Chapter 26 Maya
MAYA
The inside of Fogarty’s Hut was dark and smelled like old wood and dust, and it was the most beautiful place I’d ever been, I swear.
Nate set me down on the sofa like I was made of glass.
“Don’t move.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He was already across the room, crouching in front of the potbelly stove. Kindling, bark, the scratch of a match. The flame caught on straight away, and within a minute, the first flickers of warmth pushed into the room.
He grabbed the medical kit from the shelf and came back to me.
“Let’s look at this ankle.”
His hands were steady now as he worked the laces of my boot carefully, loosening them enough to start sliding it off.
I let out a hiss of pain. “Fuck.”
“Sorry.” Low, focused.
“It’s fine. Just do it.”
He did. My ankle was swollen and already darkening. His fingers probed the joint, pressing lightly along the bone, rotating it with a care that was almost clinical.
Almost. Except for the muscle ticking in his jaw.
“Not broken, but it’s a solid sprain. You’re going to be off it for a while.”
“Define ‘a while.’”
“Longer than you’re going to like.”
He pulled a compression bandage from the kit and strapped my ankle with the quiet efficiency of someone who’d done it a hundred times before.
“There.” He tucked the end of the bandage in and sat back. “Keep it elevated as much as you can.”
“Yes, Captain.”
His eyes flicked to mine. Something passed through them, quick and unreadable, before he looked away. “We need to get out of these wet clothes.”
The words shimmered between us for a beat.
“Right,” I said. Very casually. Very normal. As if the last time we’d been in a state of undress together, I hadn’t been grinding in his lap at the bottom of a waterfall. “Good idea. You first, then you can help me.”
He flicked me a look, but then stood and peeled his soaked shirt over his head in one motion.
I stared. Shamelessly. My body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder, but if my ribs were going to throb anyway, I might as well get a front-row seat to the best show on Earth. A girl could have a near-death experience and still appreciate the view, right?
He kicked off his boots and stripped his jeans without ceremony, hanging them over the back of one of the wooden chairs and dragging it closer to the stove.
Standing there in nothing but his boxers, he turned back to me.
The firelight caught the hard planes of his chest, the flat stretch of his stomach, the corded muscles of his thighs.
My mouth went dry.
He ignored my blatant staring. Crossing back to the sofa, he crouched beside me, all business.
“Your turn. Can you manage your shirt?”
“I think so.” I sat up and reached for the hem, but the moment I tried to lift my arms, my ribs screamed. The sound that came out of me was involuntary, a sharp gasp that locked me in place, hunched forward with my hands fisted in the wet fabric.
“Easy.” He was right there, his voice low. “Let me.”
His fingers started at the top button. Steady, methodical, working his way down. One button. Two. Three. The shirt parted as he went, and cool air hit the strip of bare skin between the open edges. As the shirt parted, his eyes stayed fixed on his hands, on the buttons, on the task.
“You can look.”
“Maya.” His voice was a low, growly warning. Even through the haze of pain, the rumble settled deep in my core.
“What? You bet your ass I looked at you.” I offered a breathless, lopsided smile. “Consider it a distraction technique. Medicinal purposes only.”
Without a word, he eased the shirt off my shoulders and down my arms, careful not to jar my ribs and dropped it on the floor.
Which left me in my bra and my work pants. Soaked through, both of them.
“Pants are going to be the problem,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Yeah.” He reached straight for the button at my waist. “Lift your hips for me.”
So clinical. So matter-of-fact. He was trying so hard, bless him.
I braced my hands on the sofa and lifted. He worked the wet fabric down over my hips, over the bandaged ankle, and hung them with his on the chair by the stove.
Then he grabbed a wool blanket from the shelf and wrapped it around my shoulders, tucking the edges in at my collarbone. His fingers grazed the hollow of my throat. Featherlight. Barely there. And it sent a shiver through me that had absolutely nothing to do with being cold.
His eyes dropped to where his fingers rested against my skin, and for one suspended second, neither of us breathed.
Then he pulled back.
“I’ll make soup.”
“Sounds good.”
I dropped my head back against the sofa, listening to Nate moving around the kitchen nook.
The clink of a tin can, the scrape of a pot on the stove.
I probably should have been appreciating the domesticity of this big, tough man making me a meal in nothing but his boxer briefs.
But the adrenaline was finally bleeding out of my system, leaving a massive, gaping void behind.
Fuck, I was freezing. The cold lived under the skin, deep in the muscles, impervious to blankets and firelight. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t make them stop.
“Soup’s up.”
I opened my eyes to see Nate standing over me, two steaming mugs of soup in his hands.
“Easy,” he said when I winced my way to sitting. He set both mugs on the floor, helped me upright, handed me one of the mugs and sat down beside me. Then he lifted my feet and laid them across his lap.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Keep it elevated,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Right. Thanks.”
We drank in silence, the storm raging outside while the quiet held inside, and when my mug was empty, I kept my fingers wrapped around it, leeching the last of the warmth.
The lightning came first. In my head. A bright, searing flash behind my eyes, and suddenly I was back on the track.
The crack of the bolt splitting the oak.
The electric taste of the air. The tree swinging down, impossibly fast, catching the front of the quad.
Then the world flipping, my body weightless, the ground rushing up with no way to stop it.
Thunder boomed overhead in real time, and I flinched so hard the mug nearly slipped from my fingers.
The shaking started deep, somewhere in my core, and spread outward until my whole body was trembling. My heart hammered against my bruised ribs and my breath came in shallow, ragged pulls that I couldn’t slow down no matter how hard I tried.
“Hey.” Nate’s voice, low and steady. “Slayer. Look at me.”
I met his gaze, but my vision blurred at the edges and my teeth chattered and something hot was building that I absolutely refused to let become tears.
“I’m fine,” I managed. Such an obvious lie that it didn’t deserve a response and didn’t get one.
He took the mug from my hands, set it on the floor, and pulled me into his lap. Carefully, mindful of my ribs, but with a certainty that didn’t leave room for argument. My head tucked under his chin, his arms wrapped around me, and the blanket came with me, cocooning us both.
“Delayed shock,” he said against my hair. “That’s all this is. It’ll pass.”
“Okay.” My voice was thin. “Good to know.”
“Seen it plenty of times.”
“You give this treatment to all the soldiers when it happens?”
A breath of almost-laughter stirred my hair. “Funny.”
I wound my arm around his neck and let my body unclench, one muscle at a time. His hand moved in slow circles on my back, and gradually the trembling eased to something manageable. The storm raged on outside, but in here, the world shrunk to Nate and wool and firelight.
* * *
“We should sleep.”
I blinked. I’d been drifting, my face still pressed into his neck, my breathing finally steady. “What time is it?”
“Late enough.” He shifted beneath me. “Storm’s not going anywhere tonight, and neither are we. There’s some pain relief medicine in the cabinet.”
“I don’t need—”
“It wasn’t a suggestion.”
“Wow, bossy.”
“Uh-huh.”
He eased me off his lap and stood. The absence of his warmth was immediate and offensive. I pulled the blanket tighter while he grabbed the pain tablets and filled a glass of water. Then he was back by my side, handing both to me.
Lacking the energy to argue, I took them from him. A little spurt of satisfaction flared when his gaze dropped to my bare shoulder as the blanket fell away.
He waited while I swallowed the tablet and drained the glass. I held it out to him, and he took it from my fingers, his eyes steady on mine.
“Good girl.”
The words landed low in my belly, warm and liquid. I opened my mouth, but my voice completely failed me. A definite first.
He turned away before I could recover, dragging the mattress off the bed and dropping it on the floor in front of the stove. He grabbed the pillow, shook it out, then went back to the shelf for a second blanket.
“Come on.” He crouched beside the sofa, one arm out. “Let’s get you down there.”
“Such romance. A mattress on the floor.”
“You want me to carry you again?”
“Obviously.”
There was that not-quite-laugh I was starting to adore. He scooped me up, settling me onto the mattress easily. The fire was close enough that the heat reached me through the blanket, and when he lay down beside me and pulled the second blanket over us both, I let out a deep sigh of satisfaction.
He arranged us so that we were facing each other, close enough that our breath mingled, and then he reached down and hooked my injured leg gently over his, taking the weight off my ankle.
The fire crackled and popped. Rain drummed on the roof. His hand settled on my hip, and I let myself sink into the warmth of him.
“Can I tell you something?”
His thumb traced a slow line across my skin. “Yeah.”
“I had the biggest crush on you when I was a teenager.”
The thumb stopped.
“What?”
“Massive. Embarrassing. Wrote-your-name-in-my-journal levels of crush.”
A beat of silence. Then, “You’re making that up.”
I leaned back enough to look at him. The firelight caught the genuine confusion on his face, and I almost laughed. “I’m not making it up.”
“Maya, I was a cranky shit most of the time. I don’t know what there was to have a crush on.”
“Broody,” I corrected. “You were broody. There’s a difference. And fifteen-year-old me thought broody was extremely hot.”
He stared at me like he was wondering if I needed to be committed to a psych ward.
I reached up and smoothed the tip of my finger over his furrowed brow. “And for the record, twenty-eight-year-old me emphatically agrees.”
“I, uh, I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, it wasn’t just the broodiness.” I tucked my arm back under the blanket and settled against him again.
“You were the only one of Dan’s friends who actually paid attention to me.
Like, genuinely. Whenever you guys were doing stuff, you’d always check to make sure I was keeping up, or that I was okay if things got rough.
Everyone else treated me like Dan’s annoying little sister. You never did.”
He stayed quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was like the words had to travel a long way to get out. “I didn’t know that.”
“I know you didn’t. That was kind of the point. You weren’t doing it to impress anyone.”
His arm tightened around me. The fire shifted, a log settling in a shower of sparks.
“I have another confession.”
“Okay.” There was a hint of caution in his voice now, which was fair.
“I really, really want to bang you. Like, a lot.”
The laugh that came out of him was sudden and real and so warm it vibrated through me. I grinned into his shoulder.
“Okay.”
My breath hitched. I tilted my head up. “You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
He laughed again. “No. Not now.”
“When?”
“As soon as you’re up for it.”
“Oh, but—”
“Maya, I’ve thought of little else but banging you for weeks now. Believe me when I say I’d love nothing more than to do it right now—”
“In that case—”
“No. Because when it happens, I don’t trust myself to be gentle with you.” His voice dropped and his fingers pressed into my hip. “And right now, gentle is all you can handle.”
My brain completely stalled out. The sheer visual of Nate O’Hare losing his iron-clad control, pinning me to a mattress and wrecking me in the best possible way, sent a wicked flash of heat through me.
The painkillers were definitely starting to fuzz the edges of my mind, but the heavy, delicious ache settling low in my belly was all him.
I swallowed hard, trying to remember how lungs worked.
“Oh.” My voice came out as a breathless squeak. “Well, in that case, I guess I can wait.”
I tilted my face up and kissed him. Soft and slow and full of promise. His hand came up to cup the side of my face, and he kissed me back the same way.
When I pulled back, his eyes were half-closed, firelight flickering in them.
He pressed his lips to my forehead, letting them linger there, and then tucked my head against his shoulder.
“Sleep, Slayer.”
I closed my eyes. His heartbeat was steady under my ear, his arm warm and heavy around me. I drifted off to the sound of the rain on the roof and the slow, even rhythm of his breathing.