Page 68 of Broken Ride

He works me the way he does everything now, present for all of it, no hurry in him anywhere. Two fingers curl deep while his thumb rolls my clit in patient ruinous circles, reading every clench and catch and using it against me. He finds the angle that makes my thighs shake and locks it in, relentless, his free hand still pinning my hip so I can't shift away from the intensity. Right at the edge he stops, fingers buried, perfectly still, and I say something about his ancestry that makes him laugh low against my sternum.

"File a complaint," he says.

"I'm drafting it."

"Draft faster." His mouth closes over my other breast, teeth catching hard, and his fingers pick the rhythm back up, deeper this time, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit with every stroke. The complaint dies in committee. The orgasm comes up from the base of my spine like ground swell and breaks long and devastating, my inner muscles clenching around his fingers in hard rhythmic pulls, my hands fisted in the quilt, his name coming out of me in a shape I've never given it. He works me through every last wave of it with his eyes on my face, missing nothing, sober as a judge and twice as thorough. When the aftershocks are still rolling through me he withdraws his fingers and puts them in his mouth.

The look he gives me while he does it could burn this motel to the foundation.

"Been wanting to do that sober," he says, rough. "Now I know what you taste like when every part of it hits clean."

I'm still trembling when he stands and strips, efficient, deliberate. His clothes all hitting the floor because he's done waiting.

He's hard, thick, the length of him standing full against his stomach, and the sight of Wade Ashcroft naked in lamplight with nothing in his blood and nothing left to hide behind is enough to make my mouth go dry. Getting clean hasn't softened him. It's stripped the padding off, and what's underneath is sharper, leaner, every muscle cut in stark relief, built by decades of rough stock and held together by stubbornness and rope burn.

He comes back over me and settles his weight between my thighs, the solid heat of him pressed against me, not inside yet, just there. The anticipation alone is enough to make me cant my hips toward him. His hand catches my hip and holds me still.

"Not yet." His mouth finds the hinge of my jaw, teeth and tongue. "I've thought about this every night for weeks, Laney, and I'm going to take every goddamn second of it. You'll get what you want when I decide you get it."

"You're a cruel man, Wade Ashcroft."

"You knew that when you let me in the room." The hot length of his cock slides through the wet of me, the head dragging over my clit, and the sound that rips out of me is raw enough that I stop caring about walls and neighbors and the entire interstate. The second pass is deliberate, coating himself, and the friction is so close to what I need that my fingers dig into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.

"Delaney Ann Prescott," he says against my ear, slow, like swearing in a witness. He notches himself at my entrance and holds, just the head of him stretching me open. "I'm going to remember every second of this for the rest of my life. So you're going to lie here and feel all of it, and you're going to look at me while it happens."

He pushes in. One long unbroken stroke that goes on and on, the width of him spreading me open inch by patient inch, the stretch bordering on too much in the best way, until he's seated to the root and I feel him everywhere, the fullness pressing deep enough to register in my ribs. My vision goes white at the edges.

He stills. Buried, his forehead drops to mine. I feel a fine tremor run the length of him, this enormous careful man shaking with the effort of taking every sensation uncut, unarmored, undefended, every nerve hit at full volume because there's nothing left to turn it down.

The withdrawal is slow, almost all the way out, every inch of it a question. Then he drives back in hard enough to jolt the headboard, and the answer knocks the breath out of me.

He builds the rhythm from there, deliberate and devastating, each stroke bottoming out with a depth that lights up nerves I didn't know I had. A hand under the small of my back tilts my hips up, changing the angle, and the next thrust hits a place so deep that both hands lock around his forearms and my breath leaves in a shape that isn't a word. He locks that angle in and takes it, his pace steady and punishing, his breathing ragged against my shoulder.

"You feel what that is?" His voice is wrecked, stripped to the gravel underneath, but the command in it hasn't wavered once. "That's what sober feels like. Every inch of you, Laney. Nothing between us. I can feel you tighten every time I bottom out, and I'm going to make you come on my cock so I can feel that too."

I can't answer. Language has left the building. My heels lock behind his thighs, my nails rake down his back hard enough to leave welts, and I hold on while he takes what he wants, because wanting him to have it is the fiercest thing I've ever felt.

The lamplight stays on. Our eyes stay open. It's the most exposed I've ever been in my life, more than the wash, more than the witness room, two people watching each other stripped to the bone and refusing to look away.

A thumb finds my clit between us, and the dual sensation of him driving deep while he works me from the outside collapses every nerve ending into a single bright wire. The orgasm builds from the inside this time, tightening around him, and he feels it. His jaw sets, his thrusts go harder, shorter, demanding.

"Give it to me," he says. "All of it. Right now."

I break. The orgasm tears through me in long shuddering waves, my inner muscles clenching around him so hard his rhythm fractures.

He swears, low and ragged, and his hips slam forward once, twice, three times, losing all their precision. He buries himself to the hilt and holds, every muscle in his body locked rigid against mine, and I feel him pulse inside me, the warmth spreading deep. My name comes apart in his mouth, all three parts of it, spoken into the curve of my throat like a man signing his life over. I hold him through it with my hands spread wide across his back, unbound, exactly the way I promised.

After, we lie in the lamplight with my head on his chest and his heartbeat slowing under my ear, and nobody speaks for a while. His fingers trace the ring on my wrist where the tie was, a man reading a healing incision.

"I'm not going to talk about forever," he says finally, up at the ceiling. "Forever's a word for men who haven't done the work yet. I've got today banked, and I'm good for tomorrow, and I'll requalify every morning after that for as long as you'll audit me." His hand goes still on my wrist. "But the finals are coming, and when they're done, I want you to come home with me. Not for a visit, Laney. For good. A mile of open ground in every direction and nobody sneaking up on anything."

I lift my head. He's already looking at me.

"You once told me that was a defensive perimeter," I say.

"It was, when you wanted it for watching the road." His thumb moves over my knuckles. "Come want it for the horses instead. See how it sits."

I think about a woman in a diner a year of road ago, wanting acreage like a garrison wants walls. A name in fresh vinyl drying in the sun. Then I answer him the only way that's ever worked between us, which is plainly.