Page 28 of Broken Ride

I finish the treatment notes. I check the mare's vitals twice more and set the overnight monitoring schedule with the pen crew, and I do all of it in the steady, pleasant, professional voice I built so nobody would ever look at me twice.

Then I walk behind the chutes where the light dies, and my hands start to shake.

They always wait, my hands. They held a needle steady over the jugular of a seizing horse under stadium lights, and now, in the dark, with the smell of penned stock thick around me, they shake like I'm the one who got poisoned.

Wade is there. He keeps his hands at his sides and his boots planted an arm's length away, close enough that reaching him would cost me almost nothing, far enough that the choice stays mine. He skips every word another man would reach for, the brave-girl speech, the offered shoulder. The gash on his forearm has dried black, and his hat throws his face into shadow. He stands in the dark with me like standing is a job he was hired for and intends to do well.

I reach out and hook two fingers into the front of his shirt.

"Your room," I say. "Mine has ghosts in it."

He looks down at my fingers in his shirt, then at my face, reading me the way he reads a bronc in the chute, weight and balance and intent. Whatever he finds, it settles him.

"Truck's this way," he says.

The drive back to the motel consists of me following him in my rig for a few miles of dark highway. The adrenaline is leaving my body one wave at a time, each one taking something with it. By the time we park and he keys open the door, my hands have gone from shaking to a fine, furious tremor I can't talk them out of.

His room smells like leather and soap and whiskey, and my gaze finds the bottle on the dresser without being sent. Some assessments run themselves. He flips the deadbolt, and the click of it lands in my chest.

"Terms," I say, because I learned to negotiate before my clothes come off, and because tonight I need them more than usual. "I don't want careful. I don't want conversation. And if you ask whether I'm okay, I'm walking back out that door."

Wade takes off his hat and sets it crown-down on the dresser, deliberate as a man laying down a weapon.

"Tell me when to stop," he says. "Tell me when to keep going. That's the whole rulebook."

"That's it?"

"You want it notarized?"

There's a leash on him when he crosses the room, the same control he used on the mare's head, a big dangerous body deliberately geared down. He takes my jaw in one hand, tips my face up, and kisses me like the arena is still roaring somewhere behind us.

My hands are still trembling when they land on his chest. He wraps both of them in one of his, lifts them, and sets them on his shoulders where they have something solid to grip. He does it without comment, without turning it into a thing I have to be, and the tremor finally has somewhere to go.

He listens. That's the discovery, and it detonates quietly under everything I thought I knew about him.

He undresses me like he checks rigging, methodical, one fastening at a time, and it's more obscene than tearing at my clothes would be. He takes his time with the buttons of my shirt while his mouth moves down my throat to the place where my pulse is giving me away, learning me like a man memorizing a route he plans to drive at night. When the shirt comes off my shoulders, he takes a long look at me in the lamplight, until I feel it on my skin like touch.

"I said I don't want careful," I remind him.

"This isn't careful." His teeth graze the slope of my shoulder. "Careful is for things that might break. You didn't break with a seizing horse trying to take your head off. I'm being thorough. Different animal."

The bra goes next, and what comes out of him when it hits the floor is rough and involuntary, the first real crack in all that control. His hands cover my breasts, calloused and certain, and his thumbs drag across my nipples until my head tips back and my hips move without consulting me. He watches me do it. He marks it. Then he lowers his head, and tongue and teeth and patience take over until I'm gripping his hair and cursing at the water-stained ceiling.

He pulls my boots off and strips my jeans and everything under them down my legs, and then I'm wearing nothing in a motel room while a fully dressed cowboy looks at me like a payday.

"On the bed," he says. It's quiet, and it moves me anyway.

He comes down between my thighs, shoulders wedging them wide, and the view up the length of me satisfies him.

"Tell me faster or slower," he says. "Those are the only two words I need from you tonight."

Then his mouth is on me and the room goes away.

He eats me like the night has nowhere else to go, long flat strokes of his tongue that gather everything in me toward one tight point. When a particular pass makes my hips jerk, he registers it and repeats it, harder, again, until I'm biting the back of my own wrist. Two fingers slide into me, curling against the spot that whites out my vision, and his mouth closes over my clit and stays.

"Faster," I gasp, and faster arrives, immediate and exact, with no showmanship and no detour. He takes everything I give him as intelligence and feeds it straight back into what he's doing to me, and being handled that thoroughly by a man this dangerous is the filthiest thing I've ever felt. He's cut from West Texas limestone, and his mouth is on me because he wants it there.

The heat gathers low and vicious, my thighs starting to shake against his ears, and he growls something against me that I feel more than hear.