Page 8 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

I get my mouth on her pussy, flat and slow, and she arches straight up off the blanket. She's already soaked and she tastes like salt and heat. I hold her hip down and stay slow, because slow is the only way I know how to do anything. Two fingers in, curled. Tongue on her clit in a rhythm I don't change even when she asks me to.

"Please — Daniel!"

"Not yet."

"You're a very cruel man."

"I'm a thorough one."

She comes with her hand fisted in my hair and her thighs shaking around my ears, and she's still saying my name when I come up her body and settle over her.

I push in slow. Her breath goes out in one long unsteady line and her legs come up around the backs of my thighs and I stop halfway, because I want all of it, not a blur.

"Look at me."

Her eyes meet mine.

"You're the first person I've wanted up here," I say. "Not the first person who's been up here. The first one I wanted to bring."

Something moves across her face that isn't about the sex at all.

"That's not fair," she says. "You can't say that now."

"It's the only true thing I've got."

She pulls me down and I go all the way in and she makes a noise against my throat like something coming loose.

I get an arm under her and start to move, and it stops being measured around the third stroke. She takes it with a sound I feel in my teeth, and then both her hands are flat on my back, pulling, trying to get the whole weight of me down onto her.

"Harder," she says. "I want you to fuck me properly." No joke on it, no wry turn, plain as a knife through an onion. "Not carefully. I've been thinking about it since the tailgate on Thursday and I want to still feel it in the truck tomorrow."

I move in her hard and slow with one hand under the small of her back to keep the angle, and she meets me every time, and the rain is going on the roof, and her breath is hot at my ear saying yes, saying my name in a voice I've never heard her use for anything else.

She's close again fast. I can feel it in her stomach and her thighs and the way her hands stop being organised, and she's tightening around me every time I bottom out, which is doing things to my ability to keep a rhythm.

"Don't stop," she says.

"I'm not stopping."

I keep the thumb where it is and get my other hand around the back of her thigh and open her further, and the next one goes deep enough that she swears at the ceiling. Then I put my mouth by her ear.

"Come on," I say. "I've got you. Let go."

She does, and she's tight around me and shaking, and I go two strokes past being able to hold anything back and finish with my face in her neck and her hands flat on my spine.

The rain has changed pitch on the roof. Neither of us says anything for a long time.

"Well," Lena says finally, into my shoulder. "That escalated." She laughs, and I feel it everywhere, and I do not for one second wish it had gone slower.

five

Daniel

"You back on the ladder the third or the tenth?" my foreman wants to know. "Because I've got the church re-deck and I've got the two rentals on Cedar and I can't do both with the kid and half a crew."

"Third." I'm sorting number twos into a flat with the phone jammed against my shoulder. "November third. Same as every year."

"You sound weird."