Page 49

I pin her against the door with my hips. The denim is rough against her bare thighs. The contrast registers in her breath, in the way her stomach tightens where my belt buckle presses into her skin.

My cock strains against the jeans, hard enough that she can feel me through the fabric, and she pushes into the pressure instead of pulling away.

My mouth drags down her throat to the swell of her breast. My tongue circles one nipple, then closes over it. The suction pulls a low sound from her chest that vibrates through her ribs into my teeth.

I bite down, light enough to sting, hard enough to make her hips roll against mine. She arches into me, her bare back sliding against the wood, and the friction of dressed against undressed tightens every nerve between us.

My hand drops to the buckle. The metal catches the overhead light. The sound of the leather clearing the loops fills the room, and she watches my hands work the button, the zipper. When I drag the denim past my hips, her gaze drops to my cock and holds there with a directness that has nothing to do with submission.

I step out of the jeans and the boots together. Naked, I close the distance she's been keeping with her eyes and press the full length of my body against hers. Skin to skin, the heat is immediate and total. The shock of bare contact after the barrier of denim sends a current through both of us that tightens her fingers against my shoulders.

"Bed," I tell her. "On your back. Hips at the edge."

She walks to the mattress and lies crosswise, her legs hanging off the side, her weight braced on her elbows. The position leaves her open and exposed, her thighs parted, her feet off the floor. She has no leverage to set the pace or pull me closer.

I stand between her legs and look down at her. The flush climbing her chest. The rapid rise of her belly. The wet shine between her thighs that tells me fury isn't the only thing driving this.

"Eyes on me." The words land with every lie she told while looking at my face. I want her looking at me now, stripped bare, and feeling the full cost of both.

She lifts her gaze from where it had dropped to my cock. Her eyes find mine. What I see in them isn't the pleasure I demanded in the early nights or the easy warmth from the night she fell asleep against me. She's looking at me with the full knowledge of who I am, what I've done, and what she did to me. Her gaze hasn't softened. It's sharpened. She's daring me to see her back.

I grip the backs of her thighs and push inside her. The first stroke is measured, controlled, the wet heat of her body closing around me tight enough that my teeth lock and my vision narrows. She takes all of me without looking away, and when I bottom out, her lips part on a sound that's half moan and half challenge.

I hold there. Full depth, no movement. I make myself wait. I let her feel the full weight of me while neither of us breathes. Her inner muscles tighten in slow, involuntary pulses that I feel from base to tip.

She shifts her hips, trying to create friction, and I pin her with one hand flat against her lower belly, holding her still.

"You move when I tell you to move."

Her teeth press together. The challenge in her eyes flares, bright and fierce, because I'm making her stay here, filled and aching, refusing to give her the release of movement. The stillness is its own kind of fury.

When I finally move, the pace is slow, punishing in depth, each stroke driving the air from her lungs on withdrawal and seating fully on the return. Standing gives me the leverage to control everything: angle, speed, how deep she takes me.

Her hands fist in the bedspread because there's nothing else to hold. Her nails can't reach my shoulders from this position, and the physical separation between us is the point. No full-body comfort. No hiding against my chest.

I shift the angle, lifting both her legs over my forearms, and the adjustment hits a depth that makes her entire body bow off the mattress. "Take it. All of it."

Her head drops back against the mattress, throat exposed. Her breath comes in short, broken pulls that match the rhythm I set.

"No badge. No cover. Eyes on me."

She holds. Her gaze is locked on mine, her breathing ragged, her cheeks flushed dark with the effort of meeting my eyes while I take her apart. The defiance is still there, threaded through the pleasure, the need, the fury of a woman who risked her career to stand in this room and be looked at.

Her orgasm builds without my hand between us. I can feel it gathering in the way her body changes around me, the grip tightening on every stroke, the slick heat of her pulling at my cock each time I withdraw. Her thighs start to shake against my forearms.

The tremor runs through the muscle in waves I can feel against my skin. The sight of her spread open beneath me, flushed from her throat to her navel, her belly tightening with every thrust, is enough to test the edges of my own control.

Each time I drive deep, another contraction catches around me, and the wet sound of our bodies meeting fills the room louder than her breathing. Her heels search for leverage and find nothing. Her abs clench, her back arching off the mattress, and I watch the tension build across her body the way I watch a steer gather before it breaks.

I hold her open and keep the same punishing rhythm, refusing to give her faster, refusing to give her my hand. She has to come from the depth alone, from the pressure, from the relentless grind of my hips against hers.

Her inner walls clench hard, rhythmic, her whole body seizing around me in waves. The grip of her is fierce enough that I feel it in my spine, and the wet pulse of her orgasm wringing my cock nearly takes me with her.

She keeps her eyes open through it. The effort costs her visibly, her lips parted, her gaze glassy but holding. The defiance doesn't break. It carries her through the peak and into the aftershocks while I watch every second of it.

The woman who lied for months is looking straight at me with nothing left to hide behind, her body still clenching around my cock in fading waves, and that gaze strips every layer of control I've been holding.

I drive deep and hold her there. The release locks through my body from the base of my spine, and the first pulse empties my lungs in a sound I don't try to contain. I come hard, buried to the hilt, feeling every contraction of her body answer every pulse of mine.