Page 29 of Broken Ride

I break with his name in my mouth and my hand locked in his hair, hard enough to bow my spine off the cheap mattress. He works me through it and keeps going, past the point where I'd have let myself off the hook, thorough as a man settling a debt, until the aftershocks turn into a second climb and I have to drag him up my body to make him stop.

His forearms are shaking on either side of my head.

"Look at you," I manage. "Holding back is going to kill you."

"Probably," he says. His voice has gravel in it. "Say the word."

"The word."

He's out of his clothes fast, boots, shirt and jeans hitting the floor with none of the patience he spent on mine. The first time was too fast for looking. This time I look, and what I see confirms everything the fit of his jeans has been suggesting for weeks. He's big everywhere, built by decades of holding on to things that wanted to throw him, his cock hard and heavy against his stomach. The sight of that much barely leashed man at the foot of the bed does something low and molten in me.

He rises over me and notches himself against me and stops, every muscle in him locked with the effort of the stopping. He's built for taking. I can feel the want to take radiating off him like heat off arena lights, and he keeps it throttled because I told him what I needed and he heard me.

"Tell me when," he says.

"Now, Wade."

He pushes inside me by degrees, thick and steady, and the stretch of him pulls a sound out of me that the neighbors can keep. The noise he makes against my throat is half relief and half fury, starving and rationing in the same breath.

He seats himself deep and goes still, letting me feel the full measure of what he's keeping on a short rein, his breath sawing against my ear.

"Move," I tell him.

He moves like the eight-second clock got suspended, deep and controlled and relentless, reading every hitch in my breathing and answering it, and it's devastating precisely because I can feel what it costs him.

The restraint is the dominance. He could take. He's choosing to give, and the choosing costs more. He does it anyway, jaw tight, ribs heaving, tension strung down his spine under my hands like a loaded rope.

"You wanted more than careful," he says at my ear, his voice dropped to the register he used on the mare, low and absolute. "So take it. And when you want it harder, say so."

"Harder," I say, because I can, because he made it true.

He delivers. The headboard finds the wall in a rhythm the front desk can probably chart. His hand slides under my hip and tilts me into an angle that turns every stroke into a direct hit, and whatever is coming out of me stops being words.

I rake my nails down his back. He hisses and drives into me, and the leash slips one notch, enough to show me the animal on the other end of it. One glimpse is all it takes.

I break for the second time with my heel hooked behind his thigh and the deadbolted door and the ugly carpet and the whole violated world locked outside, clenching around him. My climax takes his name with it on the way out.

That's what finally cracks him. His rhythm stutters, breaks, turns ragged and human, and he follows me over with a sound like something tearing loose, buried deep and shuddering, my name coming out of him like it cost him a rib. Even then, even there, he keeps a fraction of his weight braced off me on one rigid arm.

Afterward we lie in the lamplight with the air conditioner rattling, his fingers trailing along my spine. Nobody says anything soft, because we don't do soft, and because the silence is doing the work.

"You took a hoof for me," I say eventually, against his shoulder.

"Forearm was closest."

"That's your riding arm."

"Then it's used to worse," he says, and I laugh, actually laugh, for the first time since the photograph. He registers it like a score posted on the board.

His phone buzzes on the nightstand.

He checks the screen, and his body changes underneath me, the loose, spent stillness organizing itself back into readiness. He answers with one word. "Torres."

Her side of the conversation reaches me as shape instead of words, clipped and fast, and I watch it change Wade's face as it lands.

"Tonight?" he says. Then, after a pause that goes on too long, he asks, "Where?"

He hangs up and looks at me, and the lamplight catches the dried blood on his forearm.