Then she turned in his grasp, hair falling loose, lips swollen.Pressed her forehead to his, every inhale sticky and ragged, said the one thing she’d never surrendered on anyone else’s ground.
“I’m not leaving.”
He answered with action.His mouth closed over hers, wild and desperate, his body sliding into hers once more, deeper than the last, as if he could put her claim into bone and sinew.
The crowd outside surged into fresh applause, Titus’s name echoing through a haze of steel and rodeo pride, but in the trailer, he belonged only to her.
Chapter 10
The Next Morning
Titus woke with sleepthick on his tongue, sleep still clinging to the back of his throat.His left shoulder throbbed each time he drew a deeper breath, a steady reminder of last night written into muscle.He stayed still.
Kyla lay across him, half draped over his chest, her palm spread over his heart as if she had staked a claim there in her sleep.Her fingers rested wide, unmoving, warm.He narrowed his focus to that contact, to the slow rise and fall of his breathing beneath her hand, to the quiet pressure of her body against his.
Her cheek rested just below his collarbone.Her mouth stayed soft, lips parted enough to let her breath pass steady and even.She lay angled toward him, one thigh thrown across his hip, the covers twisted tight beneath them.
Heat lingered between their bodies, caught in the sheets, trapped in the small space they shared.He didn’t look for the clock.Light told him enough.Morning had already started whether he wanted it or not.
He took stock without moving.A split at his lip.A deep bruise forming under his ribs.Tightness through his thigh where she had wrapped herself around him and refused to let go.
Faint scratches down his side where her nails had caught and dragged.Every mark stayed accounted for, a tally pressed into skin.
His mouth curved despite himself.Pain never unsettled him.The way she had taken him apart and put him back together in the same breath—that left him off balance.
He kept his arms loose.One stayed bent beneath her neck.The other lay flat beside him, fingers spread against the mattress so he wouldn’t pull her closer and risk waking her.
Every nerve stretched to take her in, to register her skin, her warmth, the steady press of her weight across him.
Her knee pressed into his side.The smooth slide of her calf passed over a bruise that already deepened.He fixed each detail in place.
The damp heat beneath the quilt.Sweat cooling along his stomach.The faint trace of her shampoo tangled with the sharper scent of sex in the air.
If he moved, she would wake.He slowed his breathing, forcing his body into stillness.Outside, cattle shifted in the east lot, the sound faint through the closed windows.
Morning stayed at a distance for now.Inside this bed, everything narrowed to the woman stretched across him.
