He moved. Deep, steady thrusts that pinned me against the beam with every stroke. The wood scraped my back through my shirt and I didn’t care, couldn’t care, because every thrust hit something inside me that turned thought into static. I gripped his shoulders with both hands, nails digging in, and matched his rhythm by rolling my hips down to meet him.
“Harder.”
He gave me harder. Shifted his grip under my thighs, changed the angle, and drove into me with a force that made the beam shudder. Starlight stamped on the other side of the wall. Cassie blew an annoyed breath from two stalls down.
“Your horses hate me,” Graham managed between thrusts.
“They’ll get over it.” I pulled his mouth to mine and kissed him messy and desperate, letting him taste himself, and the intimacy of that, the rawness of it, the zero-distance-left-between-us reality of fucking a man in my barn in daylight with my jeans around one ankle and hay dust in my hair, cracked something open in my chest.
Not grief. Not fear. Something warmer. Something I hadn’t let myself feel in so long I’d forgotten its name.
“Look at me,” Graham said.
I opened my eyes. His face was inches away. Flushed, intense, his jaw tight with the effort of holding back.
“I want to watch you come,” he said. “Right here. In your barn. With nothing locked and nothing hidden.”
The words hit me like a match to dry grass. My whole body tightened around him and he felt it, I could see it in his face, in the way his control slipped and his thrusts went rough and uneven.
“Touch me,” I breathed.
He shifted my weight to one arm, strong enough to hold me up, which was going on the list of things I was never going to stop thinking about ,and got his free hand between us. His thumb found my clit and pressed, circled, and the orgasm built so fast I couldn’t brace for it.
“Graham—I’m?—”
“I know. Let me feel it.”
I came with his name in my mouth and his body buried inside me, my back arched off the beam, my nails leaving marks on his shoulders that he’d feel for days. It rolled through me in waves, legs shaking, breath gone, the sound I made somewhere between a moan and a sob, and I didn’t muffle it. I let the barn have it. Let the horses hear it. Let whoever might be passing outside hear it, because I was done being quiet about wanting this man.
Graham followed me over seconds later. His forehead dropped to my shoulder and he groaned my name against my collarbone, hips stuttering, fingers digging into my thighs, and I held him through it with both arms around his neck, feeling every pulse.
We stayed like that. Pressed together, breathing hard, my back against a rough wooden beam in a barn that smelled like hay and horses and sex, with the afternoon sun cutting through the dust and neither of us saying a word.
His lips brushed my shoulder. Then my neck. Then the soft spot behind my ear.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he murmured.
“You too.” I ran my fingers through his damp hair. “But what a way to go.”
He laughed against my skin, and the vibration of it went through me, warm and reckless, and I held on tighter because my legs were useless and my brain was offline and the only thing keeping me upright was this man.
He lowered me slowly. My legs found the ground but didn’t commit to holding me up. I leaned against the beam and watched him deal with the condom, wrapping it in a bandanna from his back pocket, because of course he had a bandanna, he was that kind of man, and then he picked up my underwear from the barn floor and handed them to me with an expression that was equal parts reverence and absolute smugness.
“Don’t,” I warned, snatching them from his hand.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face is saying plenty.”
He grinned. I pulled up my jeans and shook hay out of my hair and tried to remember what I looked like before I’d been fucked senseless against a load-bearing beam in my own barn.
Cassie watched me from her stall with an expression I could only describe asI saw everything and I’m judging you.
“Not a word,” I told her.
Graham tugged his shirt back on, still smiling. I straightened my clothes, checked for hay in places hay should not be, and finger-combed my hair into something that didn’t screamI just had sex ten feet from a horse.
“For the record,” I said, pulling my shirt straight, “that never happened.”
