Chapter 10
CHLOE
We stayed like that for a long time.
My arms around him, his face buried in my hair, the rain drumming on the roof in a rhythm that felt like the world’s heartbeat slowing down to match ours.
I could feel the tension leaving his body in stages, like layers of armor being removed one piece at a time.
First his shoulders loosened. Then his jaw.
Then his hands, which had been gripping the back of my shirt like I might disappear, gradually relaxed until they were just resting against my spine, heavy and warm and trusting.
I didn’t let go. I held him the way you hold something precious that’s been through a storm, carefully, completely, with the understanding that the holding itself is the point.
Eventually he pulled back. Not far. Just enough to look at me.
His eyes were red-rimmed and raw, the traces of tears still visible on his cheeks, but something in his expression had changed.
The weight was still there. It would always be there.
But it had shifted, redistributed, like a load that had been carried on one shoulder for years had finally been balanced across two.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked, my hands still on his shoulders.
He was quiet for a moment. Considering the question the way he considered everything, with the careful attention of a man who didn’t waste words.
“It feels lighter,” he said. His voice was rough. Raw from the crying and the talking and the years of silence that had finally been broken. “Like I can breathe.”
I smiled at him. Not the big smile, not the one I used on the world. The one that was just his. The one that existed only in the small, private space between us where I didn’t have to be sunshine for anyone.
“So can I kiss you again?” I said.
His eyes darkened. A muscle twitched in his jaw, and I watched the war play out across his face in real time, the part of him that wanted to pull back, to rebuild, to put the walls up again, fighting against the part that had spent the last hour tearing them down.
“You’ll do it even if I complain,” he said.
“No.” I shook my head, my hands sliding from his shoulders to his jaw, holding his face the way I’d held it when I wiped his tears.
“I want you to be willing. I want you to want this. Not because I pushed. Not because the moment was heavy and we got swept up in it. I want you to look at me and choose this.”
He looked at me. The green of his eyes was deep and dark in the cabin’s low light, and I could see the exact moment the war ended. Not a surrender. A decision. He reached up, took my face in both hands, rough palms and calloused fingers against my cheeks, and kissed me.
This kiss was nothing like the soft, careful press of lips I’d given him minutes ago.
This was a man who had just emptied himself of every secret he’d carried and found that what was left, underneath the grief and the guilt and the years of silence, was want.
Raw and honest and terrifying want that he was done running from.
His mouth moved against mine with a hunger that stole my breath.
His hands slid from my face into my hair, fingers tangling in the still-damp strands, tilting my head to deepen the angle.
His tongue traced the seam of my lips and I opened for him immediately, a sound escaping my throat that was half sigh, half surrender.
He tasted like black coffee, dark and warm and faintly bitter, and the contrast with the sweetness of his tenderness seconds ago sent heat flooding through my body so fast it made me dizzy.
I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him closer.
He responded by lifting me off my knees and onto his lap in one smooth motion, and the sudden contact, my thighs straddling his, his hands gripping my waist, his chest solid and warm against mine through the thin flannel, made us both go still for one beat. Two.
Then we weren’t still at all.
His mouth found my neck. He kissed the hollow below my ear, the line of my jaw, the sensitive place where my neck met my shoulder, and each point of contact sent a cascade of sparks through me that gathered low in my belly and pulsed.
I gripped his shoulders, feeling the muscles bunch under my hands, and tipped my head back to give him more room.
“Bedroom,” I breathed.
He didn’t need to be told twice.
He stood with me in his arms like I weighed nothing at all, my legs locked around his waist, my arms around his neck.
He carried me across the cabin in four strides, his mouth never leaving mine, and when my back hit the bed, the cool sheets pressing against my heated skin through the flannel, the sudden change made me gasp.
He stood over me, breathing hard. His hair was disheveled where my hands had been, his shirt pulled loose, his eyes tracking over my body with a hunger that was almost reverent.
Like I was something he’d been starving for and had denied himself for so long that the sight of me laid out on his bed was almost more than he could process.
“Tell me to stop,” he said. His voice was low and raw and shaking with the effort of offering an exit he clearly did not want me to take. “Tell me to stop and I will.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
I reached for the buttons on the flannel shirt.
His shirt. The one he’d given me when I was soaked from the rain.
I undid them slowly, one by one, holding his gaze as each button gave way and the fabric parted.
I wasn’t wearing anything beneath it. I watched the realization hit him.
His jaw clenched. His hands curled into fists at his sides.
The sound that came from his chest was something between a groan and a growl, rough and involuntary, like something primal had been let off its leash.
I let the shirt fall open. His eyes traveled the line of my collarbone, the curve of my breasts, the flat plane of my stomach, and I could feel his gaze like a physical touch, warm and heavy and hungry. It made me feel powerful and vulnerable and wanted in a way that reached deeper than skin.
“Come here,” I whispered.
He pulled his shirt over his head in one motion.
The sight of him stole the air from my lungs.
He was built like the mountains that surrounded this town, broad and strong and carved by something primal.
His chest was wide, his shoulders thick with muscle, and scars marked his skin in pale, raised lines, souvenirs of a life that had been harder than anyone deserved.
I reached for him, my fingers tracing a scar that ran across his ribs.
He shuddered at the contact, a full-body tremor that told me no one had touched him like this in a very long time.
He lowered himself over me and the full-body press of his skin on my skin was so overwhelming that I arched into him involuntarily, my back bowing, my breath catching. He was warm. So warm. And solid in a way that made me feel held and surrounded and consumed all at once.
His mouth found my throat. He kissed a path from the hollow below my chin to the spot behind my ear, slow and deliberate, each one placed with the precision of a man who did everything with his hands and did it well.
His lips moved to my collarbone, my shoulder, the swell of my breast. When his mouth closed over my nipple, I cried out, my fingers digging into his back, and felt his answering groan vibrate against my skin.
He didn’t rush. He worshipped. He kissed every inch of skin he uncovered, his calloused hands sliding the borrowed sweatpants down my legs with a patience that was devastating.
His palms traveled the length of my thighs, rough against smooth, and the contrast sent sparks racing along every nerve I had.
He kissed my hip. The inside of my knee.
The arch of my foot, which made me gasp and then laugh, and his mouth curved against my skin in something that might have been a smile.
He worked his way back up. When he settled between my thighs, his breath hot against my most sensitive skin, I trembled. He looked up at me, those green eyes dark and burning, and held my gaze as his mouth found me.
The first touch of his tongue pulled a sound from me that I didn’t recognize.
He was slow at first, learning me the way he learned everything, with thorough, focused attention, reading my body’s responses and adjusting with a precision that was maddening.
When he found the rhythm I needed, my hands fisted in the sheets and my hips lifted off the bed.
He pressed one arm across my stomach to hold me there, his mouth relentless and sure.
The pleasure built in waves, each one higher than the last. His fingers joined his mouth, one sliding inside me, then two, curling against a spot that made stars explode behind my eyelids. The sound I made was something between a scream and a sob.
“Let go,” he said against me, and the vibration of his voice was the final push.
I shattered. The orgasm crashed through my body in rolling, pulsing contractions that made my back arch off the bed and my thighs clamp around his head.
He held me through it, his mouth gentle now, easing me down with soft, slow strokes that drew out every last tremor until I was boneless and gasping and blinking at the ceiling of his cabin like I’d forgotten what planet I was on.
He kissed his way back up my body. My stomach, my ribs, the valley between my breasts, my throat.
When his face was above mine, I pulled him down and kissed him hard, tasting myself on his lips, and the intimacy of it sent a fresh surge of heat through me that had no business existing after what had just happened.
“Your turn,” I said against his mouth, and pushed him onto his back.