Page 45 of Runaway for the Grumpy Daddy

He stood there one more second, all that stillness gathering into intention — and I want it noted that I saw the moment the decision finished in him, saw it arrive in his shoulders and his hands, and every alarm I'd carried out of Bozeman had exactly nothing to say about it. Three years I'd flinched from big men making decisions in kitchens. And here was the biggest one in Montana, deciding, and what my body did was lean.

He crossed the room.

Three strides, unhurried, the floorboards announcing each one, and I stood my ground in the middle of his kitchen and let the mountain come to me. His hands came up and framed my face, both of them, so large that his fingertips met behind my head and his thumbs rested at the corners of my mouth, and he tipped my chin up and looked at me from the enormous height of him with an expression that was going to be with me the rest of my life.

"Been patient twice," he said, low. "It's in the file."

"Three times," I whispered. "Counting today."

"Three times," he agreed, and bent down to me, telegraphed the whole way, always, even now — and kissed me like a man signing something.

My hands fisted in his collar and his came down off my face and spanned my waist entire, thumbs nearly meeting over my spine, and he lifted me clean off the floor without breaking it, and I made a sound into his mouth that I had never made in my life.

He carried me across his own house like I weighed what Clover weighed, and the lamplight swung past and the fire painted the log walls gold, and then the bed came up under me — the enormous bed, built to his scale, a county of quilt — and he laid me into the middle of it.

"Slow," he said, against my jaw. Not a question. A forecast.

He undressed me with care. Button by button down my flannel, his enormous fingers working each one with the patience he brought to foaling, and between buttons he kissed what he'd uncovered — my collarbone, the hollow of my throat, the slope of my shoulder as the fabric came away — until I was shaking with something that had no fear in it anywhere, which was its own miracle, entered into the record. When the shirt opened over my ribs, he stopped. Looked at the yellow-green ghost of the hoofprint for a long moment, his jaw doing its one tight movement, and then he bent and put his mouth to it — so lightly I felt it as warmth more than touch, breath and beard and the barest press of lips, once at each rib the bruise had visited, like a man paying respects — and I lay there in the lamplight and felt my eyes go hot for no reason I could have testified to.

"Left side stays out of it," he said, low, into my skin. "My hands know where it is. They'll remember all night."

And they did. That was the thing I kept discovering, over and over, as he peeled me out of my jeans and my socks and the last of everything, as those hands moved over me sure and slow and endless — hands that could span my whole ribcage, thumbs meeting at my sternum, fingers wrapping round to my spine, and never once, not once, did they land on the tender place. For three years, hands that size had been the shape of danger. I had built a whole nervous system around the arithmetic of big men — reach, weight, what a backhand travels, where the exits are — and now I lay small and bare in the middle of an acre of quilt with the biggest hands in Montana mapping me like deeded ground, and every alarm I owned had gone off shift. His size wasn't the threat in the room. His size was the room. Shelter. Being under him was being under a roof.

He kissed his way down me. Took his time about the geography — my breasts, until I was arching and gripping the quilt; the soft of my belly, which no one had ever been kind to; the point of each hipbone — and then he settled between my thighs with his shoulders holding them wide, which was not a thing my thighs could have argued with if they'd wanted to, and they did not want to.

"Josie." My name in the low register, the two-a.m. register, spoken directly against the inside of my thigh so I felt it as much as heard it. "You'll tell me what's good. Out loud. Nobody's rationing tonight."

And then his mouth was on me.

The first pass of his tongue took the top of my head off. I heard myself cry out — actually cry out, unmuffled, unmanaged, a sound I'd have smothered in a pillow in my old life — and my hand flew to my own mouth on pure Bozeman reflex, and he reached up without lifting his head and took my wrist in two fingers and drew the hand away and pressed it flat to the quilt.

"None of that," he said, against me, and the words themselves were a sensation. "This house wants the noise. Let me hear you."

So I let him hear me. He worked me slow — devastatingly, deliberately slow, his tongue learning me, circling, testing, filing every gasp for reference and then returning to what earned it — and the pleasure built in me like nothing I had a comparison for, warm and enormous and climbing. His beard was soft-rough against my thighs. One vast hand lay spread across my belly, anchoring me — a warm bar, weight without threat — and when my hips started moving, chasing his mouth, he didn't pin them still. He let me move. He moved with me. Held down, I kept thinking, wildly, gratefully, is just held, and I was loud about all of it, louder than I'd ever been in my life, his name and God and once, breaking out of me on a rising sob, Daddy — and I felt the sound go through him like a current, felt his groan against me, and the vibration of it nearly finished the job on its own.

"There she is," he murmured, and his tongue settled into a rhythm, firm and even and merciless, right where I needed it, and the pressure coiled tighter and tighter, my heels digging into the quilt, my breath gone to pieces. "That's it, little one. Nothing to hold. Nothing to hide. Let go for me."

And I did. The wave broke over me all at once, up from my heels and through my hips and out the top of me, and I came against his mouth crying out loud enough to scatter blackbirds, my whole body arching into his hands, and he stayed with me through every pulse of it, gentling, easing, until I lay wrung and gasping in the lamplight with tears leaking sideways into my hair, laughing and leaking both at once, because apparently that was just how I did things now.

"Okay," I managed, wrecked. "Okay. That's going in the file."

"Mm." He rose up over me, and undressed — finally, at last — and I got to watch, up on my elbows, greedy about it, as the flannel came off and then the rest. He was exactly what forty years of the work builds: shoulders that ended the lamplight, the flat scarred plains of him, and I put my hands on his chest just to feel the size of what I wasn't afraid of.

And then I dared myself to look down, at the thickness and hardness of his pleasure. Big as a mountain, just like everything else about him.

He came down over me, braced on his forearms, his weight everywhere and nowhere, a roof lowering. "Ready for me, babygirl?"

I nodded, both spent and desperate for more all at once. "So ready," I whispered.

He entered me with ease, feeling just how ready I was, but as he moved farther inside me, I felt him stretching me open so far I wondered if I was going to be able to take him.

"Still with me?" Low, against my mouth.

"Still with you. Please, Daddy. Please."

He went slow. Of course he went slow — he telegraphed everything, even this, especially this — pressing into me by patient degrees, watching my face the whole way, and the stretch of him pulled a long broken sound out of me that I made no attempt to manage. He was a lot. He was so much, and my body opened around him inch by inch, welcoming, and when he was finally seated all the way home, we both went still, forehead to forehead, breathing each other's air.

"Josie," he said. Just my name. But his voice had gone down to bedrock, and his arms were shaking, faintly, the way arms shake when a strong man is being careful, and I understood I was feeling ten weeks of want held on a short rein.