I rode him. My hands on his chest, my knees on either side of his hips, my body rising and falling in a rhythm that was urgent and deliberate and everything we'd been building toward since a bar in eastern Idaho. His hands found my ass. Gripped the muscle, the fingers digging in, the palms spreading me wider as I moved on him.
"Look at you." Diego's voice was wrecked, his eyes traveling from where our bodies connected up to my chest, my face. "Fuck, Logan. You're perfect."
"You feel so deep like this," I managed, my voice breaking on the last word as a particularly hard downstroke hit the spot that made my vision white out. "Don't you dare stop."
"I'm close." Diego's voice. Rough, cracked, stripped of every layer of armor. His hands tightened on my ass cheeks, pulling me down harder onto each upstroke, and then his hips took over—driving upward, fast, hard, long merciless strokes from below that slammed into me with a force that rattled the bed frame and pressed sounds from my throat that I'd never made before.
"Fuck yes—make me yours."
I wrapped my hand around my own cock. Stroked fast, matching his rhythm, the dual sensation of him pounding into me and my hand working myself converging into something massive and inevitable.
"Fuck, Logan—" His voice broke. His back arched off the mattress. "I'm cumming?—"
"Cum inside me." The words came out raw, desperate, honest. "Fucking cum in me."
His hips drove three more deep, shuddering thrusts as he emptied inside me—the heat of it, the pulse, the grip of his hands on my ass filled with possession, the sound he made: a raw, guttural noise that was half my name and half something in Spanish that I didn't catch and didn't need to because the meaning was written in every line of his body.
The feeling of him coming inside me, the final deep thrust, the sound of his voice—it pushed me over. I came in long, shaking pulses across his stomach, his chest, the lean muscles clenching beneath the ropes of it. The orgasm rolled through me in waves that started at the base of my spine and traveled outward until my entire body was shaking. My hand still moving. The last of it dripping onto his skin in slow, heavy drops.
I collapsed forward. Caught myself on my hands. Hovered over him, my chest heaving, my arms trembling, his cock still inside me, still hard, still filling me.
His eyes were closed. His face slack. The sharp, controlled expression that he wore like a second skin was gone, replaced by something open and unguarded and younger than I'd seen him look since Bragg.
Diego lay still for a moment, his chest rising and falling, my cum streaked across his stomach and the ridges of his abs. Then he moved—efficient even now—and crossed the small room to the bathroom. The sound of water running. A cloth wrung out. He came back a minute later, cleaner, and lowered himself onto the bed beside me.
I pulled him close. He turned without resistance—a first, a miracle, the man who carried his own weight allowing someoneelse to hold it—and settled his head against my chest. His ear over my heart. His hand resting on my pectoral, the fingers tracing idle patterns in the sweat, and I felt him press his palm flat against the thickness of it, measuring the density.
"You're bigger," he murmured. His voice drowsy, the edges softened. "Here." His hand pressed harder against my chest. Moved to my shoulder. My arm. "Everywhere."
"Four years of fence posts."
"Fence posts did this?"
"Fence posts and hay bales and horse work and patience." I pressed my lips against his hair. "I like that you noticed."
"I noticed the first second you walked into the bar."
His breathing was slowing. The rhythm evening out, his fingers still moving on my chest but lazier now, the tracing becoming absent, automatic. The habit of touch replacing the intention of touch.
The room was quiet. The bare walls. The footlocker. The weapons rack. And on the chair beside the bed, my flannel shirt, draped where it had landed when Diego pulled it off me. The fabric hanging over the metal back, the sleeves loose, the presence of it in his room saying something that neither of us had said with words yet but that the room itself was beginning to understand.
I stared at the ceiling. Felt his breathing against my chest—the warm exhale, the pause, the inhale, each cycle slower than the last, the rhythm of a man settling into sleep because the body beneath him made it safe to.
The ranch was abandoned. The horses were in an open pasture. Danny was sleeping down the corridor. Thirty branded workers were scattered through this compound, carrying scars that would outlast anything Rosa's antiseptic could reach.
And the man I'd spent an eternity missing was asleep on my chest with his hand over my heart, and the wordsoonhad finally, after everything, been replaced by the wordnow.
10
NEXUS
BLADE
Iwoke to unfamiliar breathing.
Not my own. The rhythm was slower, deeper, the cadence of a body at rest that had nothing to do with mine. My brain catalogued the nightstand before the rest caught up: Ka-Bar in reach, folding tactical beside it, the geometry of the room unchanged. Then the other data registered: warmth across my torso, pressure, the smell of cedar and clean sweat layered over gun oil and leather.
Logan's arm lay across my chest. Heavy. Solid. I didn't move. Let the information arrive in pieces the way my training preferred.
