Chapter Eighty-Three
Isla
Despite the caffeine, I must’ve dozed off after we made plans to fly home, because the next thing I knew, a strong arm was sliding under my head as another wrapped around my waist.
With a measured inhale, Will pulled my back to his chest and tucked my head against his shoulder.
I smiled. “Hi.” How could one man smell so good?
“Intruse.” He kissed my temple. “How are you feeling?”
“Better.” He was right about the coffee and my headache. But I didn’t tell him.
I rolled and put my arms around his neck, nestling in against the exposed skin above his shirt collar as the shadow on his jaw brushed across my forehead.
He smelled incredible everywhere. The soap he used for shampoo in his hair.
The cool musk of his chest. The inside of his wrist after he’d held his Sig.
The warmth of his body heat when I was tucked under his arm.
But his scent—a thousand descriptions all at once that now only smelled like home to me—it was strongest here, and I loved to bury my face against his neck.
As he cupped the back of my head, bringing me in even closer, his other hand slid down my spine with exquisite pressure.
Then he pushed my leggings down my hips.
“Will.” My entire body stiffened with alarm at the same time desire surged through my core and gooseflesh erupted everywhere. “Linc is here.”
“No, he’s not.” Warm lips landed on my neck. “I sent him out to get food.” Teeth grazed my collarbone.
Oh God. “We’re miles from anything.” His touch. How had I run from this? “He shouldn’t have to walk that far.”
Deft fingers slid up the inside of my thigh. “He’s not.” Will parted my legs. “He took the SUV.”
I jerked back and looked at him. “He’s fifteen, Will.” He wasn’t even old enough for a driver’s license.
The corner of Will’s mouth twitched. “He can drive, Isla.” Then his expression turned serious, but there was something behind his eyes I couldn’t grasp.
“He was driving his mother to her appointments.” The slightest pause before he said appointments told me exactly what kind they were.
“I wouldn’t have let him take the SUV if he wasn’t more than capable. ”
More than capable. I turned the words over in my mind. I didn’t know if it was a memory of something or just the way he was with his son, but I felt that connection again.
This dominant, controlling, protective man.
His incredible son.
And me.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and it felt as if everything in my life had led to this very heartbeat. But I knew I couldn’t take that last leap into the depths of an uncertain ocean with this man until I had one guarantee from him.
Actually, not a guarantee.
A promise.
Because if Will “Phoenix” Erikson Nilsen gave me his word, I knew he would keep it.
I looked into his complicated green-eyed gaze, where he held both his commanding authority and the weight of his world. “I need something from you.”
“And you’re going to get it, ma petite intruse.” He shoved my pants all the way off.
I gripped the sides of his face. “I’m serious.”
“I’m listening.” He unbuckled his pants.
“It’s a promise.”
He stilled, and his eyes, that gaze of his, it took me in with such searing intensity, I felt the dizzying pull of his dominance wash over me. “What kind of promise?”
Right then, in that moment, I wanted to surrender absolutely everything to him. My will, my life, my agency, my well-being, this very thought. I wanted to exhale as he inhaled, and have it be as simple as that.
My breath for his will.
My surrender for his control.
Then I wouldn’t have to ask this.
I wouldn’t have to even think about it. Except it was always there.
This plan I’d had since I was sixteen years old.
But it was so much more than a plan. It was every motivating factor that governed my life.
It was my freedom. It was the peace in my sleep.
It was the restlessness in my soul. It was the well that fed my desire to see, do, feel, touch, taste, smell, and consume every single life experience I could, while I could.
If I said this now, if I let it breathe into the air between us, I knew how he would react.
He was the warfighter.
I was a survivor.
We were not the same.
He would not see my side, and I would be tempted to see his.
Warm, rough, his hand cupped my cheek. “Isla.” His thumb stroked along my jaw, and his voice pitched perfectly low. “Speak.”
I inhaled the deepest, most private part of myself. Then I gave it to him. “I want you to promise me that if the sickness comes back, you will let me die. No treatments. No hospitals. No pain. No wasting away with indignity.”
He didn’t move.
He didn’t breathe. He didn’t react. He didn’t even blink.
But I saw it.
I saw the warrior in him roar to the surface, but he kept it perfectly controlled, containing the violent storm to his eyes.
I pressed my fingers over his lips as a tear slid down my cheek. “I want to live with grace.” Same as I wanted to die with grace.
He gripped my wrist with punishing strength the same time his hand on my cheek shot to my nape and fisted in my hair. “No, you don’t.” He gripped my tangled locks so hard, pain made my lips part. “Name three things you like.”
Sensations crawling all over my body, the pain of his punitive hold stealing my breath, I felt every inch of his anger pulse in my core.
“Three things, Isla,” he demanded.
Three things I liked. Three things I liked, not loved. Three things—
“Name them,” he barked.
“I like to watch night fall.” Like. “I like to listen to the wind.” Like. “I like to feel midnight in the water.” More than like.
His thigh still between my legs, he shoved it higher. “Name three things you love.”
Love. Oh God.
His grip in my hair tightened.
I plunged into that killing ocean at the bottom of the craggy cliff. “You, Linc, and my brother.”
His nostrils flared, his throat jerked with a swallow, and he got in my face. “Now give me one goddamn reason why I would ever let you go without a fight.” His entire arm flexed with barely controlled restraint as he yanked my hair so hard that I cried out. “One,” he demanded.
Staring at the battle-hardened SEAL, forced to because of his grip on me, I searched his face for the man underneath and prayed for him to surface. Then I answered. “Because I’ve asked you to.”
The air cracked between us, my heart stopped for a suspended moment, and I thought it was over between us.
But I never should’ve underestimated a warfighter.
His roar ripped from his chest, his hips drove forward, and he shoved into me with a single thrust.
My shattered cry echoed through the cabin, and his forehead hit mine.
Then my warrior, my SEAL, the man who’d died and come back to life—he closed his eyes, gentled his hands, and he acquiesced to defeat. “What the fuck am I supposed to tell Lincoln?”
My body shocked by pain, his punishing girth splitting me in two, I fought for reason I didn’t have. “I-I don’t know.”
He opened his eyes, and I almost wished he hadn’t, because there, right in front of me, was a perfect replica of the grief I saw in his son’s eyes. “I would get the best doc—”
“Don’t,” I warned, not liking this dynamic shift.
“Why?” he supplicated, buried so deep in me, I couldn’t even breathe without feeling him. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Because I couldn’t go through it again. And I especially couldn’t go through it in front of Lincoln or him. Will knew me one way. Who I was now. But who I’d been, it wasn’t submissive or pretty or human or even living.
I repeated the only explanation I had that was big enough. “I want to live with grace.”
Fisting my hair again, pulling hard, he pulsed inside me.
“You’re not capable of living with grace, Isla Sennan.
” He retreated a mere inch, then slammed back into me.
“You trespass. You take. You steal.” He lowered his mouth to mine.
“My life. My heart. My reason.” His tongue swept across my bottom lip.
“That’s not grace, intruse.” He inhaled deeply, like he was taking that breath from me I wanted all along. “That’s you living your life out loud.”
“Will.” I clung to him and his version of me.
“This conversation isn’t over.” He palmed my throat before I could protest, pressing his thumb under my chin to keep my mouth closed. “I’m not denying you your choice on this, but we’re not done talking about it. Blink once if you understand.”
I held my eyes open.
The pressure of his thumb released from under my chin.
“I want details. Every damn thing you went through. Then I’m going to find out what advancements have been made since then.
I want statistics, medical records, intel.
I want to know what, exactly, constitutes no treatment in your eyes.
There’s a large swing between no care and a DNR.
We need to go over all of that—for both of us.
But not now.” He closed in on my mouth again and lowered his voice to a lulling seduction I was helpless against. “Now I’m going to fuck you, and you’re going to come. Understood?”
“Yes,” I whispered, licking my lips as the dynamic of us shifted back to exactly where it should be.
“Good.” His rigid length pulsed, my core wept, and he started to move.
God, did he move.
But a phoenix didn’t fuck me.
A man who was a father, whose heart beat for the life of a son he’d never known about, that man made slow, anguished love to me.