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She tossed her head. “I slept.”
They were both professional liars but not with each other. With each other th
ey only hid the truth under layers of denial. Weird it was then.
She took off, heading out towards the pastures and the barns. He took the last bite of apple, tossed the core in a garden bed and went after her, his longer stride catching her easily. He settled in behind her, let the swing of her ponytail and the economy of her movements guide him, let his motion ease the ache in his muscles and tune out all the reasons he should still be in bed, or anywhere else but following her lead.
The problem was he would follow her into the mouth of a smoking volcano. Except she was too smart to lead him there. Until last night he’d always been able to trust that Rory would ignore the moments his craving for her seeped through his armor and under his chainmail. He’d caught her off guard last night, but judging by her imperious response this morning she wouldn’t let it happen again, because God help him, he was not sufficiently squared away in his head to do the right thing.
As they pounded past the feedlot, a field full of cows and the lone goat who bellowed at them, he couldn’t recall what the right thing was. Every cell in his body told him it was to be close to her, so close he could give her the pleasure he’d denied her last night. The sweat that beaded on his skin wasn’t only the result of the exercise.
They ran past the farm crew collecting eggs and milking. They ran past the sporting field and the locked barns Rory had searched, well past being seen by anyone up this early, to a smaller barn he’d not been to before. She opened a side door and he followed her inside. It was full of farm machinery. Rory stood in front of a stack of tires, between an oil drum and the arms of a massive plough, in a shaft of sunlight from the open door, with her weight on one leg and hands on her hips. He’d had his hands all over her body last night, his mouth on her skin. That knowledge was wings at his back. Fighting the wrongness of it that was anchors at his ankles.
He pulled the door closed behind him, the bar lock clunking loudly into place, making Rory flinch.
He could keep this professional. He stayed by the door. “What did you learn this week?”
“That I—”
She faltered and turned her back to him. He stepped forward because in those two words he heard the crust of the earth crack and it released him to go to her.
“Want you,” she said.
She was supposed to be the one who drew the line for him to hold.
“That I need—”
He had her in his arms a beat after her words faltered. He pulled her back to his chest and she wrapped her arms over his. The barn smelled overwhelmingly of worn metal and rubber, oil and grease but Rory’s body was hot, and she smelled of soap and sweat and fitted so perfectly against him he was swamped by the sense of her.
“It’s unfair to you. And I don’t know what it means for us, but I want to scream from needing you,” she said.
There was another version of his life where he could see this for what it was, Rory’s anxiety from the intimidation tactics she was being subjected to, her need for reassurance, spilling over into physical form. His own long-denied ardor. He parked it, pocketed the keys. He’d come back to it when he needed that logic, because right now the only thing he existed for was to give her relief.
“I can handle it,” he said tucking his face down in her neck, breathing her in as he expelled that deceit. “Tell me what you need.”
She angled her head and he took the hint, fastening his lips on her neck, kissing up to her ear, which he rimmed with his nose and then took her lobe in his mouth. That got him the sting of fingernails in his arm and a gorgeous moan. He would break time itself to hear that again, to know it was a feeling he caused to rise up in her.
“Give me some words, Aurora Rae.” This couldn’t happen by accident. Not some day-drunk mistake she regretted, and he blamed himself for.
“Please, Zeke.”
His name groaned with need was so delicious he could almost block out the sound of his impending doom. She tried to turn in his arms, but it would wreck him permanently if he was watching her face as he made her come, so he held her fast and whispered in her ear. “I’m going to touch you everywhere. I’m going to make you feel good.”
That got him a hiss as she pushed back against him. He put his fingers to the hem of her top and peeled it up over her head. Acres of flawless flesh he’d not touched, not kissed. He dumped his own tee, the better to feel her, to let her feel him, and went to work, the insanely arousing whimpers and sighs she made his guide.
His skin felt crazily alive where she touched, and he was painfully hard. The press of her body, the ways she flexed and shifted, bumping against his cock, was deliriously distracting, but unlike last night, his heart was steady, and he was focused on her pleasure.
A flick of his fingers under the hooks of her sports bra and he had uninterrupted access to her breasts. The speed with which he wanted her naked was tempered by the fact that the floor was filthy and there was nowhere he would risk laying her.
“Hard and fast,” he said, hands sliding around her ribs and up to cup her breasts. Utterly, fucking gorgeous. “Are you here with me?”
“Yes.” She surged into his hands, and the kiss they shared as he curled around her was the purest drug he’d ever used. He made her writhe with thumb flicks across her raised nipples and wrap her arms around his neck and dig her fingernails into his skull when he pinched.
When he had her shaking and moaning and his own feelings were oozing out in rough exhales and gut deep groans, he tunneled his hand down her ribs, belly, inside her skins and under the triangle of her panties, right to the wet, hot center of her.
His body was her bed. He used one hand to hold her knee bent to her chest to open her up and the other to tease, to stroke, to rub and pinch, to dip inside her.
She gripped his arm and rolled her hips. “Oh my God, Zeke. Yes.”
