Page 87 of Forbidden Protector

"Careful is what everybody's been doing to you for three weeks. Careful is what's got you standing at a window hating your own hand. I'm done being careful with you, Blackwater. Sit down."

I sit, because there's no version of tonight where I don't do exactly what that voice tells me to.

She straddles my lap on the kitchen chair, both knees bracketing my hips, and gets her mouth on mine before I can say anything else stupid. It isn't gentle and it isn't an apology dressed up as a kiss. It's a woman staking a claim on something everybody else in this house has quietly written off.

My good hand finds her waist. The bad one comes up on instinct, tries to find those silky strands of gold and amber, and gets halfway there before the fingers lock, shake, and drop into my lap like something that isn't mine anymore.

I go still under her.

"Don't," she says, before the shame gets all the way up my throat. "Don't you dare apologize to me with your face right now."

"It doesn't work."

"I know it doesn't work. I'm not asking it to work." She takes my bad hand first, careful of the pins still sticking out along the back of it and sets it down gently on my own thigh instead of holding it, like she's putting something fragile somewhere safe before she does anything else.

Then she reaches for my good arm and runs her thumb along the old line where she stitched me herself in a line shack in a blizzard, the first scar she ever gave me before this one took the rest. "You're a mess, Holt Blackwater. Broken and scarred and too brave for your own good."

She comes back for the bad hand, lifts it careful of the hardware, and guides it to rest against her ribs, over her heart, palm flat, nothing asked of it. "This hand doesn't have to do a single thing tonight except be here."

I feel her heartbeat under my palm, quick and real and not slowing down for either of us. Something in my chest that's been locked comes apart at the seam.

She takes her time with the rest of me. Not fast, not the transactional pace of a woman proving a point the way she did once in a line shack at dawn. She works my shirt the rest of the way off and looks at what's underneath it, the old ink. Her mouth follows where her eyes go. My collarbone. The scroll over my heart. The designs down the long muscle of my good arm, and then, careful, deliberate, the broken hand, her lips ghosting over the scars like she could kiss the damage smaller if she took long enough at it.

"Christ, don't stop."

"Wasn't planning on it." She doesn't lift her head.

She works my belt loose without asking, without slowing down for the question in my face, and gets me out of my jeans slow enough that I have to grip the edge of the chair, taking her sweet time about it.

She doesn't wait for me to reciprocate. She strips out of her own shirt one-handed, braced on my shoulder with the other. I get my good hand on the clasp of her bra and she lets me have that, lets me fumble it one-handed like I've had to fumble everything for three weeks, patient, watching my face instead of my hand while I work it.

When it finally gives, she doesn't laugh at how long it took. She just leans in and puts her mouth against my ear.

"See?" she says, quiet. "Still works fine."

She steps back just far enough to work her jeans and underwear off in one motion, no rush to it even now, then climbs back onto my lap and straddles me again, nothing left between us at all.

I get both hands on her then, the good one flat against her spine and the bad one resting against her ribs where she wants it, not gripping, just there. She glances down between us, and her mouth goes wicked and satisfied, because whatever else three weeks has broken, my cock never got the memo.

She wraps her hand around the base of me and strokes my full erection, slow, deliberate, until a bead of pre-cum wells at the tip and I growl fuck through my teeth. She lets go of me right before I lose it completely, and the cold air hits me where her hand was a second ago. My hips thrust up into nothing on pure instinct. Fuck, I missed this.

She reaches past me to the counter without a word, comes back with foil between two fingers, and tears it open herself. I go to take it from her out of old habit and she shakes her head, slow, and rolls it down over me herself instead. Like handling the one thing my bad hand can't manage tonight is a claim she's staking.

Then she slides two fingers into her own mouth, wetting them slow, watching my face the whole time she does it, and reaches down between her own thighs to get herself ready, taking her time, like she's got all night to torture me with the sight of it.

When she finally positions herself over me, she doesn't ease into it. She sinks all the way down in one long stroke, taking every inch of me at once. The moan that tears out of her comes from somewhere deep, pure want with nothing held back.

"Talk to me," she says, her forehead against mine, hips already finding a rhythm that doesn't ask permission. "Not the angry words. I've had those all night. I want the other ones. The vault. Give me the dirty-mouthed cowboy I know is still in there somewhere."

"You want to know what I think about every night you fall asleep against me?" It comes out rough, unpracticed, three weeks rustier than the last time I said anything like this to her. I feel it land anyway, feel her rhythm stutter and catch. "I wake up hard as a fence post half the nights, soaked through, still coming down off some dream where I had you tied to my headboard, blindfolded, begging me to let you come."

A whimper breaks from her, small and helpless, and her hips roll down harder on me, slow and deliberate. Like she's chasing the picture I just put in her head.

"I think about taking my time with you until you can't remember your own name," I go on, watching what it's doing to her. "Burying my tongue inside your hot cunt until you're shaking, then starting again before you've come down off the first one. Making you come so many times you go limp and stupid under me and can't do anything but take it."

Her rhythm picks up, faster now, grinding down against me with a kind of desperation that has nothing careful left in it, and the sound she makes is half plea and half warning.

"I think about fucking you every which way there is. Morning, noon, night. In the shower, in the bathtub, out under the moon and the stars where anybody could walk up on us and I wouldn't care. Every hole in your body, one at a time, until you're begging me to stop and meaning the opposite."