Chapter 8 #2
"I love you, Tina. I loved your words before I knew you wrote them.
I loved the woman behind the glasses before I knew what she tasted like.
And I am done being a ghost. I am done watching from a distance.
I am done protecting myself from the only person who has ever made me feel like the things I've built with my hands are worth more than the things I've destroyed. "
I take his face in both hands. This face. This scarred, angular, beautiful face that I've been writing about in secret for weeks.
"I love you too." I brush my thumb along the scar from ear to jaw. "And I'm not going anywhere. Not when things are easy. Not when things are hard. Not when ghosts from Belgrade come knocking."
He kisses me.
This kiss is different from every one before it. It's not the detonation of the classroom or the hunger of the first night or the tenderness of the morning after. It's a homecoming. Two people who stopped running finding each other in the exact spot where they're supposed to be.
He lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist and he carries me inside with one arm under my ass and the other hand in my hair, kicking the door shut behind us.
He walks us straight to the bedroom and sets me on the bed and strips his thermal over his head and comes down over me with a focus that makes my blood sing.
"This bed," he says against my throat. "Has never had anyone in it but me. You're going to change that."
He undresses me slowly. Peeling my sweater over my head, unclasping my bra with one hand, sliding my jeans down my legs with both hands running along every inch of skin he exposes.
He presses his mouth against my hip. My stomach.
The underside of my breast. My nipple, pulling it between his lips, sucking until I arch off the mattress and grab his shoulders.
"Marcel."
"I'm right here." He moves lower. Parts my thighs with his hands. Settles between them. "I'm not going anywhere."
His mouth finds my pussy and I cry out so loudly that the sound bounces off the cabin walls.
He licks me in slow, devastating strokes, his tongue flat against my clit, then circling, then pointed against the hood.
Two fingers push inside me, curling, finding the spot that makes my vision white out.
He works me with the patience of a man who has all the time in the world and plans to spend every second of it making me fall apart.
I come with my hands fisted in the sheets and his name on my lips and his mouth sealed against me, drinking every pulse, every aftershock, refusing to lift his head until I'm shaking and boneless.
He strips his jeans. Rolls on a condom. Gathers both my wrists in one hand and pins them above my head and pushes into me in a single deep stroke that buries him to the hilt.
"Eyes on me," he growls.
I look up at him. This man. Above me. Inside me. His dark brown eyes burning with everything he's ever carried and everything he's choosing to set down.
He fucks me hard and deep and thorough. Every thrust drives me into the mattress.
His free hand slides between us and his thumb circles my clit with the same merciless precision he applies to trigger pulls and scrollwork and every other goddamn thing he touches.
I clench around him and he groans, low and rough, and increases the pace.
"You're mine, Tina." His voice is wrecked. "Every poem you write. Every word you teach. Every morning you wake up. Mine."
"Yours." I wrap my legs around him. Pull him deeper. "And you're mine. Every scar. Every kill. Every three a.m. nightmare. Mine."
He lets go of my wrists and grabs my hips and pulls me into him as he drives forward and I shatter.
My orgasm tears through me in waves, my pussy clenching around his cock in rhythmic pulses that drag him over the edge with me.
He comes with a sound that's barely human, burying himself deep, his forehead pressed against mine, our breath tangling together in the space where two people end and one thing begins.
He collapses beside me. Pulls me against his chest. Wraps both arms around me like a man who is never letting go.
We lie in his bed, in his cabin, on his mountain, surrounded by cameras and sensors and the vigilance of men who understand that protecting what you love is not a solo operation.
"The foreword," I whisper against his chest.
"What?"
"My poetry collection. The publisher wants a new edition with a foreword. I want you to write it."
His arms tighten. "You want the sniper to write the foreword for the poet."
"I want the man who memorized Still Water and wrote it on his wall before he knew me to tell the world why these words matter." I lift my head. Look into his eyes. "I want to publish under my real name. Tina Ackley. I want Grizzly Ridge to know it's me. And I want your name on the foreword."
He is quiet for a long time. His hand moves up and down my spine in slow strokes.
"Are you sure about the pen name?"
"I've been hiding behind A. Connolly for six years because a man once told me I was too much.
I'm done hiding." I press my lips against the scar on his ribs.
"You showed me that. You walked into my classroom with a hundred and fourteen ghosts and a walnut rifle stock and you showed the parts of yourself you thought were too much. I can do the same."
He tilts my chin up. Kisses me. Slow. Deep.
"I'll write the foreword," he says. "And Tina?"
"Yeah?"
"It's going to be the most honest thing I've ever written. Including every after action report I filed in fifteen years."
I smile against his mouth. "I'd expect nothing less."
Outside, the motion sensor on the access road blinks green. The cameras cycle through their sweeps. The observation tower stands empty against the stars.
Marcel Hale doesn't need the tower tonight.
He can see everything he needs from right here.