Our bodies lock and tangle, sweat slicking every surface, and there’s no way to breathe it out, only to let it choke and fill me.
He moves when I’m sure I’ll break. It’s not a gentle start, just this pure, animal rhythm that threatens to unravel everything I am.
I try to arch up, to catch the pace, but he’s holding me down, setting the speed, dragging every curse and plea out of my mouth because I can’t keep up.
Masochist, I think, but the word is for me. I want this, crave it, hate how much I crave it.
The pace is criminal, impossible. The room dissolves, and all that’s left is that animal repetition, friction building until the world’s nothing but skin and heat, my body blurring at the seams where he fits inside me.
My brain loops back on itself, electrified by sensation and the sick, miraculous knowledge that I am not, will never be, enough. Not for him, not for this, not for anything. It kills me, and it’s the only thing that makes me feel alive.
My thighs are shaking, but I force myself up to meet him every time, desperate for the next hit. We are both ruined, the slap and drag of bodies a wild metronome, but he still won’t give me the edge. He pushes me right to it, backs off, pushes again, leaves me hanging by a hair. I bite his shoulder to keep from screaming.
“That’s it,” he says, dark with pleased approval. “Shake for me. Scream.”
When the second wave hits, sharper, deeper, his mouth is on mine, catching every sound I make, his hands steadying me like he planned the entire thing from the start.
When the world finally settles, he rests his forehead against mine, breathing hard.
“You’re trouble,” he whispers, wrecked. “And I want every second of it. I don’t want this to end.”
Neither do I.
Not with him looking at me like that.
Not with the room spinning around us.
Not with the promise of more written all over his smile.
CHAPTER TWO
Boone
One week later…
The bell at Mountain Ridge Elementary is loud as a fire alarm every damn afternoon. It grates down my spine the same way it has since Sadie first started kindergarten. Kids rush out through the open gate like cattle—loud, fast, and with no sense of direction.
I lean back against my truck, arms folded, boots planted in the gravel. Parents cluster in little circles. Chattering, comparing schedules, trading PTA gossip as if it’s insider trading.
And then there’s Carol Spence, the self-appointed queen of the PTA.
She’s holding court again, waving a stack of color-coded folders. I swear she thinks she’s Moses delivering commandments, her perfectly straight ponytail not moving an inch in the breeze.
Her kid, Eli, runs to her side in a tiny collared shirt and pressed jeans, as if she ironed him too.
“They really should make the ranch parents do more volunteer hours,” she says loudly. “It’s not fair that the rest of us do the heavy lifting.”
My jaw ticks.
She doesn’t say my name. She never does.
She doesn’t have to.
I could say something. Correct her. Remind her I run a full-scale operation with employees and livestock and bills that don’t pay themselves. That the ranch keeps half this damn town afloat. That when the school needed auction items for the fundraiser, it wasmytrail ride package that got bid up.
But talking won’t do a damn thing. Carol doesn’t want understanding. She wants the last word.
So I stay silent.
