Page 81 of Sinner’s Brand

I walk after her with my boot heels coming down hard, so she can hear me coming and know it's me.

Not long ago she slept a whole day in this barn's hay. She knows its corners better than most of the men who stood in it tonight.

I stop in the aisle between the stacks and listen. I can't even hear her breathing.

My chest pulls tight, the way it does right before a bell.

Something bangs off the boards at the far end of the stacks. I turn toward the sound, and she breaks from the near end and runs for the side door with her bare feet slapping the dirt.

She threw something to pull me the wrong way. I go after her flat out.

She gets the latch up and shoves the side door open before I reach her. For one long stride I think she's going to make it into the cedar.

I catch her in the doorway with one bare foot already out on the gravel. I wrap one arm around her hips, low and well under her ribs, and haul her back against me. Her feet come up off the ground.

She fights me. She drives her elbow back into my chest and kicks at my shins with her heels. She twists hard enough that I nearly lose her, then swings her right fist back at my face. It catches me on the jaw, and my teeth click together.

I laugh. She isn't playing, and I get harder with every blow she lands.

My cock is pressed against the curve of her ass through her jeans and mine, and she has to feel it. She quits kicking just long enough to know what it is, and then she fights harder.

I carry her back across the barn with her heels kicking at my thigh. My arm stays locked low across her hips so none of her thrashing reaches her ribs.

I step up onto the canvas, push the middle rope down with my boot, lift the top one with my free hand, and duck through with her.

In my corner, I go down on one knee and sit back. She lands in my lap, so the fall comes down on me instead of her.

She doesn't wait. She twists sideways out of my lap, gets one knee under her, and lunges for the ropes.

I hook her around the hips and swing her back across my thigh. I lay her on her back in my corner with her head and shoulders flat on the canvas, a forearm's length in from the bottom rope.

She comes straight back up at me and tries to roll out to her left. Her shoulder drops before she moves, the same way a fighter's shoulder tells me where his punch is going, and I'm there first.

She tries the right, and I'm there too.

"You drop your shoulder," I say. "I can see you coming."

She swears and hits me in the chest, hard. I let her.

I shove her knees apart with mine and drop my hips between her thighs, keeping my chest up off her ribs. My hips pin hers to the canvas, and the thick, hard ridge of my cock grinds against her pussy through her jeans and mine. I roll my hips slow and drag it up the seam of her jeans, right over her clit.

She arches up into it before she can stop herself, then shoves at my shoulders like she didn't.

Her hands are free, but the rest of her can't get out from under me.

I'm grinning. I can feel it on my face, the same grin I had in a parking lot outside San Angelo when Del Carnegie went down and I couldn't make myself quit hitting him.

That's what scares me. I've got her on her back with nowhere to go, and it feels too good.