Chapter 20 #2
"Exhausting," he says again, but he's already working on my clothes, hands rough and playful, yanking my shirt up, shoving my pants down. We're both still laughing, the sound breaking into groans when his cock, thick, flushed dark, already leaking, drags hot against my stomach.
"You love it," I remind him, and wrap my hand around him, stroking firm from base to tip. He hisses, hips jerking forward into my grip.
The rest of our clothes disappear in a messy rush of fabric and more laughter.
He slides down my body and puts his mouth on me like he's been waiting all night for it, tongue working my clit in fast, filthy circles until I'm arching and coming with a shout that turns into breathless laughter because he looks so goddamn pleased with himself when he glances up, mouth shiny.
Then he's back over me, cock nudging at my entrance, and he pushes in on one long, smooth thrust that knocks the air out of both of us. We groan at the same time. It breaks into shared laughter when the bed creaks like it's personally offended.
"Jesus Christ," he mutters, already moving, deep and playful strokes that say he's having the time of his life. "This thing's going to collapse."
"Your fault," I gasp, hooking my legs higher around his waist, heels digging into his ass to pull him deeper. My hands are everywhere, his back, his shoulders, the hot skin of his chest, mapping every shift of muscle while he fucks me like he's trying to win and lose at the same time.
His hand slides under my ass, lifting me just so, and his thumb, slick from where we're joined, teases at my hole.
He presses in slow, just the pad at first, then a little deeper, the stretch burning sweet, filthy, perfect.
I gasp, then laugh, the sound cracking into a moan as he keeps fucking me with his cock and works that teasing thumb in my ass at the same time.
"Oh my god. Fuck, that's good," I manage, laughing breathlessly, clenching around both. "You absolute asshole."
He laughs too, low and delighted, forehead dropping to mine for a second while he keeps moving. "Told you I'd lose properly."
We stay like that, grinning, gasping, fucking like idiots who trust each other with everything.
Filthy, joyful, no score left to keep. I come again hard, clenching tight around him, the orgasm rolling through me in bright waves that have me laughing and moaning at the same time.
He follows right after, hips stuttering, thumb still buried in me as he spills hot and deep, the sound he makes half laugh, half groan into my neck.
This is what it's now. Married. Real. And stupidly, joyfully ours.
After, the room is dark, the dogs have given up and gone to sleep against the door. I'm sprawled half on top of him with his heart going slow under my ear, his hand moving in my hair, slow, absent, working on its own.
"I'm keeping the poppers," I say into his chest. "I want you to know that. This isn't a one-time thing. You'll never feel safe again."
"I know." He doesn't sound upset about it. He sounds resigned to it. Still a little disbelieving. "I had a whole life before you. It was very orderly. People were afraid of me."
"Pathetic life. No poppers in it at all."
"None." His chest moves under my cheek, the slow start of a laugh he doesn't fully let out. "Do you know what the worst part is?"
"That a teenage soldier watched you scream?"
"Lev will find out. I don't know how, but he will, he always does, and he will say nothing." His hand traces down my spine, idle, warm. "He'll just look at me. For weeks. Every meeting. That look he does, where his whole face is a receipt."
"I love that you're more scared of Lev's face than of the cartel."
"You haven't seen the face." He's quiet a second, his fingers still moving on my back.
"You did this, you know. Three days of planning.
You hid contraband in my study, you waited, you watched me light it.
A pakhan's wife, running a long con on him in his own house.
Running it straight into his bed." He tips his head toward the ceiling. "Best three days I've had."
"You married a woman with a ranch mouth and a grudge about cigars. This is the deal you signed."
"I'd sign it twice." His hand stills in my hair, and when he speaks again the lightness has gone out of it, something careful underneath. "Nora. What you said. On the stairs."
My whole body goes still. We've circled this for weeks and now he's set it down between us, the one word, waiting.
I have to decide in half a second whether to walk us all the way to it or pull us back, and I am not ready.
Two months into a marriage I signed to save a ranch, I have somehow fallen all the way in love with a man I came here to convict.
Not tonight, not when it's this good and this fragile, not when there's still a thing in a box I haven't told him.
"I say a lot of things," I tell him. "I'm very mouthy. Famously."
He's quiet a moment. I feel him decide not to push, the same mercy he gave me in the barn, the same one I gave him at the lake, the two of us getting expert at letting each other off the hook.
"You do," he says. "Famously."
He pulls me in tighter, and I let him. I lie there in the dark with the man I'm not ready to tell, listening to him lie awake. Somewhere in the last two months this stopped being the marriage I planned to survive and started being the one I'd burn the plan down to keep.
Tomorrow I'll go back to being careful. Tomorrow there's a word I'm not ready to say, and a husband who'd hand me anything if I'd only stop deciding I have to carry it alone.
Tonight there's just this. A dark room, a slow heartbeat, a cat that hates me asleep on the man we both love, the dogs twitching through some dream against the door.
The cigar's still out on the terrace where he dropped it, burned all the way down to nothing, harmless in the end, like the best and the worst thing I've ever done to him.