Page 20 of Broken Ride

"Don't flatter yourself."

"I'm not." His mouth drops to my neck, teeth scraping the tendon, and his right hand slides down my stomach, fingers hooking into the waist of my jeans. "Your pulse has been running fast every time I've stood within arm's reach since Midland. You think I didn't notice?"

He noticed. The same way I noticed his attention snagging on my mouth when I'm talking, his hands flexing when I lean past him at the pens, the heat pouring off him when the distance between us shrinks below professional. We've been lying to each other with straight faces and clenched fists, and the lie just ran out of road.

"Off," he says, tugging at my jeans, and I lift my hips to let him strip them down my legs along with my underwear. He drops both on the carpet and steps back between my thighs, one palm pressing my stomach down against the desk surface. The other hand slides between my legs, and the first contact of his fingers against my clit sends my back arching off the desk hard enough to rattle the wall-mounted lamp above it.

I'm soaked. His fingers slide through the slick heat of me, and the sound it makes in the quiet room is obscene, specific, impossible to pretend away. His jaw tightens at the evidence, and his free hand grips my hip hard enough that I'll feel the bruise tomorrow.

"This is what arguing with me does to you." His voice is rough, almost conversational, and the calm of it while his fingers work me open is worse than any demand. He pushes two fingers inside me, curling forward, and my hips roll against his hand before I've decided to move. "Good to know."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

My hand shoots to his wrist, not to stop him but to feel the tendons working beneath his skin while his thumb presses a slow, grinding circle against my clit. The pressure builds from the base of my spine, spreading through my thighs, tightening in my abdomen. I can feel every callus on his fingers. Every ridge. Every deliberate adjustment as he reads my body's responses and uses them against me. He speeds up when I hold my breath, slows down when I'm close, dragging me toward the edge and pulling me back with a control that should infuriate me.

It does infuriate me. It also keeps me pinned to the desk with my thighs shaking and my hand white-knuckled on his wrist.

"Look at me," he says.

I open my eyes. His are dark, focused, the same intensity he carries into the chute concentrated entirely on me. The vulnerability of being watched while my body responds to his hands is almost worse than the pleasure itself. He sees every contraction, every involuntary clench, every catch in my breathing. He's cataloging me the way I'd catalog a clinical presentation, and the precision of his attention makes the ache low in my belly sharpen until it's almost unbearable.

"I want to feel you come on my hand before I fuck you."

The words land in my chest and detonate. His thumb presses harder. His fingers curl deeper. The orgasm tears through me from the center outward, my inner muscles locking around his fingers in rhythmic contractions that he rides with his hand, steady, relentless, drawing it out until my thighs are trembling and my breath comes in ragged pulls I can't control.

His eyes never leave my face. His fingers don't stop until my body does.

I'm still shaking when I reach for his belt. My fingers are clumsy, uncoordinated, and I don't care. I work the buckle open, shove his jeans and briefs down far enough, and wrap my hand around his cock. He's thick, hard, the skin hot against my palm, and the sound he makes when I stroke him, a guttural exhale pushed through clenched teeth, is the first crack in his composure.

I stroke again, tighter, twisting at the head, and his hand slams flat on the desk beside my hip. His abs contract, the muscles standing in sharp relief, and for one second the man controlling every moment of this encounter isn't in control at all.

"Now," I say.

He pulls me to the edge of the desk. One hand grips the back of my thigh. The other wraps around himself to line up, and when he pushes inside me, the stretch is slow and relentless. Full. I feel every inch of him, the width spreading me open, the depth hitting a place that sends a white jolt up my spine. My teeth sink into the junction of his neck and shoulder to keep the sound from carrying through the motel walls.

He doesn't start slow. The first thrust bottoms out with a force that jolts the lamp overhead, and the pace he sets after that is hard and driving, each stroke deep enough that the impact registers in my ribs. I meet him, my hips rolling into every thrust because I refuse to let this be something that happens to me. This is something I'm doing. My nails rake down his back hard enough to leave welts, and his response is raw enough to strip the finish off every pretense either of us has been maintaining.

"Harder."

He obliges. His hand closes around the back of my neck, tilting my face up to his, and the angle change drives him deeper, hitting a spot that makes my vision blur. The desk hammers the wall in a steady rhythm, his maps falling from their pushpins in a slow cascade. His breathing is ragged, punctuated by low sounds that he's not bothering to suppress, and the rawness of them feeds the tension coiling tighter through my hips and thighs.

I don't close my eyes. Neither does he. The eye contact is the most dangerous part, more intimate than his cock inside me, more exposing than the sounds I'm making. Two people watching each other lose control and refusing to look away.

His hand slides between us, his thumb finding my clit again, and the dual sensation of him thrusting deep while his thumb works me from the outside collapses the distance between the first orgasm and the second. This one builds slower and hits harder, a tightening that starts in my thighs and coils inward until everything locks at once, my inner muscles clenching around him so hard that his rhythm breaks.

He swears, low and rough, and his thrusts turn ragged, losing their precision, his fingers digging into the flesh of my hip as he drives in deep and holds, his entire body going rigid against mine.

I feel him pulse inside me. The warmth spreads. His forehead drops to my shoulder, his breath sawing against my collarbone. His hands are shaking where they grip the desk edge on either side of my hips. My legs are still locked around him. My pulse is slamming against the inside of my wrists. The aftershocks roll through my lower body in slow, diminishing contractions that I can't stop and don't try to.

The silence afterward is total.

The room smells like sex and bourbon, and the manifests are scattered across the carpet three feet away, red ink still tracing the drug corridor we were arguing about ten minutes ago. Neither of us reaches for the other. Neither of us speaks.

I slide off the desk. Pull my underwear and jeans on. Hook my bra and tug my shirt down. His eyes track every movement with an expression I can't read and don't try to.

"This doesn't change things," I say.