Page 77 of The Drifter

"He was standing in the doorway of that house when I got there. He's been alive my whole life. There are reasons, and the reasons are good ones—better than good, they're the kind that take a man apart—and I'll give you all of it, someday. But he's alive, Sasha. I hugged my father today."

She sat up and took my face in both hands. Her eyes were wet, and she looked at me for a long moment.

"Oh, Clint," she said. "I'm so happy for you."

She meant it. There was something else moving behind her eyes, too—something that looked almost like recognition, like a woman checking a thing off a list I couldn't see. But the happiness was the whole front of her, and it was for me, undiluted. I hadn't known until that second how much I'd needed to hand this day to someone and have them simply be glad.

"There's a lot more," I said. "More than I understand yet. It's a big family, bigger than I knew, and there's history in it that's going to take me a while to walk." I turned her hand over in mine. "But I want you to meet them. For real. Not across a hotel counter. At Dominion Hall, at a table, as—" I let the sentence find its own end, "—as mine. I want my brothers to meet you."

I braced.

I knew what I was asking. She'd built a vow out of watching that family's wake come across her marble. She'd told me to my face she didn't trust Dominion Hall, and the honest half of me expected the walls to come up—the built voice, the let me think about it, the professional distance sliding into place.

She nodded.

"I'd love to meet them," she said. Simple as that. Then, her chin came up, and something sparked across her face that had nothing professional in it anywhere. "But first."

She stood up off the sofa, crossed her arms, took the hem of her top, and pulled it off over her head.

Her hair came down out of it and settled. She stood in her living room, bare from the waist up, and dropped the shirt on the floor without folding it—without folding it, this woman—and looked at me like a landowner surveying an acquisition.

"First, I'm going to have you before you leave again."

The passion coming off her was almost too much to stand in. I'd seen her want before—slow, unfolding, permission-shaped. This was different. This was a woman who had spent a day learning she could lose things, deciding what she was going to do about it, and what she was going to do about it was me.

She came at me. I met her halfway.

We collided for the second time in an hour, and this one had teeth. Her mouth crashed into mine and her hands were already under my shirt, dragging it up. I broke the kiss long enough to haul it over my head and then she was back, pressing me down into the sofa cushions, climbing astride me, her breasts against my chest and her fingers in my hair pulling my head back so she could get at my throat. She kissed me there hard enough to leave word. I got my hands full of her—her back, her hips, the sweet, heavy curve of her ass—and she rolled against where I was already iron behind my jeans. She made a sound of pure satisfaction, like a woman confirming inventory.

"Off," she said, working my belt. "All of it. Now."

Her rules. I lifted my hips and we wrestled my jeans gone, and then, I flipped her.

She yelped and laughed as her back hit the cushions. The laugh died in her throat when I stripped her jeans and panties down her legs in one long pull and settled over her, taking her wrists, pinning them soft above her head. Her eyes flared and went dark. Her whole body arched up into me.

"My turn first," I said.

I went down her.

Her throat. Her breasts—no patience in me for the long survey; I took her nipple deep and sucked until she cried out and hooked a leg over my back. Down the soft of her belly. Then, I put her thighs over my shoulders and my mouth on her, and she was already soaked, already swollen, already halfway to gone. She tasted like heat and salt and want. I licked into her hard and flat, no teasing anywhere in it. She grabbed my hair with both hands and rode my mouth, hips rolling, voice climbing, filthy and gorgeous and loud in her own living room with gold light going long across us both.

She broke fast and hard, shaking, my name cracking in half in her mouth.

Then, she hauled me up by the hair, still trembling, and shoved me over and down—her strength surprising me. She went down my body with her hair dragging across my stomach and took my cock in her mouth.

No slow this time. She took me deep and worked me with her hands twinned to her mouth, wet and tight and relentless, her eyes coming up the length of me. I watched her and swore at her ceiling and gripped the sofa cushion until a seam gave somewhere. When I got close—fast, embarrassingly fast, she'd built me a hair trigger in days—she felt it and pulled off with a slick sound and climbed me, knees planting either side of my hips.

"Not like that," she said, breathless, wrecked, radiant. "Inside me. I want you inside me when you⁠—"

She reached down and took me in hand and sank onto me in one long stroke.

We both went loud.

She rode me with her hands planted on my chest and her head thrown back, setting a pace that had nothing merciful in it, grinding down, taking what she wanted. I held her hips and met her, thrust for thrust, and the sofa talked.

When her rhythm started to stutter, I sat up into her, wrapped her legs around me, got my arms under her and stood—she gasped, clutched, laughed against my mouth—and I laid her down on the rug in front of the big window. I drove into her there on the floor, deep and hard, her heels in my back, her nails scoring my shoulders, both of us past language.

She came again with her whole body, clenching around me in long pulls. It dragged me to the edge and over—I buried myself to the root and let go, pulsing into her, her name tearing out of me, her arms locking me down against her like she meant to keep every ounce of it.