She takes all of me—opens around me, pulls me in, her body gripping and hot and perfect—and the sound we make together is guttural, primal, the sound of two people becoming one thing.
I hold still for a heartbeat. Buried. Feeling her around me.
Feeling the life in it—the pulse, the heat, the fierce aliveness of being inside a woman I chose.
I move. Deep, steady, controlled.
Not the frantic collision of the tack room—this is possessive.
Each thrust deliberate. Claiming.
I pin her hips with mine and set a rhythm that is slow enough to feel everything and hard enough to make her nails score lines down my back.
She meets every stroke—rolling into me, gripping me tighter, matching possession with possession because Bex Dalton does not surrender, she conquers back.
“Harder.” Her voice in my ear. A command, not a plea. She bites my earlobe and the spark of pain goes straight through me. “Stop being careful, Lee. I won’t break.”
The last leash snaps.
I drive into her. Hard. Fast.
The stall wall shuddering behind her back, the bedding shifting under my boots, my hands on her hips pulling her into every thrust.
She’s loud—God, she’s loud—her voice echoing through the barn, my name and profanity and half-finished sentences that dissolve into moans.
I bury my face in her neck and give her everything I have—every ounce of strength, every year of want, every claim I’ve been building since she walked into my barn with her tools and her braid and her hands that fix broken things.
“Mine.” Against her throat. Between thrusts. The word a punctuation mark on every stroke. “Mine. You’re mine. Say it.”
“Yours.” She’s breaking. I can feel it—the trembling, the tightening, her body winding toward the edge. “I’m yours. I’ve been yours, Lee—God?—”
She comes. Devastating. Clenching around me so hard my vision whites out.
Her whole body shakes and she screams—actually screams, raw and unrestrained—and the sound and the feel and the overwhelming reality of this woman unraveling in my arms pushes me over after her.
I bury myself deep and let go, and the release is seismic, a full-body shudder that starts at the base of my spine and tears through me in waves.
I press her into the wall and hold her against me and pour everything I have into her—the grief, the want, the choice, the claim.
We slide to the floor.
The pine bedding is soft under us.
The mare has moved to the far corner and is eating hay, profoundly unbothered.
The barn is quiet except for our breathing—ragged, slowing, the shared rhythm of two bodies remembering how to function independently.
I don’t pull away.
That’s the difference.
That’s the whole, seismic, earth-shifting difference from last time.
I pull her into me instead.
Her back against my chest, my arms around her, my face in her hair.
The shavings are in her braid and her skin is flushed and damp and she smells like sweat and sex and the sweet hay scent of the barn and I hold her like I’m never letting go because I’m not.
