Page 67 of Broken Ride

When his eyes come to me they're the same eyes that watched me across a wash full of federal light, and heat rolls up off the look like off a July highway.

"Dr. Prescott," he says, tasting it, trying the fit.

"That's what the door says."

"Door's right." He puts his hat back on and hooks two fingers toward my truck keys, an offer, and his voice drops into the register that rearranges my pulse. "Drive me somewhere, Delaney."

The name lands in me and goes off soft, sternum-deep. The last man who used it said it like leaving a porch light on, soft and certain, narrating his own patience.

In Wade's mouth it comes out returned, handed back across a fence with the dust still on it, and the difference between the two is the whole distance I've driven.

The motel that night is a two-story L off the interstate with a rattling ice machine and a door I lock once and shoot the deadbolt.

He carries the bags in, and I run my drill because a body doesn't unlearn a year and a half in a season. When the boots go down by the door I point the toes the direction I choose, which tonight, for the first time since Oklahoma, is away from the exit. He watches me do it, and neither of us says anything about it, because we both know what those boots have been aimed at every night for over a year, and tonight they're off duty.

Then I turn around and do the thing I promised myself on the edge of a steel cot with my wrists worked bloody, back when tomorrow was a theory.

I cross the carpet and stand in front of him with my hands loose and open at my sides. Unbound. His eyes go down to them and back up, and something in his jaw sets, because the man reads me like rough stock and he already knows what this is.

"On that cot," I say, "with a zip tie on the frame and the generator running in the dark, I made one promise about the other side of it. That I'd stand in front of you with nothing on my wrists and tell you to quit holding. You've been holding off me for weeks, Wade. Careful hands. Chaste goodnights. Standing your watch." I take his jaw in my hand, the move that's been passing between us like a coin all season, and I tip his face down to mine. "The watch is over, cowboy. Quit holding."

His breath comes out slow through his nose, pressure easing off a gate.

"Yes or no," he says, rough, holding my eyes. "Say it out loud. That's how it works in this room."

"Yes. Obviously, yes."

"Then hear the rest." His hands come up and frame my face, thumbs at my cheekbones. They're steady. The cost of that steadiness shows in every locked tendon. "There's nothing in me tonight, Laney. First time since I was seventeen years old that a woman's had her hands on me and I've had nothing in my blood to hide behind. Everything's at full volume and I've got no way to turn it down." His voice drops until I feel it more than hear it. "So it's going to be slow, and I'm going to remember every second of it for the rest of my life, and if that scares you, now's your window."

"I'm a large-animal vet, Wade. I don't scare in rooms."

"There she is," he says, and kisses me.

He wasn't lying about slow. He undresses me the way he checks his rigging, thorough, unhurried, twice, buttons, belt, boots, turning me where he wants me, and I let him, which he knows by now is its own kind of surrender from me.

Every place the fabric leaves, his mouth follows, my shoulder, the wing of my collarbone, the skin at my wrists where the tie left its ring. He takes his time there, both wrists, his lips against the pulse point like a man overwriting a record. My knees quit being load bearing somewhere in the middle of it.

He lays me out across the bed and settles over me on his forearms. The lamplight is on, and neither of us reaches to fix that.

Without the haze, his eyes have a clarity that's almost hard to hold. He looks at me with the same focus he gave the door of my truck. Like reading a name he means to keep. Being seen this thoroughly with nothing between us is the most dangerous thing that's happened to me all season, counting the kidnapping.

"I've been thinking about this since the wash," he says against my throat, low enough that the words register as vibration before they register as language. "Every night in that chair. Every chaste goddamn goodnight. I've had a lot of time to plan, Laney." His teeth graze the tendon where my neck meets my shoulder, and the scrape sends a jolt straight down through my belly. "So tonight you lie there and let me collect what I'm owed."

"Big talk from a man who's still dressed."

"I'll get to me when I'm done with you." His mouth drags down the center of my chest, and his hands pin my hips flat to the mattress when I try to arch into it. The hold is firm enough that I feel the calluses print themselves into my skin, and I want them there. "Stay put."

I stay. Not because he told me to. Because my body has decided his hands are the only structural support it needs, and arguing with that conclusion would require higher brain function than I currently have access to.

He works his way down my body with the patience of someone dismantling something he intends to rebuild from scratch. His mouth finds the underside of my breast first, tongue tracing the crease, then closes over my nipple with a long wet pull that drags a sound out of me I'd be embarrassed about if I could think. His teeth follow, enough edge to blur the line, and the noise I make at that is worse. Harder the next time, and my back comes off the mattress against the press of his hands.

"There," he says against my skin, low and certain, filing that one away. "That's the one."

Fingers slide down my stomach, following the midline, dragging rough over the soft skin below my navel. He bypasses where I need him with deliberate precision, knuckles trailing down the inside of my thigh instead, and every muscle in my abdomen contracts with the denial.

"Wade."

"I heard you." He doesn't speed up. The return trip up the inside of my thigh is slow enough that every nerve ending on the path fires individually, and when his fingers finally slide through the slick wet heat of me I arch off the bed with a sound the ice machine can't cover.