Page 77 of Reluctant Bride

“I’m going to make love to you until neither of us can walk tomorrow.” His voice scrapes rough against my skin. “I’ve got eight years to make up for and zero interest in being efficient about it.”

“That’s very ambitious for a man with one working arm.”

“I’ve got two working arms. One’s just supervising.” He scoops me up off the sectional like I weigh nothing at all, and I laugh, actually laugh, my arms looping around his neck while he carries me up the stairs. Cricket lifts her head off the hallway rug just long enough to watch us pass, humphs, and settles back down.

He lays me out across our bed like something worth taking his time over, already hard again, thick and eager against my thigh before he even lines himself up. He settles between my thighs and pushes into me slow, both of us groaning at the change in angle.

“Fuck.” My back arches off the mattress, stretched around every inch of him. “I used to dream about your cock, Dawson. It’s bigger than I remember. Thicker.”

Something dark and pleased moves across his face, and he drives it home in answer, watching me the whole time like he’s memorizing it.

“You have the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard,” he says, dragging deep. “I love it. I want it wrapped around my cock next, right after I’m done fucking that mouth’s owner senseless.”

“You inspire it.”

“Good. Keep talking. Tell me what you want.”

My heels dig into the backs of his thighs, pulling him in, my breath already ragged. “I want you to fuck me until I forget every other name I’ve ever said.”

His whole body goes tight at that, a guttural sound tearing out of him that isn’t words at all, and his pace turns punishing, my legs locking around his waist to pull him deeper still.

“Say it again,” he growls.

“Dawson. Fuck, Dawson, don’t stop, I’m going to come again.”

“Yes, baby. Say my name when you do it.”

I do, louder this time, no shame left anywhere in my body, and he follows me over, my name rough against my throat, both of us shaking through it together.

When I reach for the towel on the nightstand, his hand catches my wrist.

“Leave it,” he says, rough and wicked. “I want to see it on you. I want my name still in your mouth and my cum still on your skin when you fall asleep, so there’s no version of tomorrow morning where you talk yourself into thinking this didn’t happen.”

“That’s deeply unhygienic, Dawson.”

“That’s deeply mine, Sage.” He kisses my shoulder, gentle now, tender in a way that doesn’t match a single word he just said.

I curl into him careful of his stitched arm, finding the soft spot between his shoulder and his chest that’s always fit me better than any pillow in this house. He adjusts around my own bruises without either of us saying a word about either injury. I fall asleep there, his mouth against my hair and for the first time since Cornell I don’t dream about a porch step or the fairgrounds or a summer that ended too early. I don’t dream about anything at all. I just sleep, whole, claimed, and completely unashamed of it.

The good sleep doesn’t survive contact with morning. It never does anymore, not in this house.

The whiteboard takes up the whole wall of my office, and I’m the one holding the marker, still sore in places that have nothing to do with the ambush and everything to do with the man currently reading over my shoulder like the board owes him money.

Holt’s already posted at the window with the blinds cracked two inches, the exact habit he’s kept since the ambush, eyes moving over the yard every few minutes whether anyone’s watching him do it or not.

“You brought a legislative strategy board to a mafia problem,” Finn says, delighted, from his perch on the windowsill.

“I brought the only tool I’ve ever had that works.” I draw a line from the grey Silverado to the fundraiser, another from the fundraiser to the cove camera, a third from the camera straight through to Erin’s name, already circled twice from Holt’s own notes. “You want to beat a bill, you don’t chase every amendment somebody throws at you. You map who benefits from each one landing, and you find out they’re all coming from the same donor.”

“Erin,” Knox says. Not a question anymore. Nobody in this room says it like a question.

“Erin’s the mechanism. I’m not saying she’s the reason.” I tap the board, right at the center where every line converges. “Look at the pattern instead of the pieces. The truck at the wedding. The fence splice on our side. The camera at the cove, tagged to Sullivan equipment. The warrant routed through legitimate counsel. None of that reads like somebody trying to catch us doing something. It reads like somebody trying to move us somewhere.”

The room goes quiet, the kind that means I’ve said something nobody wants to have missed.

“They aren’t chasing us,” I say. “They’re herding us.”

Dawson’s already leaning forward, elbows on his knees, reading the board like a man rereading a contract for the clause he missed the first time. “Toward what?”