Page 14 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
He lifts his head just enough to look up at me. His eyes are dark and his expression is the open one, the real one. "Yeah," he says, and goes back, and I grip the pillow and breathe through my nose and let him.
When I come it's long and slow and deep — nothing like the shed's sharp urgency, it builds from somewhere low and spreads outward — and his hands hold my hips through it with the same steady certainty he brings to everything, and I lie there afterward with my chest heaving and his mouth pressed to the inside of my thigh like he's in no hurry at all to move.
"Come here," I manage.
He comes up over me. His shirt is gone — I don't remember when — and I run my palms over his chest and shoulders and he lets me, stays still, watching my face while I touch him. I feel the scar along his ribs under my fingertips. I feel the weight of him settling against me and the specific way he catches his breath when I reach down between us.
"Tessa."
"I've got you," I say.
His mouth curves. Just barely. Then he reaches for the nightstand.
When he pushes inside me it's slow — slow enough that I feel every inch of it, slow enough that I have to muffle the sound inhis shoulder — and he stays still for a moment after, forehead to mine, both of us breathing.
"Okay?" he says.
"More than okay. Move."
He moves. Slowly at first, the way I ask for, and it is — the word that comes to me isdevastating, which is not a word I associate with sex but here we are. There's nowhere to be. There's no truck, no shed, no crew in the trees. Just this room and this man and his mouth against my temple and his hands that already know me, that figure me out in a week the way some people never manage in years.
He finds a rhythm and I find it with him and my hands are on his back feeling the shift and pull of muscle and his breath in my ear gets uneven in degrees. I wrap my legs around him and he makes a low rough sound and his hips press deeper.
"Look at me," he says.
I do. He holds my gaze and keeps moving and I hold it because I want to see him — the one without the scowl or the wall, the one that's just Beckett, here, with me.
"Stay," he says. Not a question. Not a command. Just the word punched out of him like he can't help it.
"I'm staying." I pull him down closer. "I already told you."
"Tell me again."
"I'm staying, Beckett. I'm staying."
His forehead drops to mine. His hand slides between us and finds where I need it and I gasp and grip his shoulders and this time when it hits I go rigid and silent, face in his neck, and I feel him follow — the full-body shudder, his grip fierce on my hip, my name low and spent against my hair.
We lie tangled together after, the window open, tree frogs starting up outside. His arm is across my waist, heavy and warm. The lamp is still on. Neither of us moves to turn it off.
"Nora's going to want pancakes," he says eventually.
"I know how to make pancakes."
"Of course you do."
I turn my head to look at him. He's looking at the ceiling, the lamp still on, and in the amber light the scar through his eyebrow is visible and the lines of his face are at rest — not the scowl, not the careful, just him.
"Beckett."
"Yeah."
"I'm glad I came in."
He's quiet for a moment. His hand moves on my waist, once, back and forth.
"To the library," I say. "That first Tuesday. I'm glad I saw the sign."
"Me too," he says.
