"Take me home," I say quietly.
He leaves enough on the table to cover the bill without counting it, stands, holds out his hand.
I take it.
We walk out of Whiskey River into the warm Texas night and neither of us looks back.
The ranch is quiet when we get back.
That particular deep country quiet that only exists after midnight when the world has stopped pretending to be busy. The kind of quiet that makes everything feel closer and more deliberate than it does in daylight. Stars doing something extraordinary overhead, the kind cities never let you see.
The barn, a dark shape against the darker sky. Cabin two with its porch light on, warm, waiting.
We don't make it to the cabin.
We make it to the ranch house porch and Beckett has his key in the door and I have my hand on his arm and he turns around and that's as far as the key gets for a while.
He kisses me against the porch door with his hands on either side of my face, unhurried and thorough, the kind of kiss that isn't going anywhere and knows it.
I get my hands into his shirt and pull him closer and he comes without resistance, his body warm, solid, his mouth moving from mine to my jaw, my neck, the soft skin below my ear that he has apparently identified as a location of particular strategic value.
I make a sound I would be embarrassed about if I had any embarrassment left.
I don't.
He gets the door open without fully stopping what he's doing, which is impressive. I tell him so while he is pulling my shirt off. He laughs low against my neck. The sound of it does something to my knees that I barely manage without going down entirely.
Inside the ranch house is dark and warm, smelling like coffee and the particular lived-in scent of a home that has stopped being a showroom and started being real.
He walks me backward through it with his hands undoing my pants, unhurried, stopping twice because stopping is apparently something we're doing tonight and I am not complaining.
We make it to the bedroom.
He reaches past me and turns on the lamp on the low setting, the warm amber light that makes the room feel like the inside of something private and safe.
He looks at me in it for a moment, really looks, his hands resting at my hips, his expression open in the way it only gets when all the composure has gone and it's just him.
He reaches for panties with steady hands, slow and deliberate, his eyes on mine the whole time, asking a question he already knows the answer to.
I reach for his pants and we do this together, unhurried, the way we do most things, until there's considerably less between us and the warm lamp light and the quiet ranch house and the Texas night outside the window.
He is, objectively speaking, unfairly constructed.
I tell him this.
He laughs again, that low warm sound, pulls me against him with both arms, his skin warm against mine, and says into my hair, "Look who's talking."
What follows unfolds without the careful management I've been applying to myself for weeks, everything steady, patient, entirely certain. He takes his time with everything, unhurried, thorough, paying attention with his hands and his mouth in a way that communicates clearly that he has been thinking about this.
Specific, detailed, well-considered thoughts.
The kind he executes with the same focused intelligence he brings to everything he decides matters.
It matters.
I stop thinking about anything except the warm weight of him, the sure movement of his hands over my body, over my breasts. The low sound of his voice saying my name in the dark as he iskissing and touching me all over. Saying my name like it means something beyond just a name.
Like it's the answer to a question he's been asking for a long time. Our bodies connect in rhythm as he enters me.
