Page 10 of Ransom
The rain suddenly let up, ending just as quickly as it'd come in.
His hand left the back of my head, and the room came back into focus. I remembered who I was, who I was with, and what I was there for, and being on my knees for him wasn't it.
I got up off my knees slow, pulled my jeans on in the dark, put on my damp shirt, set my hat on my head.
When I turned around, he was watching me like he was unsure. I gave him the easiest smile I had. He didn't buy it.
"You all right, darlin'?"
It came out before I'd decided to say it. His head came up sharp, and something moved across his face I couldn't read — not anger, not exactly. Close to a flinch, like I'd put a hand on a bruise without knowing it was there. He held still long enough that I felt the word sitting in the air between us, too soft for the room, too soft for him, too soft for what we'd just done.
Then his jaw worked, and he looked away.
"Come on," he said. "We got light."
He moved past me to the door.
Well, all right then. Guess we were going to pretend I didn't just give him the best blowjob of his life.
Getting the judge back across Galahad was no easier the second time. Ransom took the shoulders without discussion, and I took the legs. We got him up on the third try. Ransom checked the knots twice, carefully, and I watched his hands and waited for him to look at me.
He didn't.
I mounted Faye, and she shifted under me, glad to be moving. The rain was gone, and the sun was back out, drying up thepuddles while the land drank the rest. Ransom swung up onto Galahad with his face turned away.
"Come on," he said again, and started off.
I followed.
He rode ahead with his face turned, and I rode behind in a dead man's boots and didn't ask him what he was thinking.
I figured it was forty minutes back to the ranch. I'd be dry by then and probably look presentable. No one, at least, would look at me and think I was a man who'd licked cum off another man's boots just minutes ago.
I turned my head and looked out at the desert. I'd come in from the south on a road that ran straight between the fence and the mesa. We weren't on it. The mesa was on my left when it should've been on my right. Galahad was picking his way over ground that hadn't seen a vehicle in a long time, maybe ever, and Faye was following because that was what Faye did when another horse was in front of her.
He didn't look back.
I kept my hands easy on the reins and my mouth shut, even though I knew we were headed the wrong way. I had a feeling about what he meant to do next, and it wasn't one I liked.God dammit, Winston. Can't you be wrong just once? He's going to kill me,I thought,and I'm letting him.
Some part of me had already gone over to him in the shack and hadn't come back. That part wasn't afraid. That part was settled. The rest of me, the part still wearing the badge, was the one being walked into the desert, and even it wasn't pulling on the reins.
I followed.
The sun bled outbehind the mesa, and I led the Ranger deeper into the land where Pae Saco kept its teeth.
Galahad walked beside me with Roy Castillo's body lashed across his back, and behind us Winston rode Faye with his hat tipped back and his mouth shut for once. A quiet Winston was a dangerous Winston, and the fact that I already knew that about a man I'd met four hours ago was its own kind of problem.
The bigger problem was in my jeans.
I tried not to think about Winston on his knees in a dead man's boots, his lips parted, his eyes on mine, the sound he'd made when he came. I tried not to think about how his throat had worked when I'd told him to lick me clean, or how he'd pressed his lips to the head of my cock before he put me away, like it meant something.
I failed.
My cock thickened against the seam of my jeans and I gritted my teeth. He was going to stay with me longer than anyone I'd let in.
And underneath the thinking about his lips, quieter and worse, was the thinking about what it would be to keep him. To put him in my bed. To find out what he looked like in the morning. The thought arrived without my permission and would not leave when I told it to.
And none of it mattered because I was taking him to Coyote.
