Page 130 of Branded

“I love you.” I grab his face. “I love you because you’re trying to be better. Because you let me see you vulnerable. Because you brought my family when you could have handled it on your own. Because you love me enough to kill for me.”

“Lennox.” His voice breaks.

“Shut up and kiss me.”

He does. Desperate, hungry, needing connection after everything we’ve been through. I kiss back just as hard, needing him just as much. His hands come up to hold my face, and they’re shaking, and that undoes me more completely than anything else could.

He strips my clothes off with shaking hands, and I do the same for him, pushing his shirt from his shoulders, running my palms up the warm planes of his chest. I slow down without meaning to.

I’ve touched him before. Many times, in many ways. But I’ve never looked. Not like this. Not with the right to.

I trace the barbed wire that starts at his forearm and travels across his ribs, following the line of it with my fingertip. It always looked like random ink, but it isn’t. It’s the hold this land’s had on him since before he was old enough to choose it—barbed wire because nothing worth having comes without drawing a little blood. I press my palm flat against his ribs and feel his breath hitch.

The flowers. I touch those next, and they remind me of the meadow we rode through together, early on, when I still hated him. The brand over his heart stops me entirely. I press two fingers against it and look up at him.

“No matter how far you went,” I say softly.

“This is always home,” he finishes. His eyes are rawer than I’ve ever seen them, and it nearly breaks me.

I look at the longhorn on his arm. The missing crown from the hotel branding.

“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice thick and low.

I look up at him, this man who is brutal and tender and complicated and mine.

“More than okay,” I say. “Perfect, actually.”

I pull his head down and kiss him, our tongues slow and searching at first, then hungrier, then desperate again, because we have been through something that should have broken us and didn’t and we are both still here and alive and I need him to feel that. I need us both to feel it.

He walks me backward to the bed and lays me down, and he braces above me and just looks for a moment, chest heaving, hair wrecked from my hands, and his expression is so open it almost hurts to look at directly.

“I love you,” he says. Like it’s the simplest thing. Like it isn’t the most enormous thing either of us has ever said.

“I know,” I whisper. “I love you too. Now come here.”

He lowers himself over me and his mouth finds mine again and his hands move down my body slowly, differently than any time before—touching me because I’m his and he’s mine and we finally both know it. His palm drags down my waist, my hip, the outside of my thigh, and I shiver under him and pull him closer.

He kisses down my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast, taking his time, which under any other circumstance would make me impatient but right now feels necessary. His mouth closes over my nipple and I exhale shakily and arch into him, and he hums against my skin, his hand sliding between my thighs, and I’m already so wound up from the emotion of the last hour that the first touch of his fingers makes me gasp.

“Sebastian,” I moan.

“That’s it, baby, say my name,” he murmurs against my chest. “I want to hear you enjoying what I’m doing.”

He takes his time and I let him, let him work me open slowly, deliberately, his fingers moving with the knowledge of exactly what I need, and I look at the ceiling and feel tears slide into my hair and don’t try to stop them. He kisses back up to my mouth and feels the wet on my cheek and pulls back.

“Hey—”

“Don’t stop,” I say immediately. “I’m okay. I’m really okay. I just—” I press my palm flat over the brand on his chest and feel his heartbeat, fast and real. “I could have walked away from this, and I would have been so wrong.”

His jaw tightens. “But you didn’t.”

“I know.” I pull him back down. “So don’t stop.”

He settles between my thighs and pushes inside me slowly; it’s almost painfully maddening.

This is different. Every other time has been driven by that particular madness of two people who can’t keep their hands off each other. This is what runs underneath all of that—quieter and more permanent, the feeling of two people who have chosen each other past the point of being able to do anything else.

He starts to move and I move with him, his eyes locked with mine. We don’t look away from each other, not once. Every stroke is slow and deep and deliberate, his hand sliding up my thigh to my hip, holding me to him like I might disappear if he loosens his grip. He moves the way he did our first time together, but there’s no pain, no marking, and there won’t be bruises in the morning.