitting on her she can't decide whether to say.
"Presley." She keeps her eyes on the heifer. "Has Dakota talked to you?"
My stomach drops. "Dakota doesn't talk to me. You know that."
"Right."
A muscle works in her jaw. "Well. She's—there's a problem, and I don't even know why I'm telling you, except you already know the worst of it, so—" She stops and starts over, lower.
"That investigator. The one Dakota hired back in the spring, before we knew.
Back when we still thought Mom just up and left.
" Her eyes flick to me, weighted, and I understand she's choosing every word around what neither of us will say out loud at a cattle pen in broad daylight.
"She called him off months ago. Or she thought she did. He called her again last week."
The whole world goes still and cold around me.
"Called her for what?" I manage. "She told him to stop."