Chapter 14
Donovan
She shifted her hands from my sides to the front of my shirt, gripped the material with both hands, and kissed me like I was the last solid thing in the room.
Her mouth was hot and open against mine, and every part of me wanted to stay right there and not stop.
But her hands were still shaking.
She’d been standing here telling me she’d never been the woman anyone wanted. Her voice had been climbing. Her eyes had been burning. I’d kissed her because it was the only idea I had to bring her back to the present moment.
I slowed the kiss. Eased my lips back but kept my forehead against hers.
“Hey.” I said it low. “You’re okay.”
Her eyes were wet. She blinked and looked at me, trying to read what I thought of her after everything she’d just said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize for that.”
“I’m a mess, Donovan.”
She was. Red-eyed, still in her field clothes.
But we were all always in field clothes out here.
Those were the same clothes she’d been wearing two weeks ago when she’d knelt beside a sedated three-thousand-pound rhino and worked on it with all the calm of someone pouring a cup of coffee.
Steady hands and smooth composure, the inverse of her frazzled self, standing in front of me now.
Both versions were her, and what I hadn’t expected was that the falling-apart version charmed me just as much as the competent one. Even her meltdown had been all in.
“Come here,” I said and pulled her away from the door. She let me steer her toward the edge of the bed. She sat down, put her hands between her knees, and looked at the carpet.
“What if you took a shower?” I said. “Hot water. Ten minutes. You’ll feel better.”
She looked up. “You’re not—”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here when you get out.”
The tension in her face cracked. Just barely.
She stood up and went to the bag by the door, dug around for a minute, then walked into the bathroom and closed the door. The water started a minute later.
I sat on the edge of the bed, put my elbows on my knees, and breathed.
I wanted her. No ambiguity about it. I’d wanted her since the first time those green eyes peered up at me. For the first time in years, I had cursed myself for being on a mission.
But she’d just emptied herself out in front of me. Moving on that would make me someone I wasn’t willing to be. Whatever happened between us happened when she was steady, not when she was shaking.
I heard the water running and the muffled sounds of her moving around in the small bathroom. I sat there and waited and didn’t let myself think about what she looked like in that shower.
She came out fifteen minutes later in spare clothes from the bag I’d grabbed out of the truck. Plain T-shirt two sizes too big, cotton shorts, damp hair, face scrubbed clean. She looked younger without the dust and sunscreen and field grime. She looked lighter.
“Better?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She sat on the bed, cross-legged, and pulled a pillow into her lap. “A lot better. Thank you.”
“Nothing to thank me for.”
I took my turn in the shower. It didn’t take me long to wash off the dirt of the day. When I came back out, she was still on the bed, picking at the edge of the pillowcase. Now that we were each clean, some of the tension seemed to ease on both of us.
“I should off turn my phone. I meant to do it before,” she said. “Alyson won’t stop with the messages.”
“My buddies are similarly vulgar, and besides, who doesn’t appreciate some raunchy humor here and there.”
She retrieved her phone from her bag and unlocked it. The screen lit up with a wall of notifications. Alyson’s name, over and over. Sarah scrolled through them, and her face went through about six shades of red in the span of three seconds.
“Oh God.” She covered her eyes with one hand. “She sent— Donovan, she sent a whole— I can’t even—”
“How bad?”
She shook her head, still scrolling, and I caught a glimpse of the screen over her shoulder. A stick-figure drawing that Alyson had clearly made in a notes app, anatomically creative and labeled with arrows.
The laugh came out before I could catch it. A real one, the kind I hadn’t produced in longer than I could remember.
Sarah’s hand dropped from her face. She looked at me, and for a second, she was mortified.
Then she saw me laughing, and it broke loose in her too.
She started laughing as well, but with her mouth covered by her hands like she was still nervous about whether it was appropriate for her to find it amusing.
“She labeled it,” Sarah managed. “She put arrows.”
“She did. I saw.”
“I’m going to kill her. I’m going to drive back to Ol Pejeta and kill her with my bare hands.”
“She is certainly imaginative.”
She fell sideways onto the bed, laughing into the pillow. Her damp hair spread across the white cover. Her face was flushed, her guard completely down for the first time all night. That was the version of her that was going to be a problem for me.
Fuck…now I was hard.
From a woman laughing into a hotel pillow without trying to be anything other than herself. Sarah, wrecked by her own best friend’s stick-figure pornography, and my body had decided that was the hottest thing it had seen in years.
I didn’t tell her. I shifted my weight and kept my expression level, letting the moment pass without anyone knowing except me.
Damn near everything about this woman turned me on. Whatever she thought I wanted, she was already it. And I didn’t want a single thing about her to be different.
She sat up eventually, wiping her eyes. “I should apologize for her.”
“You already did. Twice.”
“Third time’s the charm.”
“Sarah, you don’t need to keep apologizing for your best friend.”
She went quiet. Picked at the pillowcase again. “She doesn’t have a social filter.”
“I know.”
I stood up and pulled back the covers on the far side of the bed. “Get some sleep. You’ve had a day. I’ll take the floor.”
“Donovan.”
“I’ve slept on concrete in a hundred-and-twenty-degree heat with my body armor as a pillow. A hotel floor with carpet is an upgrade.”
“Get in the bed. Please.”
How was I supposed to tell this woman no when she said please?
I got in on my side.
The bed was a double, which meant there was approximately eighteen inches of neutral territory between us. I stayed on my side. She stayed on hers. I could hear her breathing in the dark after I reached over and turned off the lamp.
We lay there. The air conditioner hummed. I could feel the warmth of her mere inches away, the mattress dipping slightly under both of us, and I kept my hands to myself and my breathing even.
“I’m sorry Alyson is making it seem like I’m just here to jump your bones.” Her voice was low, half into the pillow.
“I wouldn’t have complained.”
The silence after that was long. I didn’t explain it. Didn’t soften it. Let it sit there and be what it was.
She didn’t say anything else. After a while, her breathing evened out and slowed, and I listened to it until I was sure she was asleep.
Then I closed my eyes and let myself go under.
I awoke to fingers on my arm.
Delicate and slow, they traced a line from my elbow to my wrist.
My eyes opened, and I was fully awake between one breath and the next. Operator’s sleep. You never lost it. The room was dark except for a thin line of light under the door. The clock on the nightstand read 2:47.
I could barely make out the dark outline of Sarah. She appeared to be facing me. Her fingers paused their exploration.
“Is this okay?” she whispered.
I let my eyes adjust to the darkness until I could make out more of her features. She appeared much calmer, relaxed even. She’d slept for hours and woken up steadier than before.
That was what mattered. Her once-shaky hands, now steady, reaching out for me.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice rough. “It’s more than okay.”
She moved closer. She slid her hand up my arm to my shoulder, and then she pressed herself against me. Her mouth found mine in the dark.
I kissed her back. Slowly. I kept my hands where they were for as long as I could stand it, letting her set the pace, letting her decide what this was. She pressed closer and traced my jaw with her fingers, and when she deepened the kiss, I let her take it there.
I moved my hands. One to her hip, one to the back of her neck, and when I pulled her flush against me, she made a noise against my mouth that finished whatever was left of my self-control.
She was touching me like she was building courage with every inch, her fingers learning the shape of my shoulders and my chest through the cotton of my shirt. If I moved too fast, that courage would snap, and she’d be back behind the wall I’d seen her build last night.
I wasn’t going to be the reason that wall went back up.
She pulled at the bottom of my T-shirt. I sat up enough to pull it over my head, and her hands were on my bare chest immediately.
Her expression in the thin light was focused.
Intent. She ran her fingers along my collarbone, down my sternum, across my ribs, and I held still and let her take what she wanted.
“Your turn,” I said. Quiet. Giving her the choice.
She sat up and pulled the oversized T-shirt over her head in one motion. No bra underneath. My breath caught, and I didn’t try to hide it.
She was small and bare from the waist up. I made no effort to hide my excitement.
I reached for her. Drew her down against me, skin to skin, and kissed her until we were both breathing hard. Her hips shifted against mine, and I was so fucking hard it hurt. She felt it and rocked against me deliberately. My body let out an involuntary groan.
“I want you to know that I’m on birth control,” she said against my mouth.
“Okay.”
Does that mean—
She pushed at my waistband. I helped her, and then her shorts were gone too and we were naked together in a hotel bed in Nanyuki.
She wrapped her fingers around my cock, and I stopped breathing. Her grip was uncertain for half a second and then it wasn’t, and I had to grab her wrist because I was about thirty seconds from ending this before it started.
“Not yet,” I managed. “Come here.”
I pulled her on top of me. She straddled my hips, her knees on either side of my waist, my hands open on her thighs. She could set the pace. I’d match whatever she gave me.
She looked down at me, and I saw the moment she understood what I was giving her. Her hands braced on my chest. Her hips tilted.
She reached between us and guided me to her entrance, and when she sank down onto me, I uttered something that wasn’t a word.
Tight. Wet. So fucking warm that my hands went to her hips on instinct.
I had to force them to stay loose, not to pull her down harder the way every nerve in my body wanted me to. She took me all the way in and stopped, adjusting, and I could feel her pulse around me.
She started to move. A slow roll of her hips, testing the angle, figuring out what worked. Her eyes fell shut. Her lips parted. She found her rhythm and rode me like she owned me.
I’d had sex. Good, bad, forgettable. None of it compared to this.
She bit her lip when a particular angle made her gasp, and her fingers tightened on my skin when a new sensation hit. I saw something hesitate in her face.
She was about to overthink it.
Fuck no.
I reached up and cradled her face. “Stay with me,” I said. “Here and now.”
She exhaled. Let her head fall back. Let herself stop being careful.
The change was immediate. I let my hands fall back down her body, touching every inch of her I could.
Caressing her breasts, thumbs brushing back and forth over her nipples then gliding my hands down her ribs before grabbing ahold of her hips again.
Her hips moved faster, harder, and I thrust up to meet her, matching her. I had to lock my jaw to keep from flipping her onto her back and driving into her the way I wanted to.
I slid my hand between us and found her clit, and when I touched her there, she jolted and grabbed my wrist.
“Too much?”
“No.” She pressed my hand back down. “Don’t stop.”
I worked her with my thumb while she rode me. Her breath went ragged. Her thighs shook against my hips. She tightened around me in waves, and every time she clenched, I had to grit my teeth against how good she felt. If I came before her, I’d never forgive myself.
“Donovan.”
“I’m right here. Let go.”
Her whole body locked, her back arched, and she bore down on me so hard I saw white. I held her hips and thrust up into her through it. When the last tremor ran through her, I stopped holding back.
Two more thrusts and I was done. I pulled her down onto me and came so hard my hands shook. She collapsed against my chest, both of us breathing hard, both of us spent. I wrapped my arms around her back and held her there.
She’d chosen this. From calm and steady ground.
She’d chosen me.