Page 33 of The Reckless Rookie

“Catt.”

I grip his shoulders. “Don’t stop.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

This one comes faster. My thighs tighten around him, and I come looking straight at him.

Finn breaks. His head drops beside mine, his rhythm losing every bit of control he has fought for all night. A few hard movements and his whole body locks over me. My name is against my throat when he comes.

Afterward, the room goes quiet except for us trying to breathe and something outside screaming into the Texas night like it has a personal grievance.

Finn rolls away long enough to deal with the condom, then comes back. His hand moves slowly up my spine. Back down. Still keeping the pace I taught him.

“I didn’t know it could be like that,” he says into my hair.

I put my hand over his heart. Still racing. “No?”

“I thought slow meant waiting to get to the good part.”

I smile against his chest. “And now?”

His fingers move through my hair. “Turns out I’m an idiot.”

“I knew that already.”

“Mean.”

“Accurate.”

He goes quiet. “I’d have waited longer.”

I lift my head. There is no joke waiting for me.

“For you,” he says. “However long you needed.”

That gets through, because wanting is easy and Finn has wanted plenty of things. Waiting is different. The man who attacks most of life at full speed would have stayed half a second behind me for as long as I asked him to.

I look away, and his fingers touch my jaw until I make myself look back.

“Stay.” The word escapes before I can organize it into something safer.

Finn’s expression shifts, and then he settles deeper into the bed. “Yeah.” No joke. Just yes.

Later, he sleeps with one arm heavy across my waist, and I stare at the ceiling.

The felony is still there. So is the contract. My mother remains, regrettably, my mother. I knew all of that when I pulled him through my door, and I chose him anyway.

Somewhere between telling Finn to follow and forgetting which one of us was leading, I stopped managing the moment long enough to actually live inside it.

The consequences can come tomorrow. Tonight was mine.

Chapter seventeen

Finn

I’ve been carrying it around for three days like a hot coal in my chest, and the strangest part is nobody can tell.

I do the work. I muck and I mend and I haul and I take Vicente’s corrections, and the whole time there’s this thing sitting behind my ribs, warm and enormous and mine, and I can’t say a word about it to a living soul. Not because it’s shameful. Because it’s dangerous. What happened in that house three nights ago could cost her the ranch and cost me the only door left out of a cell, and knowing that doesn’t make me want it back. It makes me careful with it, the way you’re careful carrying something you’d break your hand before you dropped. I’ve never had a thing worth being careful with before.