Jake towers over me, an imposing pillar of strength and promise. He said I would talk about the ravine, and I did. He said he would tell me everything, and he did. Only one thing remains, and it thrums through the bedroom, engulfing my senses.
“No more miles between us.” The predatory intensity in his eyes captures, claims, and marks his territory.
“No more years.” I remain on the edge of the bed before him, trapped in his sights.
“No more secrets.” His unblinking gaze stares through me with unmasked desire. Jaw locked and hands flexing at his sides, he looks as if he’s going to eat me alive.
“I love you, Jake Holsten.” I lick my lips, my mouth dry. “Even if you don’t go slow. Even if it’s not that great.”
He laughs, a dark rumble of thunder. “I’m confident you’ll come on my cock this time. Multiple times.”
A pleasurable shiver skips up my spine. “If I knew it was you in the barn that night…”
“Tonight, you know. Take off the shirt.” His command ravishes my body, thrusting into me with deep vibrating tones.
I lift the shirt up and off.
He drinks in my nudity, his attention loving me raw and his dominant nature owning my depths.
“On your knees.” He points at the rug beneath his bare feet.
He wears jeans, unbuttoned and unzipped, and nothing else. His hot, hard, half-naked body is incentive enough to run my mouth all over him. But it’s instinct that slides me off the bed and onto the floor. The instinct to please him, to surrender to him in every way.
As I lower to my knees, his breathing loses rhythm, his chest a heaving slab of power that contracts and expands. I rest my hands on his trim hips, and the position puts me at eye level with the hardness straining against his briefs through the open zipper.
Three years ago, I held his cock in my hand in the dark. I haven’t actually seen it since we were sixteen, but I felt every steely inch of him inside me that night.
“You said something to me in the barn.” I feather my fingers along the rigid shape of him through the cotton. “Do you remember? You pressed your lips—”
“Against your cheek. I wanted you to feel my voice when I said, I love you. I belong to you. No matter the time or distance, I’m yours.”
His words decimate me. The severe look on his face accelerates my pulse. His hunger is raw, palpable, and only a couple layers of clothes away from becoming very real inside me.
“Pull me out.” He tangles his fingers in my hair.
My skin tingles and heats as I lower his jeans and underwear and free his swollen length. Jesus, he’s bigger than I remember, thicker, harder, and hungry.
His balls hang heavy and full beneath his jutting cock. A clear bead of arousal wells on the plump tip, and I ache to catch it with my tongue.
“I need you to take the edge off.” His voice strangles. “It’s been too long, and… Goddamn, stop staring at it.” His features tense as if he’s in pain. “Put it in your mouth, Conor.”
I slide my lips over his shaft, relishing the taste of that salty drop. I draw him in until he bumps the back of my throat, and his growly groan envelopes me, urging me to suck root to tip and back again.
He tightens the fist in my hair, and I let myself go, tonguing the velvety skin with a yearning I’ve only ever felt with him.
The room pulses with our uneven breaths, and the rug offers little comfort beneath my knees. But I’m exactly where I want to be. Where I’m supposed to be.
I’ve always been his.
The suction of my mouth muffles my moans as his sounds run wild. Grunting, guttural groans reverberate in his chest and charge the air with enough sexual energy to raise the hairs on my nape.
“Fuck, Conor.” His head drops back, exposing the taut cords in his neck. He clamps his hands against my scalp and drives my movements, fucking my face, and panting heavily. “I’m so close. Shit. Oh God, fuck, I’m gonna fucking come.”
His eyes latch onto mine, and my pussy clenches. I sheath my teeth, suck him hard, and send him over the edge. I’m so hungry for him my heart rate explodes with the first gush of his release against my throat. He throbs against my tongue, grunting and moaning as he empties himself in my mouth.
His legs tremble beneath my hands, and his fingers move to my face, roving across my lips where they seal around his softening cock.
“Now I can take my time with you.” He slips from my mouth, shoves off his jeans and underwear, and hoists me onto the bed.
His hands grip my thighs, and with a forceful yank, he brings my butt to the edge of the mattress. Then he buries his face between my legs.
I fall back, melting beneath the wet hot sensations of his lips and tongue. The scruff of his whiskers burns my skin, and his fingers dig against my thighs, holding me open for his punishing mouth.
He eats me like he’s starving. The same starvation that depletes my lungs and coils in my core. His teasing flicks and bites ignite an unbearable need inside me, driving me to madness.
“I need your cock.” I squirm beneath him, tugging on the messy brown strands of his hair.
But there’s no denying him. He devours my pussy until I detonate against his mouth and slump into a puddle of spent limbs and liquid pleasure.
He prowls up my body and scoots us to the center of the bed. Knees between my legs, he stretches me open, his cock hanging hard and long between us, twitching with readiness.
This is really happening. It won’t be stolen from us this time. It’s not faceless or nameless. It’s just him and me and vibrating awareness.
“It took us twenty-two years to get here.” I wrap a hand around his steely girth and stroke a hoarse moan from his throat.
He lowers his mouth to mine, filling my horizon with his sexy bedroom eyes. “You know what they say about hard-earned happiness.”
“We won’t be so quick to part with it.” I kiss his scruffy jaw. “No matter what happens, I’ll fight for this. For us. For—”
His tongue parts my mouth and feeds on my words, flooding my taste buds with the tang of my arousal.
It’s a touching, sweltering, slow-burn kiss that sizzles through my veins and smolders the passion between us. His lips worship mine, and his hand holds my face, orienting my head as he ravages me, lick by wicked lick.
The lazy swirls of his tongue, his caressing fingers, his soft groans of contentment—this is my cowboy, devoted and patient, taking his time, indulging himself while building a fire that will never burn out.
As that fire grows and roars into something more demanding, he edges back. Not to end this, but to bask in the moment before we begin.
He runs his fingers up my bare arms, sending electricity to my heart, his eyes firmly fastened on mine.
Staring isn’t what I’d call it. His gaze inhabits, like it belongs on my face, connecting us between slow, infrequent blinks.
His eyes remind me of a fine-grained saddle, deep brown with striations of golden hues. Tough and dependable, crafted to hold and support through years of hardship.
He moves closer with those eyes that peer so deeply into mine. Then he whispers my name as the wide crown of his cock breaches me.
Slowly, he sinks inside, and a long groan vibrates in his throat. His sounds, the intense feel of him, the warmth of his breath on my lips—he’s my heaven.
He begins to thrust, and my breathing grows shallow. The focused look on his face melts me into the mattress, the pleasure enormous, gripping my body with bursts of sensations. I squirm against the invasion, throwing my head back and gulping for air.
With a finger on my chin, he directs my face to his, his gaze absorbing the hunger in mine and returning it tenfold. There’s no smile in his expression. Only white-hot intensity, the sparks of what will soon become an inferno.
He drives deeper inside me, and my inner walls relax, welcoming him, needing more. Being with him in such an intimate way is mind-blowing. He is love and safety. A proven cure for the soul.
His deep grunts are therapeutic. His kisses are remedies, but it’s the feel of his body inside me that heals. Or maybe it’s all of him and all of me combined.
Every thrust restores what was stolen from us. His constant gaze revives what we lost. There’s something in that look of his I’ll never find in another person. It’s the bridge between us, the bond that cements us together.
His lips touch mine, and his tongue carves out my mouth, his kisses long and penetrating.
I gasp, and he thrusts harder.
We moan together and move faster.
Arms and legs entwined.
Tongues rubbing and tangling.
Lost in the rhythmic throb of our beating hearts.
Then he slides out and shifts to my side.
From the nightstand, he grabs a remote and aims it at the stereo across the room. A second later, the intro to a familiar song hums through the speakers.
“Now we’re going to do this the reluctant way.” He flips me to my stomach. “Until you’re no longer reluctant. Focus on my voice.”
Before I can resist, he covers my back with his warm, heavy body and jumps in with the music, singing Meant to Be by Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line.
The darkness tries to pull me under, seizing my chest and tensing my muscles. But I cling to the security of his heavy weight and the sultry twang in his voice as he sings.
I’m with Jake, and his presence is so potent it armors me in a sheath of warm protective skin and humming notes, promising I’ll never be alone again.
Not everything’s meant to be, but Jake and I are inevitable. We’re knotted together, and damn if he doesn’t know how to tie a knot that withstands the test of time.
He wraps tendrils of red hair around his fist and tilts my neck back, positioning my face in his line of sight. His knees push my legs apart, and his free hand notches his cock against my pussy.
My breaths careen into gasps, and his singing cuts off.
“I love you.” With his lips on mine, he sinks into my wet heat from behind.
The indomitable size of him stretches my inner walls, and I arch off the bed, moaning against his mouth.
“Goddamn, Conor.” He buries himself to the root, his body iron hard and shaking against me. “You’re so fucking tight. Do you feel that? You’re clamping down on me.”
“I feel everything.”
I don’t know if it’s the position or the fact that he’s riding me bareback, but my God, I feel his hardness, his heat, every ridge and twitching pulse of him.
Neither of us have ever had sex without a condom. Willing sex, that is. When we had a conversation about it last week, he learned that I’m still on the pill.
“Nothing between us.” He thrusts slowly, spiraling electric sparks through my body. “Never again. Fuck, you feel incredible.”
He pulls out and moves me onto my side, facing away from him. Then he kneels against the backs of my thighs and drives into me from behind.
“Ahhh.” His head falls back. “Feels so fucking good.” He surges into me, panting as he tweaks my nipple and plays with my clit. “God, you’re so wet and snug. Fucking perfect.”
The position gives him full access to my body, and his hands roam everywhere, rubbing and pinching my heated flesh. I rock against his thrusts and reach up to scrape my fingers along his sculpted torso, delighting in the flex of masculine strength as he bends over my hip and drives harder inside me.
Ravenous desire mounts between us. His pelvis collides with my backside, his cock stabbing in and out, demanding more, needing release. We’re famine and drought, starving and wanton, fucking like our lives depend on it.
“I need your mouth.” He rolls me to my back.
Crawling between my legs, he plants his lips over mine and grinds his way back inside me.
With a groan, he grips the back of my head and pulls me closer to his hungry mouth. His other arm hooks around my lower back, crushing our bodies together.
Then he fucks me into a languid rhythm, his hips rolling against mine with delicious friction. He holds me buoyant, drifting through a lofty, dreamlike state, with none of the frenzied desperation that reunited us. We’re just as impassioned, more so, but in a dazed, spellbound way that drugs the senses and intensifies the fever.
I’m lost in him, in the fusion of our heart beats, in the hooded sensuality of his eyes as he watches me.
He moves in and out of my body and kisses me achingly. Then he watches me again. Back and forth. Kissing, watching, both connections are possessive and inescapable as he digs his cock deeper inside me.
I slide my hands down his back and palm his ass, gripping the rigid muscle.
He’s a stallion between my legs, possessing me with his touch, all brawn and power and huffing breaths, a steady and bucking rush of animalistic hunger and watchful eyes.
It’s his unwavering eye contact that sends me over. I grind against him, moaning and gasping as every pleasure zone inside me bursts into full-body shock waves.
His mouth swallows my screams as he joins me with spasmodic jerks of his hips. We climax together with our entire bodies, every inch of him sliding against every inch of me in a rhapsody of prickling skin and electric ripples.
He continues to thrust, kissing me languorously as his cock strokes in and out, throbbing against my walls. I wrap my arms and legs around him, inhaling his gasps and locking our souls together.
“That was… Jesus, Conor.” He half-groans, half-laughs against my neck. “And we’re only getting started. I fucking love you.”
For the next few hours, I relearn his rough edges, the intoxication of his breath, the scar on his calf from the rattlesnake bite, and the sounds his throat makes when he’s turned on. I rediscover all my favorite things—the dimples above his ass, the way his hair falls around my scraping fingers, the twitches in his legs when he comes, and the elation in his eyes when I scream his name.
When we aren’t lost in the throes of orgasm, I curl up against his chest and fall into an enchanted coma as he strokes my hair with reverent fingers. We talk about everything from school work to cattle ranching and the mischief we stirred up as kids. He hates snakes and wants children. I love all animals, and I’m terrified to get pregnant. He thinks I smell like wildflowers and sweet cream frosting. I accuse him of taking Viagra and injecting steroids. We both wish we knew our mothers before they died.
I snuggle against his hard body, chest to chest, and hook a leg over his hip. “Why do you think my mom created those hoops for Lorne and me to jump through?”
“It’s an incentive trust, which isn’t uncommon. My guess is she thought if you cared about the land, you would live here and work for it. College was the exception, as long as the ranch was your permanent address.”
“Makes sense, I guess.” I nuzzle my nose against his neck, breathing in his spicy male scent. “What’s the state of the ranch? Did it go into bankruptcy?”
“I retained some of the profit from the drilling and kept the business out of the red. Jarret streamlined the entire operation and hired better workers. Now I’m focused on the accounting and making better investment decisions.”
As he launches into a long-winded explanation on business models and money stuff, my eyes start to glaze over.
“By next year, we’ll be profitable again.” He pushes me onto my back and slides over my body, licking and kissing my breasts.
“What are you doing?” I shiver beneath his diabolical tongue.
“Clearly, you need to be stimulated by something other than my intelligence.”
“Hey, now…” I laugh. “Don’t judge me because I have a thing for naked cowboys with killer abs and endless stamina.”
“Well, this naked cowboy has a thing for you.”
The thing in question jabs against my thigh, buzzing a throb between my legs.
“The best course of action on this investment,” he says, biting my nipple, “is to go all in.”
He does just that, loving me hard into the mattress until we both pass out. Then he wakes me a few hours later and takes me again. By the time morning rolls around, I know Jake in every way—fast and brutal, slow and sensual, front and back, over and under, and side to side.
I fell in love with him when we were kids, before I understood the language of love.
Tonight, I fall harder than ever before. With every kiss, glance, smile, and evocative word, he doesn’t just stitch my heart back together. He welds it to his own.