He stayed there. On purpose, methodically, for a very long time. His hands on my hips, tilting the angle fractionally every few strokes to map exactly what made me lose my mind, cataloguing it the way he catalogued everything about this land—carefully, permanently, like information he intended to use for the rest of his life.
I came so hard my vision went white at the edges.
He kept going.
"Gage—" I gasped. "I can't?—"
"You can." His thumb found my clit and I choked on a sound. "You're going to give me one more. Want to feel your pussy milking me. Want to make sure you get everything."
I gave him two.
Afterward he pressed the cup into place himself, careful and deliberate, and I felt the warmth of it and of him held deep inside me and thought dimly that I would never recover from this man. That there was no version of me that came out the other side of this unchanged. That I had walked into a fertility clinic in a marigold mask with a spreadsheet and a plan and I had ended up here, on a wedge pillow in the Hill Country dark, being takenapart and put back together by a man who knew exactly where every piece went.
You're going to be pregnant,he'd said.
Probably already are.
I pressed my face into the quilt and let my body do what it was supposed to do.
The window was his idea.
Late on the second night—or maybe early on the third morning, time had become a suggestion—he pulled me out of bed and walked me to the east window. Hands flat on the glass. Looking out at the dark hills.
The creek glittered somewhere below. The sky was enormous.
He pushed in from behind and I gasped—cold glass under my palms and his heat at my back, the contrast so sharp it knocked the breath clean out of me.
"Look," he said, against my neck. "Look at it."
The Hill Country spread out below us, dark and ancient and endless. Twenty-four hundred acres. Three generations of Holts. The creek winding silver through cedar and limestone.
His hands came around to spread across my stomach.
"This is yours," he said. Low. Certain. His hips moved slow and I pressed back to meet him, fogging the glass. "All of it. You and whatever we made."
"Gage—"
"Say it."
"It's—" He drove forward and I gasped. "It's mine?—"
"And whose baby are you carrying?"
The question hit somewhere low and deep and I clenched around him involuntarily and heard him exhale hard against my neck.
"Yours," I said. "Gage—yours?—"
"That's right." His mouth found the curve of my neck, teeth grazing. "Mine. In my house, in my bed, carrying my baby." One hand stayed spread across my stomach. The other slid down. Found me. I jerked against the glass. "This land isn't going anywhere." His fingers moved and my legs shook. "You're not going anywhere." He drove forward and I cried out into the dark. "Say it."
"I'm not—" I lost it when he did it again. "I'm not going anywhere?—"
"No." His arms tightened around me. "You're not."
He took me apart against that window with the whole sleeping ranch spread out below us and his mouth in my hair and his hand on my stomach and when I came he held me through every second of it, watching the hills over my shoulder like a man who had just confirmed something he'd always known.
The bath was slow.
My legs had stopped working properly somewhere in the middle of day two and he'd filled the tub without asking, helped me in, settled behind me in the water. I floated back against his chest. His arms came around me.
