Page 120 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Silas buries himself to the hilt, holds there, his hips welded to mine while the aftershock rattles my bones. The pressure inside me is a bright, white, splitting a hole in the universe, and there’s only the shaking of my thighs and the sound of him bruising against me, obscene and impossible.

He grabs my ass, shoves forward so I’m almost off the desk, held there with just his weight and the iron cable arm around my lower back.

My head bats against the window behind the desk. I see the shape of us, partial and refracted, and it looks exactly how it feels: dangerous, necessary, a perfect accident.

He fucks me with the kind of technique you can only get from being so goddamn starved for so long that you taught yourself to be patient out of spite.

Each thrust is a punctuation mark on some private thesis about what I am, what he is, what we are together. I lose track of time, lose track of my own words, which keep breaking and reassembling on the air, syllables in no language and volume set somewhere between “please” and “kill me.”

There’s nothing but the furnace of his body and the piston of his hips, the glass of the window shuddering with each impact. I think, for a dazzling, brief second, that I would let him fuck me through the wall if that was where inertia led us.

The universe condenses: the office, the ruined skirt, the sensation of my own pulse in every nerve ending.

That’s it. That’s all.

I scrape my nails into his shoulders, use the leverage to grind myself harder onto him, and the way his eyelids flicker like he’s short circuiting is almost a reward.

He’s not holding back anymore. There’s no savor, just the destructive logic of friction and the disaster of need. He bares his teeth at me and I bare mine right back, daring him, begging for more.

He obliges, and the rhythm of his hips changes, deep, grinding, unspeakably good, and I can tell he’s close because his breath is this ragged, desperate saw scraping in my ear, and his hand goes to my jaw, forcing my eyes open so I have to look at him.

The order in his stare is clear: Stay with me. Don’t you dare look away.

I don’t want to, could never, not when he looks like this. Like I’m the singular point of gravity in his fucked-up universe, like none of the rest of it matters, not the town, not our jobs, not the mess we’ll have to scrub from the desk when we’re done.

I angle my pelvis so he’s hitting every nerve again, and I shatter, nothing but sweat and spit and body. He doesn’t slow, just grinds harder, chasing his own ending.

I find his mouth and bite hard enough to draw blood, taste it coppery, stinging on my tongue, and he comes, cock pulsing hot and wild, spilling into me in hard, unstoppable surges.

Each pulse makes me keen, wringing the last of the orgasm out of me. I shudder until my voice breaks and all I can do is sob into his mouth, clinging so hard it feels like I might splinter both of us.

He collapses over me, hands planted to either side, his chest slick with sweat, head bent into the curve of my shoulder. There’s a noise, low and unraveling, that takes me a second to realize is him.

He breathes like he’s been underwater, starved for this, for me, for the right to lose himself in something that won’t collapse under the strain.

The office cool chills against the heat of my skin, and only then do I realize I’m shaking. Every nerve is so open, so raw, I half-expect to see the skin stripped off in ribbons, nerve endings like exposed wire.

It’s a long moment before either of us moves. He doesn’t straighten right away. A man so hyper-regulated every day of his life letting himself slouch into this, slack and human.

He presses weighted kisses to my collar and neck and the line of my jaw, maybe for reassurance the world hasn’t vanished entirely. The tenderness is so at odds with what just happened it makes my eyes water, and I blink hard, anchoring myself to the sting.

He’s the one to shift first, easing out of me with an apology half-formed on his lips, but I catch his wrist in my hand before he can step away entirely.

“Don’t,” I say.

He stills. For a man who controls everything, it’s almost shocking how quickly he listens.

Silas’s eyes pierce me. Spread out on the desk, flushed and disheveled and absolutely not something that fits into the clean, ordered life he’s built.

His chest rises once. Falls.

“Don’t say anything,” I rasp out once more as I push myself into a sitting position. “We can just… let it be.”

I do want him to speak, a little. I’d much rather know what’s going on in his mind. But truth be told, I don’t know if I can handle it, so for now, silence feels a lot easier.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Cody