Dark hair falling forward, chest heaving, her hand still in my hair.
The look on her face—God.
Desire and disbelief and the raw vulnerability of a woman who isn’t used to being worshipped.
“Lee—”
I hook my fingers in her underwear and pull them down, pressing my mouth to her hip bone.
Then lower. Then exactly where she needs me.
The sound she makes isn’t a moan.
It’s a fracture—sharp, shattered, the sound of a woman’s knees giving out.
I grip her thighs—her strong, thick, powerful thighs—and hold her up as I taste her.
Slow. Deliberate. Learning what makes her shake, what makes her grip my hair harder, what makes her hips roll against my mouth in that desperate rhythm she can’t control.
She’s wet. Soaked.
The taste of her spreads across my tongue and I groan against her because the intimacy of this—of being on my knees for this woman, of making her come apart with my mouth, of feeling her thighs tremble around my head—is the most present I’ve felt in years.
I’m not in the past. I’m not in the grief. I’m right here, in this stall, with this woman, and Iamgoing to make her scream my name.
I find the rhythm she needs. Steady. Relentless.
My tongue moving in flat, firm strokes while my hands grip her hips hard enough to bruise.
She’s gasping—incoherent, beautiful, her head thrown back against the boards and her body shaking under my hands.
When I slide two fingers inside her and curl them forward she shatters.
Her whole body locks—thighs clamping, spine arching, her hand fisting in my hair—and she comes against my mouth with a cry that fills the stall and spooks the mare and I don’t give a damn about anything except the way she pulses around my fingers and the way my name sounds in her throat.
I stand before the aftershocks have finished.
My belt, my jeans—off, fast, the urgency finally overtaking the patience.
She reaches for me and I let her this time, let her wrap her hand around me, and the contact of her calloused palm on my cock makes my forehead drop to the wall behind her and a sound tear out of me that I didn’t know I could make.
I lift her.
She knows the choreography now—legs around my waist, arms around my neck, the trusting surrender of a woman letting a man hold her weight.
I pin her to the wall and position myself and look at her face.
Her eyes are on mine.
Black. Bottomless. No fear. No guilt.
Just want, pure and clean and uncomplicated by ghosts.
“You’re mine.” I say it against her mouth. Not a question. A fact. A vow.
“Prove it.”
I push inside her in one long, devastating stroke.
