8. Banks
BANKS
The words leave my mouth and I don't recognize the sound. Too low. Too raw. Something scraped out from underneath the bedrock I built over myself a long time ago.
Her eyes go wide. Not scared. Something else. Something that makes the oxygen in this cabin thin out until my lungs have to fight for every breath.
She doesn't speak. For the first time since I found her shivering in that cave, Hadley Fence has nothing to say. Her lips part. A tiny sound escapes, barely a breath, and I feel it land against my thumb where it rests on her cheekbone. Warm. Alive. Devastating.
My hand stays where it is. I should pull it back.
I should roll away, put room between us, remind myself of the seven SAR protocols I've already violated tonight.
I should think about the men on the other side of that ravine.
The wound in my side that burns every time I breathe.
The fact that my radio is dead and no one knows where we are.
I don't move.
Her skin is impossibly soft under my calluses.
The contrast is obscene. My hands are scarred and rough and built for breaking things.
Rope. Ice. The scout's radio back in the cave.
Her cheekbone feels like something that belongs behind glass in a museum.
My thumb traces it again and the firelight reflects in her eyes.
I think about how a man can survive eleven Alaskan winters and a bullet wound and hypothermia and a bridge collapse and still die in a cabin from the way a woman looks at him.
She shifts. Just barely. The fur slides against her bare shoulder and I catch a flash of collarbone in the warm light.
The pink streak in her hair falls across her forehead.
Under the furs, her body is pressed against mine, hip to bosom, and the heat between us has nothing to do with survival protocol anymore.
I know what's about to happen. I can read it in the tension of her jaw, the slight forward tilt of her chin, the way her breathing has gone shallow and fast. I've tracked elk through whiteout blizzards. I've read boot prints in frozen mud from two hundred yards. I can read her body like terrain.
She's going to kiss me.
The professional in me, the part that has kept people alive for eleven years on these mountains, that part says stop.
Says this is shock and adrenaline and the bonding response of shared trauma.
Says she's a twenty-five-year-old influencer from Brooklyn who will forget my name in six weeks.
Says I am her rescuer and she is my responsibility and this line exists for a reason.
That part of me dies when she closes the final inch.
Her lips hit mine and every system in my body goes offline.
Just shuts down. No more tactical assessment.
No more perimeter evaluation. No more calculating wind chill and blood loss and time until dawn.
There is only her mouth, soft and warm and tasting like the cheap instant coffee from the survival kit she made us drink an hour ago, and the sound she makes against my lips.
A sound like she's been holding her breath for twenty-five years and finally, finally exhaled.
A groan rips out of me. Low and guttural and foreign.
I don't groan. I don't make sounds. I am silent on the mountain, silent in the field, silent in every part of my life because noise is weakness and weakness gets people killed.
But her lips move against mine and my hand slides from her cheekbone into her hair and I groan like she's pulling it out of me by the roots.
She presses closer. Her bare body against mine, the bandage on my ribs catching between us, and it is white-hot and I do not care.
Her fingers climb my neck, nails dragging across the tendons, and my skin erupts in something I have no word for.
Not heat. Not cold. Something electric and primal that starts at my head and rips straight down my spine.
I kiss her back and there is nothing gentle about it.
My hand fists in her hair. The pink strand wraps around my knuckle.
I tilt her head back and take her mouth deeper, harder, and she opens for me like she's been waiting for exactly this kind of ruin.
My tongue finds hers and she gasps into my mouth and my free arm locks around her lower back and hauls her against me so tight I can feel her heartbeat hammering against my sternum. Fast. Frantic. Matching mine.
This is a mistake. This is a catastrophic, career-ending, protocol-shattering mistake and I do not stop.
I cannot stop. Eleven years of iron discipline and stone walls and sleeping alone in frozen outposts and never letting anyone close enough to reach the thing I buried after Denali.
She reaches it in one kiss. Blows past every defense I built.
Walks right through them like they were made of smoke.
Her back arches under my arm. Her hips shift against me and the fur slips lower and the firelight paints her bare shoulder gold and I pull back just enough to look at her. Flushed. Breathless. Lips swollen. Brown eyes black in the dim light.
I should say something. I should tell her we need to stop.
My grip tightens in her hair.
"Banks."
My name in her mouth. Not a question. A surrender.
I pull her underneath me in one fluid motion and the furs shift around us, cocooning us in heat and firelight and the smell of old cedar and wood smoke.
My wound screams. I ignore it. Pain is information and right now the only information that matters is the way her thighs part to let me settle between them, the way her hands flatten against me and then grip, fingernails biting into the muscle like she's afraid I'll disappear.
I'm not going anywhere.
Her skin. God, her skin. I drag my mouth from her lips down the line of her jaw and she tilts her head back and I find the soft hollow of her throat where her pulse is jackhammering. I press my lips there. Hold them there. Count the beats. Fast. Alive. Mine.
The possessiveness of the thought should scare me. It doesn't.
I brace myself on one forearm, keeping my weight off her because I am twice her size and I will crush her if I'm not careful.
She doesn't seem to want careful. Her hips lift against me and the contact sends a jolt through my entire nervous system.
Raw. Blinding. I drop my forehead against her collarbone and breathe hard through my nose.
"Slow down," I tell her. My voice doesn't sound like me. Wrecked. Scraped raw.
"No."
I almost laugh. Almost. Instead I lift my head and look at her.
She’s staring up at me with zero fear. Zero hesitation.
This woman saw a man get executed today.
Ran through a blizzard. Crossed a disintegrating ice bridge over a two-hundred-foot drop.
Packed a gunshot wound with shaking hands and didn't flinch.
She is soft and ridiculous and braver than half the operators I've worked with.
I kiss her again. Slow this time. Deliberate.
I map her mouth like terrain I need to memorize for the return trip.
She whimpers and her fingers slide up from my shoulders into my hair and she holds on.
I let her. I let her hold on as tight as she needs because that's the whole point.
That's what I'm here for now. Not the extraction. Not the rescue. This.
My hand traces down her side. Ribs. The dip of her waist. The flare of her hip.
I consider every ridge and valley of her body with the same precision I use to navigate a ridgeline in zero visibility.
She shivers under my palm and it's not from the cold.
The cabin is warm now. The woodstove is throwing heat and the furs are heavy and between us there is enough thermal energy to melt the permafrost.
I find the curve of her hip bone and grip. She arches off the mattress. Her stomach presses against mine and the bandage shifts and pain lances through my side. I’m not concerned about anything except the sound she just made.
"Look at me."
She does. Instantly. That same blind, devastating trust she gave me in the cave. The thing that rewired my entire brain.
I hold her gaze while my hand slides lower. Her breath catches. Stops. Her fingers tighten in my hair until it hurts. I gaze at her face the entire time because I need to see everything. Every reaction. Every flicker across those expressive eyes.
When I touch her she makes a sound that guts me. Not a moan. Something deeper.
I work her slow. Patient. Reading her body the way I read weather systems. Pressure building.
Heat rising. The small, desperate shifts of her hips telling me exactly where and how much.
She is not quiet. She is the opposite of quiet.
She fills the silence of this cabin with sounds I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
"I've got you." The words come out rough against her ear. "I've got you."
Her back bows. Her nails rake down my shoulders and it is different from the wound in my side. This pain I want. This pain I need. She buries her face in my neck and breathes my name against my throat and I feel it vibrate through my entire body.
She comes apart under me. The whole cabin narrows to this. Her body shaking against mine, her fingers gripping my shoulders hard enough to bruise, the way she goes completely silent for three seconds and then gasps like breaking the surface of water.
I hold her through it. Both arms locked around her. Face pressed into her hair that smells like snow and smoke and something sweet underneath. Something distinctly her.
She is still trembling when she pulls my face back to hers. Kisses me hard. Her hands slide down my stomach, careful around the bandage, and lower. Her fingers wrap around me and my vision blanks.
I press my forehead against hers.
"Hadley."
"I know." She guides me forward. "I know."