Page 64 of Thunder

"So get back on one."

"Can't yet." And it galls me to say it, but I do. "Doc says the hip's not ready for what a horse asks of it. A green colt spooks, I come off wrong, I could undo everything, maybe worse. So I wait. I hate it, but I have to wait."

I look at her. "Spent my whole life bein' the man who could do anything the club needed, physically. Learnin' to tell my own body no and mean it—that's the hardest work I've done in years."

She reaches over and takes my hand.

"You'll ride again," she says, simple and certain. "You're doing the patient thing now so you get all of it back later. That's not weakness, Thunder. That's the smartest kind of strength there is."

She squeezes. "I'd know. I run a breeding program. Patience is the whole job."

I don't have words for what that does to me, so I do what I do instead of words.

I stand, and I pull her up out of her chair by the hand she's got in mine.

I walk her back into the deeper dark of the barn where the light from the lantern goes soft, and I back her up against a support post and kiss her slow and deep.

She melts into it with a little sound that undoes me every single time.

"Barn," she murmurs against my mouth. "Anybody could⁠—"

"Everybody's at supper. Raine's at Mama Lou's. Nobody's comin' out here." I get a hand in her hair, tip her head back, work my mouth down her throat. "And I've been wantin' to lay you down in the hay since the second I saw you chewin' that pen. Let me have you, rattlesnake. Slow. We got all night."

She stops arguing.

It's different tonight, and we both feel it.

Not the desperate claiming of the tub, not the quiet we had to be on the edge of my bed with Raine down the hall.

This is slow and settled, a man and a woman who've stopped running at each other and started to just... have each other.

I lay her down on a horse blanket over the straw and I take my time undressing her in the lantern light.

I trace the rattlesnake on her ribs with my mouth, my mark on her, and then lower to the script on her back that says she's mine, and she shivers under every pass.

I'm stronger tonight than I've been.

I can hold myself over her now, take more of my own weight, move her how I want her, and there's a deep satisfaction in getting a piece of that back, in being able to cover her body with mine and feel her go soft and open underneath me.

The hip still talks. It always talks.

When I settle between her thighs there's a bright pull of it that I have to breathe through, and she feels me go still and reads it instantly.

"Let me," she starts, moving to shift us.

"No." I press her back down, gently. "I've got it tonight. I want it like this. I want to be the one over you."

I roll my hips and we both groan. "Pain's just along for the ride, darlin'. It doesn't get a vote when you're lookin' at me like that."

I take her slow and deep on a horse blanket in my own barn while the last light dies outside.

One hand laced with hers up over her head, the other under the small of her back arching her up into me, and I watch her whole face the entire time because I can, because it's mine now, because she gave it to me.

There's a strength coming back to me tonight that I've been missing since the spring, and I feel it in every place our bodies meet.

Months ago I couldn't have held this position, couldn't have taken my own weight on the bad leg long enough to do this right.

Tonight I can.