Chapter 43: The Confession
The stairs to Dove’s apartment were steep, narrow, and creaked under Jackson’s weight with a familiar protest. He knew each sound, had memorized them over countless nights of checking perimeter sensors, of bringing up reports, of simply standing at the bottom listening for the soft shuffle of her moving about, safe. Tonight, each step felt like crossing a border into a country he’d only ever surveyed from a distance.
He stood before her door, plain pine worn smooth by time. From below, the rich, clean scent of leather and hay from the tack room seeped up through the floorboards. He could hear the soft rustle of paper, the click of a pen. He lifted his hand, hesitated, then knocked—three firm, even raps that sounded like gunshots in the quiet hallway.A pause. Then the click of the latch, and the door swung inward.
Dove stood there, backlit by the warm glow of a desk lamp, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. She wore faded jeans and a soft grey t-shirt, her feet bare. In her hand was a sheaf of irrigation maps, her reading glasses perched on top of her head.Her sharp green eyes widened slightly, then narrowed, taking him in.
“Jack,” she said, her voice a low drawl.“Everything alright? Perimeter alert?” She started to turn, already thinking of the security tablet on her desk.
“No,” he said, the word rough.It stopped her.
She faced him fully now, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe, a question in her posture.He stood there, rooted, his throat tight. All the speeches he’d practiced, all the careful words he’d lined up in his head during the long walk over, dissolved into static.Damien’s voice echoed: One true thing.
He swallowed, the sound loud in the silence.He met her gaze, held it.
“One true thing,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, scraping like gravel.Dove went perfectly still. The casual tilt of her head straightened.She didn’t breathe.
“Fifteen years,” he continued, the words coming now, low and relentless, a damn breaking inside him. “Every damn day since you turned eighteen and walked out of the house in that blue dress for the rodeo dance. I’ve been in love with you.Every single day since. When you’re laughin’.When you’re cussin’. When you’re covered in mud fixin’ a fence or sittin’ quiet in your daddy’s old chair, runnin’ this whole damn empire.It’s the only true thing I know.”
He stopped. The silence that followed was absolute, a vacuum. He watched her face, saw the shock fracture her composure, saw her eyes well up, glassy in the lamplight. A single tear escaped, tracing a quick path down the sun-kissed skin of her cheek.She didn’t wipe it away.
For five seconds, ten, they existed in that suspended space.Then a shudder ran through her. Her lips parted.She dropped the maps.They fluttered to the floor like wounded birds.
In one swift motion, she reached out, her hand fisting in the worn cotton of his shirt just above his heart. She pulled him inside, the force surprising him, and kicked the door shut with her heel.The click of the lock engaging was the loudest sound he’d ever heard.
Then her hands were on his face, cool and soft, dragging him down, and her mouth was on his.
It was not a gentle kiss.It was a claim. It was desperate and hungry, a suffocating, drowning pressure that stole the air from his lungs. Her lips were insistent, parting under his, and he groaned, a deep, broken sound from his chest as his arms finally wrapped around her, crushing her to him. She tasted of coffee and wild mint from the garden, and of the salt of her tears. Her tongue swept into his mouth, and he answered, the careful control of a lifetime incinerated in an instant. He kissed her back with the pent-up fervor of fifteen years of silence, his hands digging into the strong muscles of her back, holding her as if the earth might vanish beneath them.
“Dove,” he rasped against her mouth, her name a prayer and a curse.
“Shut up, Jack,” she breathed, tearing her lips from his only to attack the buttons of his shirt. Her fingers, usually so deft with reins and rifle bolts, fumbled. “Just… shut up.”
He let her, his own hands sliding under her t-shirt, skimming up the hot, smooth skin of her sides. She arched into his touch, a sharp gasp catching in her throat. He found the curve of her breast, the weight of it perfect in his palm, the peak already hardened against the lace of her bra. He brushed his thumb over it, and she moaned, the sound going straight to his cock, which was already achingly hard, confined painfully in his jeans.
“Bedroom,” she managed, pulling his shirt open, her palms flat against the solid plane of his chest, feeling the frantic beat of his heart. “Now.”
He didn’t need telling twice. He scooped her up, one arm under her knees, the other supporting her back. She was solid, real, her arms looping around his neck, her face buried against his throat. He carried her the few strides into her small bedroom, dominated by a large, simple bed with a wrought-iron frame. He laid her down on the quilt, the faded pattern of stars and moons under her, and came down over her, bracing his weight on his forearms.The frantic energy settled for a moment into something more profound, more terrifying. He looked down at her, her hair fanned out, her lips swollen from his kisses, her eyes dark and bottomless with want.This was Dove.His Dove.The girl he’d taught to shoot. The woman he’d follow into hell.
“You sure?” he whispered, the last fragment of his protector’s instinct surfacing.
In answer, she hooked a leg around his hips, grinding herself against the hard ridge of his erection.A bolt of pure need speared through him. “I’ve been sure for fifteen years, you stupid, beautiful man,” she said, her voice raw. “Now get these fucking clothes off.”
They moved in a frantic, clumsy symphony of disentanglement. Boots thudded to the floor.Jeans were shoved down and kicked away. Her t-shirt and bra followed, and then he was staring at her, completely bare under the soft light. She was magnificent. Sun-streaked skin, strong shoulders, the gentle swell of her stomach, the dark triangle of curls between her thighs.He drank her in, his breath catching.
“You’re staring,” she said, but there was no shyness, only a fierce pride in her eyes.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “I am.” He leaned down, capturing her mouth again, slower this time, as his hand stroked down her body. He cupped her breast, sucked her nipple into his mouth, lavishing it with his tongue until she writhed beneath him, her fingers tangling in his hair.He kissed a trail down her sternum, over the flat of her belly, lower.
When his mouth found her center, she cried out, her hips bucking off the bed. The taste of her was earthy and sweet, unmistakably her. He parted her folds with his tongue, circling her clit, teasing, then laving it with firm, flat strokes. He learned her rhythm quickly, the way her breathing hitched, the desperate clutch of her thighs around his head.
“Jack… oh, god, right there,” she pleaded, her voice fraying. He drove her on, relentless, until her body tightened like a drawn bowstring and she came with a shattered cry, her back arching off the bed, her hands fisting in the quilt.
Before the tremors fully subsided, he was moving up her body, sheathing himself in one long, slow, inexorable push.They both groaned at the sensation, a perfect, stretching fullness. He was buried deep inside her, their bodies joined in a way that felt more like a homecoming than a conquest.
“Fuck,” he gritted out, forehead pressed to hers, fighting for control. She was so tight, so hot, clenching around him.
“Don’t you dare go slow,” she panted, her legs wrapping high around his waist, her heels digging into the small of his back. “Not this time.Give it to me.All of it.”
He obeyed. He pulled almost all the way out, then slammed back in, setting a hard, driving rhythm. The bed rocked against the wall with a steady, protesting thump. The air filled with the sounds of their union: skin slapping against skin, their ragged gasps, the creak of the old frame. He fucked her with the pent-up urgency of a decade and a half, each deep thrust a word he’d never said, a touch he’d never allowed himself.
She met him thrust for thrust, her hips rolling, her nails scoring down his sweat-slicked back. “Yes,” she hissed, her head thrashing side to side. “Right there, don’t stop, god, don’t stop.”
He could feel his own climax building, a coiling pressure at the base of his spine.He reached between them, his thumb finding her clit again, rubbing in tight circles. She screamed, a raw, unfettered sound, as another orgasm ripped through her, her internal muscles milking him violently.It pushed him over the edge. With a ragged groan that was half her name, he buried himself to the hilt and came, pulse after pulse of hot release emptying into her, his vision whiting out at the edges. He collapsed onto her, careful to keep his weight on his elbows, both of them slick with sweat, breathing in shattered, syncopated rasps.
The only sound was the wind whispering against the windowpane and the slow settling of the old house. He nuzzled into the curve of her neck, inhaling the scent of her skin, sex, and the faint lavender from her soap.
After a long while, her hand came up, her fingers gently tracing the shell of his ear.“Fifteen years,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
“Every day,” he confirmed, his lips moving against her skin.
She shifted beneath him, and he rolled to his side, pulling her with him so she lay draped across his chest. Her head rested over his heart. “Took you long enough,” she murmured, but there was no heat in it, only a profound, sleepy satisfaction.
He stared up at the shadowed ceiling, her weight the most comforting thing he’d ever known. The world outside, with its obligations and dangers, still existed.But here, in this room, a fundamental truth had shifted.The silence was over. And for the first time in fifteen years, Jackson Mac felt no fear at all, only a weary, satiated peace, and the thrilling, terrifying certainty of a new path opening under a sky full of old, familiar stars.