Page 30 of Rope Burn

I know how to function under force. The careful touch leaves me with nothing to push against.

"Look at me," he says again. Quieter this time.

My eyes are wet and I let him see it. Cover gone, composure gone, the clinical distance between the woman in this bed and the woman who filed his case number in El Paso collapsed to nothing. Just White Sands and the truth of it written across me.

He pushes inside me slowly. The stretch is immediate, thick, the width of him spreading me open in an inch-by-inch pressure that I feel in my ribs and my throat and the low, broken groan it pulls from my chest. My hands lock around his forearms, and the muscle beneath my fingers is rigid, the restraint of a man who could drive forward and is choosing not to. When he's fully seated, the depth of him sends a shudder through my entire lower body that I couldn't hide if I tried. I feel him everywhere, the fullness radiating from where we're joined through my hips and up into my belly.

He holds there. His breath comes rough on my mouth, one hand braced beside my head and the other pressing flat against my sternum like he's reading my pulse through bone. The deliberate stillness while he's buried inside me is its own kind of command. My body adjusts around the width of him in slow, involuntary contractions that I know he can feel because his jaw flexes and his fingers press harder against my sternum.

He moves. Slow, deep, an unhurried rhythm that lets me feel every inch of retreat and every inch of return. The friction is devastating, the drag of him pulling back and the stretch of him pressing forward building a heat between my hips that compounds with every stroke. My legs wrap higher around him, and the shift changes the angle enough that the next thrust hits a place that makes my abs contract and my breath catch audibly.

His hand slides beneath my knee and lifts, opening me further, and the depth from this position hits something deeper. My nails score lines down his ribs, and the sound I make against his shoulder is raw enough that I feel his cock twitch inside me in response.

"Keep your hands on me."

My nails dig into his ribs and hold.

His pace builds. I can track it by the roughening of his breath, the increasing force behind each stroke, the tension gathering in the muscles of his back under my hands. He drives deeper with every thrust, and the fullness of him at this angle sends a pulse of heat through my pelvis that tightens with each repetition until I can feel the second orgasm building beneath the first one's aftermath.

Our eyes stay connected through all of it. Through the moment his control begins to fracture, his thrusts deepening until the headboard finds the wall. Through the moment the last of my defenses gives way and the memory of White Sands hangs open between us, every response I can no longer contain laid bare while he watches.

His thumb brushes the corner of my eye where moisture has collected. He doesn't wipe it away. He touches it like it matters.

The second orgasm hits without warning. My inner muscles clench around his cock in sudden, forceful contractions that bow my spine and wrench a cry from me that I muffle into his palm. The grip of my body around him is involuntary, rhythmic, each pulse tighter than the last, and I feel him swell inside me in response, his cock thickening against the pressure of my body clenching down.

He doesn't cover my mouth to silence me. His hand is already there because he was touching me, and the sound presses into his skin while the contractions drag on, each one pulling him deeper.

His rhythm breaks. His thrusts go hard and deep, his fingers digging into the muscle of my thigh where he's holding the angle, his jaw locked, his eyes still on mine even as his body drives toward the edge. The controlled pace is gone. What replaces it is raw, unguarded, his hips slamming into mine with a force that drives me up the mattress and a desperation he's been holding back since he walked through the door.

When he comes, the groan he buries in my neck is low and ragged, torn from somewhere he didn't plan to open. I feel him pulse inside me, the warmth of it spreading through my hips in slow, heavy waves. His body shudders once, hard, and his arms give just enough that his full weight presses me into the mattress for the span of a held breath before he catches himself.

He stays. His weight settles over me, braced enough to keep from crushing but close enough that I feel his heartbeat slowing against my ribs. His mouth presses to my temple and stays there, a placement rather than a kiss, a mark left where he chose to leave it.

We lie in the thin light of the motel room while the air conditioner cycles and the ambient road noise fills the silence that neither of us tries to break. His hand is still in my hair. The weight of it on my skull is warm, steady, nothing I can afford to get used to.

I let him into my room and didn't ask him a single useful question.

He falls asleep before I do. His breathing evens into the slow cadence of a body too exhausted to guard itself, and his arm across my waist loosens without letting go.

Sleep strips away the discipline. The lines around his mouth ease. The jaw unclenches. The face that remains is one I haven't earned the right to study this closely. Seeing him without the composure he'd never voluntarily drop feels like reading a file I was never cleared to access.

I slide out from under his arm past midnight. He doesn't wake.

The habit of sleeping light through five years inside has apparently been overridden by the physical expenditure and whatever else loosened his guard. Maybe exhaustion. Maybe trust. Either way, he's unguarded beside the woman least entitled to receive it.

I pull on my jeans and a shirt before I open the laptop on the small table by the window. Sensitive case material open beside an unsecured person of interest, and the best I can manage is pulling the curtain closed so the screen glow doesn't reach the bed.

Before this circuit I would have left the room, driven to a secure location, and filed from a locked office. Tonight I angle the screen toward the wall and type.

The field template is standard. Date, location, subjects contacted, intelligence gathered. I type Slade's intel about Clint in clean, sourced language: trailer number, timing, the girl's name, the recruiting pattern, the phone call.

FIELD REPORT

Subject CARRICK, SLADE (Person of Interest) provided source reporting regarding WILSON, CLINT, a full-season team-roping competitor.

Carrick reported Wilson was present off schedule near two Thornton transport vehicles and was directing a female identified only as Rachel, believed to be a first- or second-season barrel-racing competitor, toward the isolated area behind the Thornton trailer at Pen 12. Carrick overheard Wilson use a sponsor-meeting pretext. Carrick intervened before Wilson moved the woman farther behind the trailers.

Wilson placed an immediate phone call after leaving the area. Carrick assessed that the call likely reported his interference, based on its timing and Wilson's behavior following the encounter.