"This time, you don't hide. Every time before, some part of you was holding back. The part that knew the lie was between us. That's gone now."
"That's gone now," she repeats, and the agreement is quiet and absolute.
I pull her tank top over her head. She reaches for my shirt and works the snaps open, and the sound of them popping fills the quiet room like small caliber rounds.
She pushes the fabric off my shoulders and runs her hands down my arms, her fingers tracing the scars on my forearms with a deliberate attention that tightens something low in my gut.
I unhook her bra and drag it off her arms and drop it on the floor. The moonlight through the gap in the curtains paints silver across her collarbones, her breasts, the freckles scattered over her skin.
I trace them with my mouth, unhurried, tasting each one, and her back arches off the mattress when I close my lips around her nipple and pull.
"Colt." My name fractures in her throat.
I take my time with her breasts because the sounds she makes are worth the patience. I use my teeth until she gasps and my tongue until she sighs. I learn the difference between the sound that meansmoreand the sound that meansI can't take any more, and I push her past both.
Her hands are in my hair, pulling, and the sharp sting of it sends a jolt of heat straight to my cock.
I unbutton her jeans and drag them down her legs. Nothing underneath. She lifts her hips to help, and I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, the soft skin where her pulse thrums close to the surface.
She smells like arousal and clean sweat and something under both that is specifically Kenna, the scent I've been catching in truck cabs and kitchens and borrowed beds for days. I breathe her in and feel my control thin to a wire.
I strip the rest of my clothes, and she watches me do it. The way her eyes track down my body makes my skin feel like it's running a current.
No shyness. No performance. She looks at me the way she looks at everything, with that sharp, evaluating focus that should be clinical but isn't because underneath it her breathing has gone ragged.
I settle between her thighs, skin against skin from chest to hip, and the full-length contact draws a sound from her that I feel in the base of my spine. I brace my weight on one forearm beside her head and use my free hand to tilt her chin up.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Her eyes are blown dark, the pupils swallowing whatever color is there, and the expression on her face is stripped of every defense she's ever built.
"You're mine," I tell her. "I don't let go of what's mine. And I don't care what name you used or what lies you've told or what anyone on that circuit thinks they know about us."
I push into her in one long, steady stroke, and the tight heat of her clenching around me drags a groan from somewhere deep in my ribcage. She gasps at the stretch, and her nails cut into my shoulders, ten sharp points of contact that I will wear tomorrow.
I hold still, buried to the hilt, and let her feel the full weight and size of me. Her body pulses around mine, adjusting, and I watch her face while she does because the way Kenna looks when she's full of me is something I need to memorize.
Then I move.
I set a rhythm that's slow and deliberate and deep, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in, and every strokelands with my hips flush against hers. She wraps her legs around my waist and locks her ankles at the small of my back, and the angle change makes both of us groan.
"Kenna." I say her name against her jaw, her neck, the shell of her ear. The same name she always gave me, but it means something different now that I know what comes after it. Repeated like a claim, like a brand, like something I'm searing into both of us.
She moves with me, matching my rhythm, her hips rising to meet each thrust. Her hands roam my back, my shoulders, the muscles that flex along my spine, and her nails drag lines down my skin that sting in the best way.
I increase the pace. She wants it harder.
I know because her heels dig into the backs of my thighs, pulling me deeper, and the sounds she's making have shifted from breathless to urgent, sharp little cries that break from her throat on every downstroke.
I fist my hand in her hair and pull her head back, exposing her throat. I drag my mouth down the tendon there while I drive into her with a force that shoves her up the mattress.
She grabs the headboard with one hand and braces, and the sound that tears from her mouth is raw and wrecked and so loud it probably carries through the motel walls.
"Tell me," I say, my voice low and rough and barely recognizable. "Tell me this is real."
"This is real." She can barely get the words out. Her body is trembling, her thighs shaking against my hips. "This is real, Colt. This is the realest thing I've ever?—"
The sentence dies because I shift the angle and hit the spot that makes her spine bow and her mouth fall open on a silent scream.
