Page 36 of Forbidden Protector

"Still yes?" Two words, and I can hear what it takes him to say them out loud instead of just reading the answer off me.

"Don't stop to ask me again."

"That's not a yes."

"It's a command. Take it as one."

The corner of his mouth ticks, not quite a smile, but close enough that it counts. After that he doesn't ask again, because he doesn't have to.

Then I get an honest look at exactly what I'm dealing with, and it startles a short, disbelieving laugh out of me even now.

"That's a lot of you."

"Didn't design it. Just carry it around." His eyes go warm at the edges. He reaches for his jeans on the floor, digs a foil packet out of his wallet, tears it with his teeth, steady, a man whose hands have done harder things than this, and gets it on without ceremony. Careful even now, mindful of the arm without making a production of it.

Then, instead of coming down over me, he rolls onto his back and takes me with him, settling me over his hips, with both hands loose and open at my waist. He’s in no rush to take back the control he just handed me.

"Your pace," he says. "Take whatever you need."

I sit up over him, and his hands find my breasts before I've even settled, cupping, thumbs circling slow over both peaks until I feel it everywhere at once.

Then I take him in, an inch at a time, letting him stretch me open in increments instead of all at once.

I watch him fight to hold still for it: his breath goes ragged, his jaw sets, both hands tightening at my hips like he's losing an argument with his own control on purpose.

I keep both hands flat against his chest the whole time. One of them is resting right over the scroll worked into his right pectoral, careful to stay well clear of the stitched left forearm.

I don't stop until I've taken every inch of him, seated all the way down.

For one long second neither of us moves at all. Just breathes.

"Christ, Mackenzie."

"I know." I feel impossibly full, deep enough that breathing changes shape around it. When I finally start to move it pulls a sound out of both of us at once.

He lets me set it. Doesn't try to take it from me and doesn't flip me under him, which I half expect from a man built like this. He just lies there with his hands on my hips, guiding, not steering, letting me find the rhythm that works and then matching it. It’s that same iron control I watched him hold crouched over a dead man's tracks, except now it's aimed entirely at not taking over.

Cases, families, fence lines: gone. I'm not thinking about anything at all.

Except once. One beat, mid-roll, when his hands tighten on my hips and he says my name in a voice that has nothing left guarding it, and I think: the last man who held me like I mattered is in a box in a garage in Salt Lake, and I couldn't save him either.

My rhythm goes wrong for half a beat. Holt's thumb traces one slow circle against my hip bone, and he says nothing, and that is the exact right thing.

I roll my hips and pull a groan out of him low enough to feel in my own chest. A reckless, powerful thrill runs straight up my spine at the sound of it. I chase it shamelessly, again and again, until his hands go tight enough on my hips to bruise and he's saying my name like it's the only word left in him.

"It's been a while," I tell him, breathless, half a laugh in it, half something far less steady. "God, this feels..."

I don't finish it. I don't need to.

He feels me say it in how I move, and answers by growing impossibly harder inside me, thicker, like my own words wound him tighter.

That's what finally does it: I detonate around him, shaking, his name breaking out of me in pieces, and he follows two heartbeats later with his whole body gone rigid beneath mine and my name in his mouth like a confession he's been saving.

We come down slow, tangled, a heap of sweat and spent breath, my forehead dropped against his collarbone and his hand moving in slow, absent circles up my spine.

After, I find his uninjured arm first, tracing the dark work down it, old lines gone soft with years, patterns I don't ask him to explain and he doesn't offer to.

My palm travels to his chest, the scroll over his heart, small numbers beneath it I don't understand and he doesn't volunteer.