Page 55 of Forbidden Rancher's Return
I set her down and she pulls me with her and we land together. Her back on the mattress, my weight braced above her, both of us breathing hard from the stairs and the wanting and the sheer disbelief of finally being here.
She reaches for my shirt. Pulls it over my head. Her hands spread across my chest. Slow, mapping the territory. I watch her face while she does it. The concentration. The hunger she's stopped hiding.
I unbutton her flannel one button at a time. She watches my hands. Patient for about three buttons. Then she grabs the hem and pulls it off herself and the sight of her in the moonlight stops me completely. The soft curves of her body, the way she looks up at me like she's daring me to stop.
I don't stop.
My mouth finds her collarbone. The hollow of her throat. The soft skin below it. She arches beneath me and her fingers dig intomy shoulders and the sound she makes is quiet and desperate and mine.
Her hands find my belt. No hesitation. She works the buckle and I help her and then there is nothing between us but skin and heat and the ache of eight years dissolving into the present tense of her body against mine.
I pull back once. Just to look at her.
Her hair spread across the pillow. Her lips parted. Her eyes open, watching me with everything she usually keeps locked away.
"Hi," she whispers.
The word undoes me.
"Hi," I say back.
She pulls me down.
What follows is slow and thorough and specific to us. The way she gasps when I find the spot below her ear.
The way my hands shake when she wraps around me. The way we figure out the rhythm together is like a language we used to speak and are remembering in real time.
She is loud when she forgets herself and quiet when she's close and I learn every version and I want every single one.
There is a moment near the center of it where she opens her eyes and finds mine already open and neither of us looks away. No armor. No distance. Just this. Just us.
Just the honest, terrifying, unguarded truth of two people who have loved each other since they were young enough to carve it into a tree and are only now brave enough to let it be real.
I watch her fall apart and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I follow her over the edge with her name in my mouth and her hands in my hair and the mountain quiet around us like it finally got what it wanted.
Afterward we lie tangled in the moonlight. Her cheek against my chest. My hand tracing idle lines up her arm.
"You're thinking loud," she says.
"Occupational hazard."
Her finger draws a circle on my sternum. "About what."
I look at the ceiling. At the moonlight. At the life I just fell into like it was always there waiting.
"About staying."
"You already said you would."
"I mean about what staying looks like." I pause. "Mornings. Winters. Whether this house needs a new water heater before November."
She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her eyes are soft and full and unguarded in a way I don't think anyone else has ever seen.
"It does," she says. "The water heater is terrible."
I almost smile. "Then I'll fix it."
She settles back against my chest. Her breathing slows.
