"Tell me you're mine."
"I'm yours, Spur."
"Say it again."
"I'm yours."
I pull her flannel off her. The t-shirt under it. Lay her down in the hay on top of my flannel.
Her jeans next. Her panties. She's bare in the morning light, and I take a long second just to look at her.
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, baby."
"Spur."
"I'm not done. I have been watching you for years, and you've been the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in every one of them. Tonight, I'm going to ask you something I have been waiting a long time to ask. But first, I'm going to fuck you in this hayloft and take it back from the dead man who tried to take you from me."
She pulls me down to her.
I kiss every part of her she'll let me.
The inside of her left wrist where my name is healing. Her collarbone. The spot under her jaw that makes her breath catch. Her breasts. Her stomach. The inside of her thighs.
She's wet for me before I put my mouth on her, and when I do, she fists her hand in my hair and her hips come up off the hay.
"Spur."
"Yeah, baby."
"I need you in me."
"Soon."
"No, now."
"Soon."
I take my time with her. The man who took the photo of us on the porch doesn't get a quick fuck in his hayloft.
He gets the woman he wanted dead on her back in the hay, coming on the mouth of the man whose name is on her wrist.
She comes loud. Loud enough I'm glad the barn's fifty yards from the main house and the brothers are sleeping in.
I take my jeans off and the cedar box ring stays in the small pocket on the floor of the loft beside us, and I push into her, and she takes me the way she's been taking me—fierce, hers, mine.
"Tell me, Dakota."
"Yours, Spur."
"Whose?"
"Yours. Always have been. Always will be."
"That's right, baby."
I fuck her in the hayloft of the big barn. Slow. Then hard. Then slow again.
Until she comes a second time around me, and I let myself go and empty into her with my mouth on her throat saying her name.
