Chapter 9
Bianca
We stand on the porch with his forehead against mine until the light changes.
The sun drops behind the ridge and the temperature follows, and neither of us has moved, and I don't care.
His hands are still on my face, and my hands are still wrapped around his wrists, and I can feel every callus, every scar, every rough edge of a man who has built his entire world out of things that can't leave him.
I don't want to leave him.
The thought is so clear it startles me. Not the wanting.
I've been wanting for weeks, lying awake with his name in my mouth, aching in places I'd closed off, I'd forgotten they were there.
But the clarity of it. The absolute, bone-deep certainty that this scarred, shaking man with his hands on my face is the safest place I've ever stood.
"Come inside," he says. Low. An offering.
"Yes."
He drops one hand from my face and takes my hand instead, and my throat tightens at the simplicity of it. He leads me through the cabin door, and Chief lifts his head from his bed and watches us pass, and sets his chin back down with a sigh that sounds, absurdly, like satisfaction.
The cabin is warm from the wood stove. The light is amber and low, and the only sounds are the fire and the wind outside and the blood in my ears.
Rhett stops in the middle of the room. Turns to face me. His hand is still holding mine, and his eyes are dark and open, and I can see the war in them. The part of him that wants this fighting the part of him that thinks he doesn't deserve it.
I step closer. Close enough that my chest is almost touching his. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back to look at him, and the height difference sends a slow heat pooling at the base of my spine.
"Rhett."
"Yeah."
"Stop thinking."
Something shifts in his face. The war quiets. Not gone, but paused. He looks at me the way he's been trying not to look at me since the clinic doorway, and this time he doesn't shut it down.
He kisses me.
Not carefully. His mouth covers mine and his hand comes to the back of my neck and he pulls me in, and the sound I make against his lips is something between a gasp and a sob because I have been waiting for this, waiting without letting myself know I was waiting, and the reality of his mouth on mine buckles something in my knees.
He tastes of coffee. He smells of wood-smoke and cold air and something underneath that's just him. His other hand finds my waist, and his fingers press into the curve of my hip, and I feel every single one of them through the thin fabric of my scrubs. Five points of pressure. Five points of heat.
I open my mouth and he groans.
The sound goes through me like a current.
Low, rough, pulled from somewhere deep in his chest. His tongue finds mine, and the kiss deepens, and my hands are fisting the front of his flannel, pulling him closer, needing him closer, needing the weight and the heat and the solid, undeniable reality of his body against mine.
He walks me backward. Slow. His mouth never leaving mine, his hand never leaving my hip. One step, then another, and I feel the edge of the bed against the backs of my knees, and he stops.
He pulls back. Just far enough to look at me.
"Bianca." His voice is wrecked. Rough and low, and unsteady. "Are you sure?"
I look up at him. His face in the amber light, the scar, the stubble, the dark eyes that have been watching me since the first day I sat at that clinic desk and felt the weight of a stranger's gaze through glass.
"I'm sure," I say. "I've been sure."
He exhales. A long, shaking breath. And then his hands go to the hem of my scrub top and he lifts it over my head, slow and deliberate, unhurried the way he is with anything that matters.
The air hits my bare skin and I shiver, and his eyes drop to my body and his expression is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.
Reverence. He's looking at the curve of my waist, the fullness of my breasts in a plain cotton bra, the soft swell of my stomach, and the look on his face says he can't believe he's allowed.
"Jesus," he breathes. His hand comes to my ribs. Traces the curve. His thumb sweeps the underside of my breast, and I arch into the touch. "Look at you."
My instinct is to cover myself. To cross my arms and deflect and say something self-deprecating about the body I've never been comfortable in, the one that's too soft and too round and too much.
I don't.
I reach behind my back and unhook my bra, and let it fall.
His eyes close for a second. When they open, they're darker than I've ever seen them, and the restraint in his jaw is costing him.
"Come here," I whisper.
He comes.
His mouth finds my neck first. The hollow beneath my ear.
He kisses me there, open-mouthed, and his stubble scrapes against my skin, and the sensation is so sharp and so good that my head falls back and a moan spills out of me that I don't muffle.
His hands cup my breasts, both of them, and the rough drag of his calloused palms against my nipples makes my entire body go taut.
"Rhett." His name comes out broken. Breathless.
"I've got you," he murmurs against my throat. "I've got you, sweetheart."
The word undoes me. Sweetheart. Said rough and low with his mouth on my skin, and I realize I'm crying and I don't care.
I pull at his flannel and he lets me push it off his shoulders, and I see the tattoos up close for the first time.
Dark ink covers his left arm, climbing his shoulder, trailing up to his neck.
Underneath them, scars. Some thin and surgical.
Some rougher. The map of what happened to him written on his skin in a language I can read.
I press my mouth to the worst one. A raised, jagged line on his shoulder where something tore through muscle and healed wrong. He goes still under my lips.
"Bianca—"
"Shh." I kiss the next one. A puckered circle on his ribs that I know without asking is a bullet wound. I press my lips to it and hold them there, and I feel his chest heave under my mouth.
He lets me. This man, who won't let anyone close enough to see the damage, who has spent four years behind a wall so thick that even the people who love him can't get through.
He stands in the amber light of his cabin and lets me put my mouth on his scars, and when I look up at him, his eyes are wet.
His chest is broad and hard and covered in more ink, more scars, and I put my hands flat against his skin and feel his heart slamming under my palms.
"Lie down with me," I say.
We lower ourselves onto the bed together.
Carefully, because his leg makes careful necessary, and I don't rush him.
He settles on his back and pulls me over him, and I straddle his hips, and the feeling of him between my thighs, hard and pressing up through the layers between us, makes my breath stutter.
He watches me. Both hands on my hips, fingers pressing into the flesh, and the look on his face is so open, so unguarded, that I feel like I'm seeing someone no one else has seen in years.
"You're beautiful," he says. Raw. No decoration.
"Rhett—"
"You are." His hands slide up my sides. Over my ribs. Back to my breasts, thumbing my nipples until I'm rocking against him involuntarily, chasing the friction. "Every part of you. Don't argue with me."
I don't argue.
I lean down and kiss him, and we work the rest of our clothes off between us, tangled and graceless and laughing once when my scrub pants catch on my ankle, and the laughter cracks the last wall open.
Because this isn't a performance. This is real and messy, and his bad leg keeps him from moving the way he wants, and I have to help him shift his weight, and none of it is smooth, and all of it is perfect.
When we're bare, he rolls me under him, taking his weight on his right side, his left leg braced. He's above me and I can feel the full length of his body against mine, skin to skin, and the heat of him is staggering.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him.
His hand slides between us. Down my stomach. Between my thighs. When his fingers find me, I'm so wet that the sound his touch makes in the quiet cabin is obscene, and my cheeks flush and his eyes go black.
"Christ," he breathes. "You're soaked."
"I've been—" I gasp as his fingers circle my clit, slow and firm and devastatingly precise. "I've been thinking about this. About you. For weeks."
His jaw tightens. His fingers slide lower, two pressing inside me, and the stretch of his thick, calloused fingers makes my back arch and my hands grip his shoulders.
"Tell me," he says against my mouth. "Tell me what you thought about."
"Your hands." I'm panting. His fingers curl inside me and the heel of his palm grinds against my clit, and the pleasure is so sharp I can barely form words. "Your hands on me. Your voice. The way you—oh—"
He swallows the sound with a kiss. Deep and consuming, and his fingers don't stop, working me with that focused patience, reading my body like he reads the grain of wood before he splits it.
Learning what makes me gasp. What makes me shake.
What makes my thighs clamp around his hand and my voice break on his name.
I'm close. He can feel it. He pulls his fingers out, and I make a sound of protest that he catches with his mouth.
"I need to be inside you," he says. Not asking. Telling. And the rawness of it sends heat flooding through every nerve I have.
"Yes. Please. Now."
He reaches for the nightstand. I hear the tear of foil. He rolls the condom on, and I watch his hands. None of the nights I spent imagining this prepared me for the way it feels to have him settle between my thighs and press against me.
He pushes in slowly.
The stretch is overwhelming. He's thick, the angle is deep, and my body opens for him in a way that makes us both groan. He sinks in inch by inch, watching my face the whole time, and when he's seated, he drops his forehead to mine and holds still.
"You okay?" Rough. Shaking.
I nod. "Don't stop."
He moves.
Slow at first. Long, deep strokes that I feel in my spine.
His hand grips my hip, angling me up, and the change in position drags the head of his cock against the spot inside me that makes my vision blur.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and the sound he makes against my neck is animal and desperate, and beautiful.
"Bianca." My name in his mouth. Rough and broken. "You feel—God. You feel—"
He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. I can feel what he means in the way his body trembles against mine, in the grip of his hand on my hip, in the way he keeps his forehead against mine and his eyes on mine and doesn't look away.
Neither do I.
We stay like that. Eye to eye. Skin to skin. Moving together in a rhythm that builds and builds, and every thrust pushes me closer to the edge, and every time his eyes find mine, the intimacy is almost more than I can bear. This isn't hiding. This is just me. Bare and open and seen.
His pace changes. Faster. Harder. His hand slides between us, and his thumb finds my clit and presses, and the combination of his cock inside me and his thumb circling tight is too much.
The pleasure crests and I shatter, clenching hard around him, and I say his name with my whole voice.
Not quietly. Not carefully. I say it the way I mean it.
He follows. Two more strokes, deep and shuddering, and he breaks against me with a groan that I feel in my soul. His face presses into my neck and his whole body shakes, and I hold him through it. Both arms around his back. My fingers in his hair.
He's not alone.
Neither am I.
We don't talk for a long time.
We don't need to. He's on his back, and I'm tucked against his right side with my head on his chest and my hand over his heart, and the cabin is dark except for the glow of the woodstove, and the room smells like us.
Sweat and skin and wood-smoke and something new that didn't exist in this cabin before tonight.
His fingers trace lazy patterns on my shoulder. Slow. Absent.
"Stay," he says. Quiet.
Not do you want to stay or can you stay. Just the word.
"Okay," I say.
He pulls me closer. Presses his mouth to my hair.
The bed shifts. A heavy, warm weight settles at our feet, and I hear the familiar sound of Chief circling once, twice, and lying down.
Rhett's heartbeat is steady under my ear.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.