Chapter 43 Maya
MAYA
“Nate.” I sat up straight in my seat, phone in both hands. “Nate, pull over.”
“Again? We’ve only been driving for twenty minutes since the horses.”
“I know, but I need you to look at this and I need you to not be operating a vehicle when you do.”
He glanced at me sideways, something between amusement and concern in his gaze. But he found a shoulder and eased the SUV to a stop. I held the phone in front of his face.
“You can go inside a volcano.”
His eyes shifted to the screen. To me. Back to the screen.
“Like, inside. Like, you take a lift down into an actual magma chamber and you stand inside the Earth, Nate. Check out these photos.” I scrolled through them, tilting my phone toward him. “It’s about forty minutes from here. There’s a tour at eleven.”
“Today?”
“Today.” I was already pulling up the booking page. “Unless you’d rather go to the hotel and nap like a boring person.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“There are two spots left.” My thumb hovered over the button. “Can I book it?”
“Seems to me like you’re already booking it.”
“Oh god. Okay. I’m booking it. Right now.” I tapped confirm before he could answer. A little green checkmark appeared. “Done. Holy fuck, we’re going inside a volcano.”
He shook his head, but the corner of his mouth curved up slowly.
I plugged the address into the GPS and we were back on the road, my leg bouncing the entire way. Nate rested his hand on my knee at one point, maybe to calm me down, maybe to stop the tremor from shaking the whole car. It continued anyway.
Forty minutes later, the GPS announced our arrival. The meeting point was a small parking lot in the middle of a lava field. A wooden hut, a couple other vehicles, and a woman in hiking gear holding a clipboard.
I scanned the lot, then turned to Nate.
“Where’s the volcano?”
He scanned the horizon, hands in his pockets. “I think we’re standing on it.”
“That can’t be right.”
But it was. Our guide, a tall woman named Sigrid, confirmed it with a smile that said she got this reaction a lot. The volcano was beneath us. We just had to walk to the entrance.
The hike took about forty-five minutes across an open lava field. Black rock and green moss and a wind that cut right through every layer I was wearing.
I loved every freezing, windswept second of it.
Nate walked beside me, matching my stride without effort, his cheeks flushed from the cold. My gaze kept drifting to him. The man looked obscenely good in hiking gear. It was becoming a problem.
“You good?” He nudged my shoulder after my third or fourth lingering stare.
“I’m great.” I scrambled over a ridge of rock and he reached down to pull me up the last bit, his palm warm even through both our gloves. I held on for an extra beat. “This is insane. We’re walking to a volcano.”
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“I’m going to keep mentioning it.” I squeezed his fingers and released them. “For the rest of my life, probably.”
The entrance was a narrow opening in the rock, barely wide enough for two people side by side.
Sigrid handed out hard hats and heavy harnesses.
She ran through the safety briefing with the calm efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times.
Only when we were completely strapped in did she lead us to the platform.
It was an open cable lift, basically a metal cage suspended over a hole in the ground. Below us, the shaft dropped straight down into darkness.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
Nate peered over the edge, completely unfazed. Of course he was. The man had jumped out of actual helicopters.
He bumped his shoulder against mine. “You okay?”
“I’m amazing. I’m also terrified. Both things are true.”
He slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me into his side as we stepped onto the platform.
The lift lurched. I let out a breathless, oh fuck, then we began our slow descent. The daylight above us shrank to a pale circle as the rock walls closed in around us.
Down. And down. And down.
The temperature plummeted. The air shifted, turning damp and heavy and ancient. As the rock face faded from dark gray to deep rust, I pressed closer to Nate on pure instinct.
Then the shaft opened up, and the breath stilled in my lungs.
The magma chamber was enormous. A cathedral hollowed out of the earth, stretching so far above and below us that I struggled to make sense of the scale.
The walls were streaked with colors I had no reference for.
Reds that bled into burnt orange, veins of deep blue cutting through bands of gold and violet.
Layers upon layers of mineral deposits painted across the rock like the planet had spent millennia creating something meant to remain hidden forever.
“Oh my god.” My voice came out thin and small against the vastness of it. “Nate.”
He stood beside me, his head tipped back, genuinely lost for words. His lips parted slightly, his eyes tracking everything, absorbing the sheer, impossible scope of where we were standing.
“Yeah,” he said quietly.
The group spread out across the viewing platform, everyone speaking in hushed tones the way people do in places that feel sacred.
Cameras clicked. Someone laughed nervously.
Sigrid gave us space, leaning against the railing with her arms crossed and the satisfied expression of a woman who lived for this moment.
I reached for Nate and laced my fingers through his.
We stood there in the belly of the Earth, the mineral cavern glowing around us, and I committed every second of it to memory.
The cold of the air on my face. The warmth of his hand in mine.
The impossible, breathtaking fact that we were here at all.
“Thank you,” I said. “For saying yes to this.”
He lifted our joined hands and brushed a kiss on my knuckles, a rueful smile in his eyes. “You didn’t exactly give me a choice.”
“And yet here you are. Inside a volcano. Looking impressed.”
“I am impressed.”
“Say it again.”
He laughed, low and warm, and the sound echoed off the chamber walls and came back to us in a soft echo that made my chest ache in the best possible way.
* * *
The adrenaline from the volcano had shifted, settling lower, turning into a hum beneath my skin. Every point of contact between me and Nate burned like a live wire. His hand on the gearshift. His thigh inches from mine. The way his forearm flexed when he turned the wheel.
I’d been fine all day. Buzzing, excited, running on caffeine and wonder and the sheer high of being in a new country with this man.
But something about the ascent back up from the magma chamber, rising out of the earth into the cold gray daylight, had flipped a switch.
The adrenaline needed somewhere to go and my body had decided exactly where to redirect it.
I shifted in my seat. Crossed my legs. Uncrossed them.
Nate glanced over. “You’re fidgeting.”
“I’m not fidgeting.”
“You’ve changed position four times in the last two minutes.”
“Maybe the seat’s uncomfortable.”
“It’s the same seat you’ve been in all day.”
I looked at him. He looked at the road. But the corner of his jaw tightened, just slightly, and his grip on the steering wheel shifted.
He knew. He absolutely knew.
My hand found his thigh. Higher than usual, my fingers pressing into the solid muscle through his jeans, and I reveled in the quiet catch of his breath.
“Maya.”
“Mmm?”
“How far is the hotel?”
I checked the GPS. “Twelve minutes.”
His foot pressed a little more on the accelerator.
The music played. The landscape blurred past. My hand stayed on his leg and his knuckles stayed white on the wheel. The air inside the car grew so thick with what was coming that I could barely breathe through it.
He pulled into the hotel parking lot and killed the engine. We collected our bags from the trunk in silence and headed into the hotel lobby.
Nate handled the three-minute check-in process with a calm I found personally offensive.
He leaned one elbow on the counter and made polite conversation with the clerk while I stood behind him, vibrating at a frequency that could have shattered glass.
She handed over the key card, gave us directions to the room that I immediately forgot, and wished us a pleasant stay.
Nate thanked her. Picked up our bags. Walked toward the elevators like a man with nowhere to be and all day to get there.
But the second the elevator doors closed, the bags hit the floor.
His hands were on my waist, spinning me, pressing me back against the wall. His mouth found mine. The kiss was hard and open and so hungry that a helpless, raw sound tore from my throat. His fingers dug into my hips, pulling me flush against him. Fuck, he was so hard and ready.
I grabbed the front of his jacket and dragged him closer. His thigh pressed between my legs and my head fell back. The look in his eyes when he pulled back to breathe was dark and raw and absolutely wrecked.
Just as he was sliding his hand under my sweater, the doors opened on our floor. He stared at me for a beat, chest heaving, then picked up the bags and walked down the corridor. I followed on shaky legs.
The door barely closed behind us before his mouth was on mine again. My jacket hit the floor, then his, and we stumbled through the entrance hall tearing at each other’s clothes.
He grabbed my shirt and hauled it over my head, along with the thermal underneath.
I hooked his belt, yanked it free, and popped the button of his jeans while his fingers unclasped my bra.
The cold air hit my bare skin for half a second before his hands replaced it, warm and rough, palms dragging over my breasts.
I arched into him with a moan that echoed through the suite.
“God, I’ve been thinking about this since the volcano,” I gasped against his mouth.
“Since the volcano?” His teeth grazed my earlobe. “I’ve been thinking about this since the horses.”