GUNFIRE IN THE NIGHT brought Connor awake with a gasp. The commotion downstairs was loud. Otis hammered out "Old Rough and Ready” with enough force to rattle the dishes.
“It’s okay,” I soothed after rising to close the window. “They’ll quiet down. Go back to sleep.” I’d woken several times already, enjoying the feel of her there and playing back the memories of the night over and over.
With a sleepy sigh she answered, “‘I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.’”
“No Titania, no Oberon. Just cowboys,” I said, with a fondness for the breed I had never felt before.
This cowboy, whose warmth I could feel against my skin, this cowboy had loved me as if my pleasure mattered, as if pleasing me was what pleased her. She knew I sold my body, was damned hundreds of times over, yet still thought I was worth pleasing. When I’d touched her, it had seemed as if she enjoyed not just my touch but the union of our passion. It was the fire we shared that moved her.
I knew there would not be another night like this one. I’d felt something I’d not known for so many years. I could not quite name it, but the feeling was so very welcome.
I thought she had dozed off until she said, “I’ve always had trouble sleeping under a roof.”
“Shall I open the window again?”
“No.” Her arm tightened around me again. “Stay.”
I played lazily with her hair as I snuggled closer against her warmth. The uproar outside and below us finally subsided and I was nearly asleep when I felt her hand cup me with intent. My response shocked me. I moaned, loudly, suddenly aflame. She moved with surprising quickness, turning me over, then touching me again with her body behind mine.
I pushed back against her as she pulled us both to our knees. I was dizzy with fever and strong with desire. “Is this what you want of me?”
“Yes.” She was growling in my ear. Her hand went under me to find my breasts as she pushed ever more quickly, more firmly, inside me.
“You can have it.” There was nothing left of my protection. I wanted her to do this and could not hide it. “You can have anything you need of me.” My voice broke. I had nothing to give her but my surrender. “Whatever you want, take it.”
I ought to have been ashamed. I gave my body for money, and it was honest trade. I was giving her far more than that and didn’t even know if she wanted it. If I gave her something so precious for free, I no longer knew what that made me.
She was forceful, powerful, but did not hurt me. As I came closer and closer to my ecstasy she was, if anything, gentler, more subtle, as if to find the most precise place to touch me that would wring from me everything I had to give.
She found it, but it wasn’t a place her fingers could reach. Something else was touched, something else inside me broke wide open.
I was a dam burst, and tears poured from me. A few minutes later she tenderly dried them, crooning to me softly.
“Darlin’,” she murmured in my ear as I fell asleep, as if that was truly my name. “Darlin’.”