Page 8 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

She holds my eyes while she does it, which nearly finishes the conversation right there.

I put my mouth on the inside of her knee. Work up.

Her breath quivers.

I put my tongue on her clit and she stops talking. Her heel finds my shoulder. I take my time, because I've had four days of watching this woman correct paperwork with a straight back, and I want to know exactly what it takes.

It takes two fingers in her and my mouth working slow when she wants fast, and then fast exactly when she gives up on asking. Her thighs start to shake and she puts one hand flat on the back of my head like she's holding a door shut, and when she comes she says my name once and then a word that isn't a word at all, and her heel drums once against my shoulder blade.

I stand up. Wipe my mouth with the back of my wrist. She watches me do it with her chest going hard.

"Bar's cold," she says.

"I've got a floor and a stove."

"Sold."

I get the horse blanket off the hook by the door — the one for the porch bench, wool, older than me — and she's off the bar and pulling my shirt over my head before I've got it spread. Her hands go over my chest, my stomach, and stop.

"You're built like the building," she says.

She gets my belt. Gets my jeans down. Takes my cock in her hand and does something with her thumb that shuts my eyes, and I let her have thirty seconds of that before I've got her down on the wool with the stove throwing orange up her whole left side.

I brace over her. She's got one hand flat on my ribs. Her hair's out of its clip, all over the blanket.

I stop, holding myself over her, and she looks up at me and reads it — she actually reads it, four days in, faster than anyone ever has.

"You've gone quiet again," she says.

"Yeah."

"Say it."

"It was never the business." The words come out low and rough and I don't dress them up. "That's true. But I've stood in those poplars sixty times and it was never about the tannin curve." I put my forehead against hers. "I grew up watching this valley get sold off in pieces to people who'd never taste any of it. And I couldn't stand to watch it happen to the last flat ground on my own fence line."

Her hand comes up to my face.

"And now?"

"Now the person holding it is you." I move against her, once, slow. "And I find I don't care about the ground nearly as much as I thought I did."

She pulls me in.

I push my cock into her and she takes all of it, one long breath in through her teeth, nails going into my back above the shoulder blade. I hold there. Let her get around me.

"Okay?"

"Move."

I move. Slow first, the whole length of it, because the wool's thin over floorboards and I want to know how she takes it before I take anything. She takes it by hooking one heel behind my thigh and pulling on the down-stroke, which is an answer.

"Like that," she says. "Exactly like that, don't get clever."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were."

I get one arm under her lower back and lift her into it, which changes the angle, and she stops talking in the middle of a word. Her head goes back on the blanket. The stove's throwing orange up the left side of her and the cellar cold is coming across the floor at both of us and her skin's hot everywhere I put my mouth.