Page 34 of Rope Burn

"Sounded like one."

The banter settles into a quiet that doesn't need filling. We finish the food, and she gathers the containers and drops them into the trash. When she turns back from the wastebasket, I'm watching her from the edge of the bed.

I cross the room and turn the deadbolt. She's FBI. She's armed. She cleared the lot before I arrived. None of that changes the fact that I check the window before anything else happens in this room.

The curtains are already shut, but one side catches on the bracket where the rod mounts to the wall. I push at the gap twice before the overlap holds as well as it's going to. A finger's width of lot light still bleeds through at the seam.

Good enough.

I pull my shirt over my head, drop into the chair by the window, and turn back to her. She's watching me from the bed with the expression of a woman who knows she could have done all of that herself and is choosing not to point it out.

"Strip."

Her gaze comes to mine. The instruction sits between us in the hum of the air conditioner, and what registers isn't surprise or resistance. It's recognition.

This version of me isn't new to her. She's been waiting to see whether it would show up tonight.

She bends to pull off her boots and socks first and sets them beside the chair. Then her shirt comes over her head. The bra follows. Her jeans and underwear go down together, and she steps out of them with efficient grace, no performance, no negotiation.

I stay where I am. My jeans and boots on, shirt off, my hands resting open on my thighs. The imbalance is deliberate, and she feels it.

Her breathing changes while I look at her.

"Stay right there." The words come out low, unhurried. "I want to look at what's mine."

I stand. My hand closes around the back of her neck, and I walk her three steps to the dresser. The mirror above it is cheap motel glass, water-spotted at the edges, but the reflection is sharp enough to show both of us when I turn her to face it.

"Watch."

Her eyes find mine in the reflection. The contact is different from every time before. Not direct, not contested, but refracted. She can see my hands on her body and her own face at the same time, and the composure she wears in daylight buckles visibly. Her knees soften. Her lips part.

My hands move over her from behind. Down her ribs, across her belly, the rough skin of my palms dragging against the smooth plane of her stomach. In the mirror, the contrast is stark. Scarred knuckles and callused fingers on skin that carries nothing harder than motel soap and the faint salt of a long day.

I cup her breasts. The weight of them fills my hands, and her nipples harden under my palms before I do anything to earn it. I roll one between my thumb and forefinger, slow enough that she feels every ridge of the callus, and the sound she makes is low and involuntary. My mouth works down the side of her neck, and I suck hard enough to leave marks she'll find tomorrow.

Her head tips back into the hollow of my throat.

"Open."

Her eyes open in the mirror. I hold her gaze in the glass while my hand travels down her belly, over the dip of her navel, and slides between her thighs. She's already wet. My fingers find her clit and circle, slow and deliberate, and the first full stroke of pressure pulls a sound from her chest that tightens every muscle in my arms.

My other arm wraps across her chest and pins her to me. Her hips push forward into my hand, chasing the friction, and the flush climbing her throat and chest spreads across her skin in the reflection. I keep the pace slow. Every circle of my fingers draws a sharper response from her body, and I watch all of it in the mirror. The way her abs contract. The way her thighs spread wider without being told. The way her mouth opens on sounds she stopped trying to control two strokes ago.

I work her until her breathing fractures and her weight sags into my arm. The muscles in her thighs are trembling, and the slick heat under my fingers has soaked my hand. She's close when I pull my hand away, and the protest she buries in my neck is half profanity and half plea.

"Slade—"

"Not yet." I press my mouth to the space below her ear. "When you come, it's going to be with me inside you. And you're going to watch."

I pull off the rest of my clothes, one-handed behind her. She hears the zipper and her back arches, pressing into me. The denim drags against the backs of her bare thighs, and the friction of dressed against undressed tightens her grip on the dresser edge.

I grip her hip and bend her forward. The view from here is her spine curving down to the dresser, the dimples at the base of her back, the dark spill of her hair falling across one shoulder. She looks like a woman who chose to be exactly where she is.

The angle puts her face level with the mirror. Her forearms brace on the surface. Her eyes meet mine in the glass. She steadies and waits.

I line myself up and push inside her. The depth from this angle is immediate, fuller than missionary, and the stretch pulls a groan from both of us that neither tries to contain. The heat of her closing around me is slick and tight, and I feel every adjustment her body makes as it takes me in.

The first stroke seats fully. The clench of her inner muscles gripping me locks my hand on the wood beside hers, and the effort of not moving while she pulses around me costs me more than the last steer I threw.