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“Now take over,” she says.
The permission goes through me like current. I close my hand on her hip and stand with her against me, and she helps instead of hanging on. I turn her toward the foot of the bed, and she goes to her hands and knees without another word.
“You asked for this,” I say.
She looks back over her shoulder. “Use it.”
I drive into her.
Her back bows under the first hard thrust. I hold her hip and set the pace she handed back to me, deep enough to pull a low sound out of her, controlled enough that every stroke lands where it makes her push back for more.
This part of me I understand. Weight. Timing. The answer under my hands. What’s changed is the fence around it. I have this power because she put it in my hands, and it reaches exactly as far as this bed and not one inch past it.
“Harder,” she says.
I give her harder. When her arms start to shake, I reach around her with my good hand and find her with two fingers and keep driving into her.
“Stay with me.”
“I am.”
She comes again with her face turned into the sheet to muffle my name, and that takes the last of me. I grip her hip and come so hard my eyes close.
Afterward she lies on her back and leaves one knee against my leg. Neither of us reaches for a meaning the moment can’t hold.
She drinks from the water glass first and hands it to me. “I chose this.”
“I know.”
“I still haven’t forgiven you.”
“I know that too.”
She looks at the ceiling. “But I’m choosing you anyway. Tonight. With my eyes open. I want you to know the difference.”
“I know the difference,” I say. “I’m going to spend a long time earning the rest.”
She turns her head and looks at me, and whatever she sees makes her eyes go bright for a second before she looks away.
She gets up to start her backups wearing my shirt and nothing else. I rewrap the dressing that came loose and don’t ask her to come back to bed. The suite door is unlocked. There’s no ranch device anywhere in this room. I don’t know the password to a single file she opens.
I fall asleep to the sound of her keyboard.
She wakes me in the dark. The laptop screen is the only light. A new row is open under the number from the old tag.
“The owner on that tag isn’t a dead shell,” she says. “He renewed a brand four months ago and filed a current agricultural-use form.”
I sit up. “You found him.”
“I found out he’s alive.” She turns the screen toward me. “Today we find out whether he ever sold that heifer.”
Chapter 15
Tessa
The rancher’s front gate hangs square on new hinges and sags through the middle where the old pipe has lost an argument with time. Fresh wire runs south from it. The corner braces are newer than the posts. Every cut end has been bent inward with the tidy impatience of somebody who knows cattle and doesn’t care whether the work looks pretty.
Mercer waits until I put my phone away. “We do this in order. I tell him why we’re here. He decides whether he talks to us. You ask about records. If he names a crime or a suspect, that part’s mine.”
