Page 39 of Broken Ride

I close the door and flip the lock. When I turn around she's watching me from the middle of the floor with her chin up and her pulse going in her throat, and I take my time crossing to her, because a man should never hurry the last steps toward something he means to keep.

Then I wait for the terms. There are always terms with her, rules of engagement laid out sharp and bright before the first button, and I've honored all of them, because a man who can't respect a fence has no business being let inside it.

Nothing comes. She looks at me and gives me the whole open gate. That lands harder than anything she could have said with her mouth.

"Tonight you show me," I say, and it comes out graveled. Her hands rise to her shirt buttons, and I catch them and move them to her sides.

"No. That's mine."

I undress her like I'd gentle something wild and expensive, one slow piece at a time, watching only her eyes, and she stands for it with her jaw set like standing still is the hardest thing I've asked of her yet, because it is.

Shirt. Boots, first one and then the other, her hand on my shoulder for balance and gripping harder than balance needs. Jeans peeled down legs that have braced against half-ton animals all day and still tremble under my palms.

When she's bare in the full light she squares up to it, chin high, daring me to look, and I look until the daring runs out of her and what's left underneath is just want.

There's a scar low on her ribs I've felt under my hands and never been shown. I go to one knee and put my mouth on it and feel her body pull one breath and hold it, and her fingers slide into my hair, not pulling, just holding on.

"Wade."

"Right here." I work my mouth along the crease of her hip until her knees start negotiating with gravity, and then I put her on the bed, hook her thighs over my shoulders, and lower my mouth to her with nothing dimmed. She's already soaked, salt and heat, and the sound she makes when my tongue finds her clit could earn us a noise complaint.

I take my time about it, slow flat strokes and no mercy, two fingers curled inside her against the spot that makes her swear at me, reading her like she reads bloodwork, every hitch and every clench a data point I use against her.

"Come for me, Laney. Loud as you want. I mean to watch."

She comes with her thighs locking against my ears and my name broken into pieces, her inner muscles pulsing hard around my fingers, and I stay right there and work her through the aftershocks until she shoves at my head, laughing and swearing in the same ragged breath.

"You're not in charge here," I tell her, and strip out of my own clothes while she watches with fever-bright eyes, taking her long look at me, scars and miles and all the rest.

Then I settle over her, my weight on my forearms, her wrists gathered loose in one of my hands above her head, held like something I could crush and won't, which is the entire point and we both know it. "Eyes on me. You wanted slow. Slow costs more. Stay with me while you pay it."

She pays it. When I finally push inside her, one slow thick inch at a time, we're watching each other in the full light, nothing between us, nowhere to hide and neither of us reaching for it. She's tight and slick and burning hot around my cock, gripping me the whole way down, and hers is the only body that has ever felt like an answer instead of an escape.

I go slow because slow is the vow. Deep and unhurried, dragging the strokes out until she's arching under me and cursing my name and the horse I rode in on, her heels dug into the backs of my thighs, her free hand fisted in the sheets until I tell her to put it on me instead, and she does, nails first, raking down my spine like she's signing her own name to something.

The window unit rattles. I keep her wrists and keep the pace and watch every wall she's built come down course by course, not because I knocked them down, because she's opening the gates herself, eyes on mine. That's a gift a smart man never mistakes for surrender.

"This isn't temporary," I tell her, low, matching the words to the rhythm so she can't file them under later. "Say it back."

"This isn't temporary." Her voice breaks on the last word. I let go of her wrists and grind in deep, and her body follows her voice over the edge, the long rolling kind, her inner muscles clamping down on me in waves while she keeps her eyes open and on mine the whole way through it. It's the bravest thing I've ever watched a human being do.

It also finishes me. I bury myself to the root and hold there and empty everything I have into her with her name in my teeth.

After, she lies against my side with one leg thrown over me like a claim staked, tracing the old rope scar across my palm with one finger, slow, memorizing.

She doesn't ask about it. I don't ask about the rib. Tonight isn't for confession. It's for the other thing, the one neither of us has said with words yet, sitting in the room with the lights still on, patient as weather.

"Tactics," she murmurs against my shoulder, more than half gone already.

"Sound ones." I reach over and kill the lamp, and the dark that comes down is the friendly kind for once. "Sleep, Doc. The wall's got the watch."

Her breathing evens out and goes long. It's the first night with one key between us, and she went under easy, nothing in her squared toward the door.

I did that. Whatever else I've broken in my life, I built that.

I lie in the dark with my woman asleep on my arm and do the accounting a man does when everything he wants is finally in the room with him. The wall is built. Colt and Kenna on the road home with the money trail she's been walking, Brenda riding the circuit with her ears open, riders headed back out with logbooks in their glove boxes, and a ghost named Slade watching pens at night for reasons he keeps in his own pocket.

The war is named. In a few weeks a grand jury reads her science and the corridor starts coming apart. Every day between now and then, something out there is reaching for her, and it has to come through me. I have never in my life wanted to be a wall this bad.