Page 97 of Forbidden Protector

I hook my good arm under her thigh and haul it up around my hip, opening her, and she takes the angle like she was built for exactly this, back against timber and glass.

"Look at me." I need her eyes when I do this, need her to see who's got her.

She does, honey-gold eyes turned ravenous. I push into her in one long slow drive that has her mouth falling open on a sound with no words in it at all. Skin on skin and I almost lose it right now.

"Mine," I say again, buried to the hilt, forehead against hers. "Christ, you feel incredible. So slick, so goddamn tight around me, nothing between us at all." I don't wait for her to answer with anything but her body.

I set a pace that has nothing careful left in it. She meets every stroke, nails dragging down my back, teeth finding my shoulder, one leg locked around my hip and the other barely holding her own weight. I take most of it and pin her harder into the wall with my hips so she doesn't have to work for anything but the taking.

"Kiss me." Her voice, ragged, demanding, and I move to her mouth instead of her throat, hard, no patience in it. I feel her lipstick smear across my jaw and my own mouth with it. Some faint sweet wax taste mixing in under her tongue. Neither of us cares and neither of us has cared about a single thing that isn't this.

"Holt." My name breaks apart in her mouth. "I'm not going to last."

"Don't want you to." I drive into her harder, and feel her walls start to flutter and grip. I know exactly how close she is because I've been learning every stage of it. "Let go. I've got you."

She does. Her whole body seizes around me, a cry tearing loose that the open window doesn't even try to muffle. The sight of her coming apart against my own glass with the mountain standing behind her is the thing that finishes me. I follow two strokes later. “Fuuuuck, Mackenzie.”

For a long moment neither of us moves, both of us breathing like we climbed the whole mountain instead of just each other.

She laughs first, a little bit unhinged, her forehead dropping to my collarbone.

"You have my lipstick on your entire face."

"Worth it."

"You look like you lost a fight with a strawberry."

"I won every part of that fight." I set her down slow, careful even now, her legs not fully trusting themselves yet.

She leans into me while the room finds its edges again, green pasture and white peak both still exactly where we left them through the glass.

Wyatt's truck comes up the drive an hour before sundown, and Gus doesn't move off the porch mat when the engine cuts.

That's the whole conversation, before either man says a word. Wyatt gets out slow, stands at the fender a second, looking at a dog who used to sleep in his own barn and now sleeps flat against my door like he was born to it. Something in Wyatt's shoulders comes down half an inch.

"He looks good."

"He is good." I don't offer more than that. Some men need the silence left open so they can decide what to put in it themselves.

Wyatt crouches, and Gus lifts his head, tail going once, twice, and doesn't get up. Doesn't need to. Wyatt runs a hand down his back, slow, and stays crouched there a long moment with his jaw working on something he isn't ready to say out loud yet.

"Keep him."

"You sure?"

"He picked. Nine years my dad had him and the second he had a choice, he picked your door." Wyatt stands, wipes his palm on his jeans, and looks at the ranch behind me like he's seeing it different than he did in February. "Man doesn't get to argue with a dog's math."

I make coffee. We drink it on the porch steps, not much said. The kind of easy that isn't owed an apology anymore. When he leaves he shakes my hand at the truck door, and it's the first time since a driveway in February that his grip doesn't have grief loaded into it.

Mackenzie ships her father's boxes out the next day, four of them, taped and labeled for the county historical archive, sealed fifty years per the form she filled out at the kitchen table with relief on her face, a woman finally setting down a weight she's carried her whole life.

"Caleb goes to the record," she says, watching the truck pull out with her whole inheritance boxed up in the back of it. "Not to me. Not to a garage in Salt Lake. Where a name like his is supposed to end up."

I don't say anything. I put my good hand at the small of her back instead, and she leans into it, and we watch the dust settle on a road that used to only bring trouble up it.

That night I find the key in the drawer where it's sat since I built this place, cut for a lock that's never once had a second copy used. I set it on the counter next to her coffee in the morning without a word.

She picks it up, turns it over in her fingers, and looks at me.