She digs her nails into my shoulders, looking into my eyes. “No.”
I thrust into her in one slow, deep push. We both groan, low, raw, and helpless. She’s tight. So fucking tight. Her body clenches around me like she’s pulling me in, like her body remembers me the same way mine remembers her.
I grip her hips and start to move, deep strokes, dragging out every inch, feeling her tremble around me.
Her head falls back. “Cole—“
“Look at me.”
She does, and it’s over. I lose myself in her—hips snapping harder, faster, my hand sliding up her stomach to her big, beautiful breasts, squeezing, teasing her nipple until she gasps. The desk rocks under us. Pens roll off. More papers scatter.
She clings to me like she’s drowning. “Harder,” she begs.
I give it to her. I fuck her like I’ve wanted to for a month, deep, punishing strokes that make her toes curl and her voice break. When she starts to tremble again, I grip her jaw and force her eyes to mine.
“Come for me,” I growl.
She comes undone instantly, shaking, gasping, crying out my name as her body tightens around me. That’s all it takes. I bury myself deep, groaning her name into her neck as pleasure snaps through me, sharp and overwhelming.
We stay like that, pressed together, breathing hard, tangled in heat and sweat and silence, for a long minute.
Eventually, she exhales, soft and shaky. “Are you still scared?” she whispers.
I laugh, a rough, breathless sound against her skin. “Terrified.”
She cups my jaw, eyes soft now. “Cole… take the project.”
I go still.
She wipes her thumb across my cheek. “Let me help you. Especially now that it’s a bidding war. You waited too long, but we can fix it. I can help you fix it.”
I study her, really study her. Ella Morgan is chaos. Trouble wrapped up in 5 feet of gorgeousness, a storm I should be running away from. But she’s also honesty, grit, determination, and heat I can’t pretend I don’t want. If there is anyone who can convince me to do anything, it’s her.
And for the first time in weeks… something inside me eases. I let out a slow breath. “Okay.”
“Okay?” she repeats softly.
I nod. “I’ll do it. I’ll bid.”
Relief flashes across her face, warm, bright, beautiful. “And you’ll let me help you?” she asks.
“For now,” I say.
She smiles, then pulls me down for another kiss.
7
ELLA
I startle awake, choking on a scream. My lungs seize, heart thrashing against my ribs, and for a moment I don’t know where I am. The room is dark, shadows long and distorted, with sheets tangled around my legs like restraints. I shove them off, gasping, dragging a palm over my damp forehead.
Not again.
I sit up slowly, pushing my hair back, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the faint light leaking in from the hallway. But the pressure in my chest doesn’t ease. The nightmare clings to me like smoke—heavy, thick, and suffocating—a montage of memories that don’t belong together but always find each other anyway.
The accident when I was seventeen. The one that ended my barrel racing career before it even began. The screech of tires, the flip, the hospital lights.
Then, Zane and Ava’s car crashing seven years ago. The phone call from the hospital that haunts me to this day. All the blood, Ava’s screams, my own cries as I thought I’d lost both my brother and my best friend. Even now, I swear I can still hear it—the flat line of the EKG before they brought back my brother.
