Page 44

Knox is in the hall, barefoot, in jeans and no shirt, with a towel around his neck and his hair still wet from the shower. He stops when he sees me and doesn't come any closer.

"I want you to hold me down," I tell him.

He pulls the towel off his neck and tosses it onto the hall table, and he looks at me long enough that my face starts to burn.

"The first time I was in your bed, you put your chest on my shoulder, and I went somewhere else in my head," I say. "I've been thinking about it all day. Men held me down on a stone floor, and I want to know what your hands feel like doing it instead. On my back, where I can see you." My voice holds. "I want to feel you stop me from moving, and I want to know it's you doing it."

"Same limits as before," he says. "Nothing that puts you facedown. No weight across your back or your neck from behind. I don't touch your wrists. And nobody tells you to keep your eyes down."

"Yes."

"You say Bandera, and everything stops."

"I know."

"I decide how I hold you," he says. "You decide whether it keeps going. Go to my room. Take off everything but your shirt, and lie down on your back."

He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. It's the low, even tone that stopped fights in his barn when I was nineteen, the one I used to lie awake wanting him to turn on me. Now he's using it to send me to his bed. Heat floods low in my belly, my pulse starts pounding between my legs, and my knees go so loose I have to catch the doorframe.

The lamp on his nightstand is already on. I take off my sneakers and socks, then my jeans and underwear. Beckett's shopping bag from Kerrville didn't have a bra in it, so there's nothing under the shirt but me. I keep it on, with the cuffs pulled down over my wrists, and lie back with the quilt cool under my bare thighs.

From the bed I can hear him in the kitchen. The faucet runs and shuts off, and a drawer slides closed. He's making me wait, and I'm wet before he's even started down the hall.

He comes down the hall barefoot, heavy on his heels so I can hear every step. He sets a clean folded quilt at the foot of the bed and locks the door.

He straightens and looks at me, taking his time. His gaze travels from my bare feet up my legs to where my shirt stops at the tops of my thighs. My pussy clenches as if he'd already touched it.

He unbuttons his jeans and shoves them down with his briefs. His cock springs free, thick and hard and flushed dark at the head, and it bobs as he steps out of the denim. A vein runs along the underside of it. My mouth waters, and I press my thighs together.

"Open them," he says.

I let my knees fall apart on the quilt. He looks right between them, at how wet I already am, and his cock jerks against his belly.

He takes a condom out of the nightstand drawer, tears the packet open with his teeth, and rolls it down his length with one slow pull of his fist while I watch.

He kneels on the bed beside my hip and opens the buttons of my shirt down the front, one at a time, until it falls open. He leaves the sleeves where they are.

He keeps his hands to himself. He looks at my breasts, at the bruises gone yellow along my ribs, and down my belly to the wet curls between my legs. The air from the window is cool on my bare skin. My nipples draw up so tight they ache, and he just keeps looking until I squirm.

"Don't move," he says, and I stop squirming.

He takes my right arm high up, near the elbow, well clear of the cuff. He bends it and lays it on the quilt beside my head, palm up. He does the same with my left. He doesn't stretch my arms over my head. Bent beside my face like this, they leave my ribs alone when I breathe.

He moves between my legs and spreads them wider with his knees, so wide the backs of my thighs stretch.

He leans over me, closes his hands around my forearms just below my elbows, and presses them into the mattress. My whole body jerks once before I can stop it.

When he braces, his right forearm turns inward, a few inches from my face. The circle and crook I drew on it last night is still there, faded from his shower but dark enough to read. He didn't scrub it off.

"Where are you?"

"Here."

"Tell me what's on my arm."

I turn my eyes to it. "Whitlock's brand."

"And whose arm is holding you down?"