Page 29 of Rope Burn

His hands strip my shirt over my head with the same unhurried control. The bra follows.

Calluses meet bare skin first. The roughness sends a jolt straight through my sternum. His hands are warm and heavy, shaped by rope and leather and years of gripping livestock at full speed, and the texture of them circling my nipples is coarse enough to make me arch into the friction.

He rolls one between his thumb and forefinger, slow and precise, while his mouth drops to the other. The heat of his tongue against the peak drags a sound from low in my throat that I don't bother muting.

The bed catches behind my knees when he walks me backward. I sit.

He stands over me, unbuttoning his shirt with one hand while the other stays on my shoulder, his knuckles drawing a slow line along my collarbone. The shirt drops. The body underneath is scarred, dense, carrying the damage of a man who has thrown himself at running livestock for the better part of two decades and absorbed every consequence.

I reach for his belt. He lets me. His weight shifts back on his heels. The permission is the difference.

Last time he pinned my hands. Tonight he watches me work the buckle, watches my fingers shove the denim down his hips, watches my hand wrap around the hard length of him and stroke. His abs contract, a sharp visible flex, and the breath he lets out through his teeth is controlled like a man holding a last reserve.

I lower my mouth to him. The taste of his skin is salt and heat, and the width of him stretches my lips as I take him deeper. His hand settles into my hair, not guiding, not pushing. Holding. His fingers tighten against my scalp when I find a rhythm with my tongue, and the sound he makes is low and bitten off, hauled back behind his teeth before it fully escapes.

I take him deeper. His hips stay still through what looks like force of will, the muscles of his thighs locked rigid under my hands. His breathing turns jagged, and the grip in my hair tightens enough that I feel the pull all the way down my spine.

He lets me have him for another slow, deliberate stroke. Then his hand slides from my hair to my jaw, tilts my face up, and draws me off him.

"Lie back."

The sheets are cool beneath my bare shoulders, the overhead light throwing long shadows across the popcorn ceiling.

Slade removes my remaining clothes with the focused patience of a man who owns the pace and knows it.

He kneels at the edge of the bed. He grips my thighs and spreads them, and the exposure is total, the motel light falling across every inch normally covered by pressed clothes and a holster.

His mouth presses to the inside of my knee. Then higher. Then higher.

The first touch of his tongue is slow, a long flat stroke through my folds that draws a shudder up my spine and locks my heels into the edge of the mattress. He does it again, unhurried, holding me still when my body tries to lift into his mouth.

He works me with devastating patience. His tongue traces the full length of me before closing over my clit, the pressure light enough to make me feel every nerve ending he's choosing to ignore. My thighs tense under his grip. He pushes them wider, the command in his hands as clear as anything he's said tonight, and the exposure at this angle leaves me with no way to hide the effect he's having.

His tongue flattens against my clit and strokes, slow, firm circles that build heat in a place I can feel tightening all the way through my hips. My fingers twist in the sheets. The sound I make carries more need than I'd planned to show him, and his grip tightens on my thighs in a way that tells me he heard it.

When my body begins to gather toward release, he eases back. His mouth moves lower, his tongue sliding through me with the same unhurried attention, tracing every fold, every response, cataloging what makes my breath fracture and filing it away. When I strain for the edge, he holds it just out of reach.

In his room, the pace was a weapon. Tonight the control is in how long he makes me wait.

"Slade." His name comes out rough, torn between a request and an accusation.

He pauses long enough to look up my body with an expression that carries more heat than his mouth just delivered. "Still here."

"Then stop teasing."

"I'm not teasing." His thumb replaces his tongue on my clit, pressing with a precision that buckles my spine. "I'm paying attention."

Two fingers slide inside me, and the stretch of them combined with the pressure of his thumb dissolves what's left between tension and release. He curls his fingers forward, finding the spot that makes my thighs clamp around his hand. He holds steady while his thumb circles with a rhythm that tracks the responses my body gives before my mouth catches up.

The orgasm builds differently than the last one. It pulls rather than crashes, a deep gathering low in my belly that tightens through my pelvis in slow, relentless increments. His fingers curl inside me and hold, his thumb circling with steady pressure, and the tension winds so tight that my thighs lock around his hand and my spine lifts off the mattress.

When it breaks, the force of it empties my lungs. My inner muscles clench around his fingers in hard, rhythmic contractions that I feel all the way to my ribs, and the sound I make is guttural, involuntary, pulled from a place I didn't plan to open. He doesn't stop. His thumb keeps its rhythm through every wave, drawing the orgasm out until my body is shaking and my hands are fisted in the sheets hard enough that my knuckles ache.

He gives me a breath. Then he rises, strips the rest of his clothes, and settles his weight over me.

The full-body contact is staggering. The heat of his skin on mine, the solid width of his chest pressing me into the mattress, the hard length of his cock along my inner thigh.

He braces on one forearm beside my head. His free hand pushes the hair back from my temple with a gentleness that does not belong in the same encounter as the grip he had on me thirty seconds ago.