Chapter 13
His surrender took him by surprise, and generated more heat, more texture than all the ways he had tried to remain in control.
Her rhythm grew wild, her body hammering down on his cock with relentless force, her cries mingling with the roar of the falls. His hands clamped to her hips, not to stop her, he couldn’t stop her, but to hang on as she rode him to pieces.
“Christ, Em,” he groaned, his voice breaking, his body straining. “You’re gonna kill me.”
But she only kissed him harder, grinding down, milking him, taking everything. Her hair whipped against his face, wet and silken, her mouth feverish on his as she worked him with a merciless rhythm that made his dick pulse deep inside her.
The pressure coiled hard and savage, pleasure building like the weight of the waterfall itself, pounding, unstoppable, driving him down, down, down until there was no air, no ground, no escape. Just Emily, surrounding him, breaking him, remaking him.
“Emily…” His voice cracked, desperate, hushed. His eyes locked on hers, and he saw it then, her wild joy, her fierce love, her utter possession. Fuck, he wanted it. Needed it.
“I’m dying for you,” he gasped, every muscle shaking. “Dying…don’t let me go. I need your life, your energy, all that pixie magic.”
Then it hit, detonated, tore him apart. His climax erupted, violent and unstoppable, his cock jerking, spilling deep inside her as his whole body bowed beneath her.
His face twisted, broken wide open, a muffled, aching sound tearing from his chest as he gave her everything, pleasure, trust, surrender.
The SEAL, the protector, the ironclad warrior, gone. Just a man, helpless under the woman who had claimed him, who had undone him, who had made him fall.
Christian Beckett had never fallen so hard in his life.
When the last tremors left her body, she slumped bonelessly against him, her head tucked under his chin, her breath warm and even. Brawler held her close, unwilling to release her even as exhaustion stole through his veins. She sighed once, a soft sound of surrender, and slipped into sleep.
He stayed still, memorizing the weight of her, the scent of her, the way she seemed to have remade him in the space of a single night.
Then, with care, he shifted, lifted her into his arms, and carried her across the cavern.
The moss was damp, the air cool, but he found their tent and folded down with her in his arms. Once they were supine, he reached for the light blanket and covered them.
His arm snaked around her waist, careful of the bruises, her goddamned hero brand, gathering her against his body.
For once, he didn’t fight the need to keep her close.
He let it take him under, sleeping with her curled against him, the rhythm of her breaths syncing with his own.
She burrowed into him, and the skin-to-skin contact made him groan softly, shiver with all that sweetness against him.
He woke on his back, the cave dim with early light, her small body sprawled across him like she owned every inch of his real estate.
One thigh was tucked high between his legs, pressing into sensitive territory that had his cock twitching before his brain caught up.
An arm was draped across his ribs, her hand splayed possessively against his side.
Her fiery hair was everywhere, across his throat, tickling his nose, sliding over his chest like strands of silk and flame.
She breathed evenly, but even in sleep she was chaos, taking up all the space, tangling them together in ways that made it impossible.
He lifted a hand, tracing the curve of her arm, the fine skin soft against his callused fingertips.
She was warm, impossibly warm, pressed against him in all the ways that drove him crazy, breast to chest, thigh to groin, her breath damp against his skin.
Every nerve in his body was alive with her, and it was sensory overload in the best possible way. He wanted to laugh at how thoroughly she’d conquered him without even knowing it. Instead he just lay there, memorizing the weight and heat of her, the steady rhythm of her breath.
His missions weren’t normally this…crazy. But then again, none of them had ever started with a pint-sized redhead zooming out of the jungle and into his arms like she belonged there.
Ops lately had tangled with women, Nora, Cameron, Astraea, Maddie, Sadie, and Quinn. His brothers had gotten caught up in them, lives woven together with the kind of intensity that couldn’t be shrugged off when the mission ended. But those had been their problems. Their complications . Not his.
Emily was different.
Diminutive, opinionated, mouthy, contrary, sexy as hell and sprawled across him now like she had staked a claim on his body in the middle of the night.
She drove him out of his comfort zone, shoved him into places where discipline and control didn’t mean a damn thing.
He thought he was adaptable, that he could handle anything a mission threw at him.
But she wasn’t an ambush or an extraction gone sideways.
She was something else entirely, something he couldn’t strategize his way around.
He shifted slightly, careful not to wake her. The fiery fall of her hair slid across his face, catching in his lashes, tickling his lips. He turned his head just enough to breathe, but not enough to escape that pixie trap, her hair a wild curtain that smelled faintly of moss and citrus and sex.
Christ, she was intoxicating. But in a way that made him want more. Always more.
He rubbed a hand over his chest, over the sudden ache lodged there.
He knew what it took to dig deep, to do the shit that needed to be done.
His parents’ deaths had taught him that.
Toby, sixteen and shattered, had taught him that.
His whole world had collapsed and narrowed down to one priority.
Keep his brother alive, whatever the cost. The ache never eased.
It sure as hell wasn’t easing now. His responsibility for his brother was tied up in his grief and need to hold onto the only family member left, a family member who needed him.
“I’m sorry, Toby,” he whispered, the words torn out of him before he could stop them.
“What?”
The soft voice snapped his eyes open. Emily.
She was awake, her face tilted up toward his, green flecked with gold even in the dim cave light, her hair a fiery tangle across his chest. His breath caught. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, hadn’t meant for her to hear. But here she was, pressed against him, wide-eyed and listening.
For a beat, he couldn’t speak. This hideout oasis, this temporary reprieve from men hunting them through the jungle, had gone a long way toward restoring her. Her skin had lost that gray look of exhaustion, her body warm and alive against his.
Her mouth was soft, the curve of her jaw delicate, those goddamned freckles dotting her sweet face like a sensual goad. Now, awake and watching him, she looked more than pretty. She looked beautiful.
He was lost, because all he wanted was to kiss her again, hard, hungry, like he had in the pool, when what he should be doing was remembering he was on an op, not a date.
He was losing perspective, and he knew it.
She was a zoologist, a civilian caught in the middle of something she couldn’t comprehend, yet lying here draped all over him she felt inevitable.
A woman like Emily could choose anyone she wanted, someone safe, someone steady.
If she was smart, she would look away from him, deployment, Toby, Beast, the endless cycle of missions. His life was impossible.
But he wanted her anyway. Wanted her with a hunger that scared him more than a gun to his head.
Her breathing brushed warm against his chest, steady and soft, grounding him even as it unraveled him. His chest grew tighter, but in a different way now, not grief, not duty, but something gentler, dangerous. And he was sliding into it, slow and unstoppable, desire braided with something deeper.
Insane—that’s what it was. There was no other explanation for how a man could feel so exasperated and still get turned on. Something must be broken in his wiring—serotonin, dopamine—but no chemical was more potent than her.
He wanted to kiss her again, to devour her, to feel her hands in his hair and her tongue tangled with his until he forgot they were hiding in a cave with armed men outside. He wanted to lose himself in her when everything about this mission screamed that it wasn’t supposed to be personal.
But it was. God help him, it was.
She blinked up at him, lashes damp with sleep, and his mouth curved before he could stop it.
She sighed. “You kill me by degrees every time you do that,” she murmured.
That was when he saw it, something metallic glinting faintly near the open flap of her pack, nestled beside her battered laptop and a stack of field notebooks. Cold, sharp-edged, out of place among her warm, tangled presence.
He frowned, stretched out an arm, and picked it up. Light in his hand, but the second his eyes locked on it, recognition slammed through him. His stomach dropped.
A fragment.
Not just any fragment. Drone casing.
Heat prickled the back of his neck. He rolled it in his palm, noting the alloy, the scoring along the edge telling him this had been blown off. No mistaking it. He’d seen too many before.
He held it up. “Where did you find this?”
Emily pushed upright, reaching for a T-shirt and pulling it over her head. Crossing her legs, she plucked it gently from his fingers. “On the bank of the river. Not far from where those guys chased me right into you.” Her green eyes lifted, steady. “What is this?”
“It’s a fragment of what we’ve been looking for.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you that, Em. It’s classified.”