Chapter 26 #2
I answer by sliding my palms flat against his bare skin. His heart is hammering under my fingers, and the contrast between his outward calm and his racing heart makes me fierce.
I push my tongue over his, needier now.
He groans. Low, involuntary, buried against my mouth. The vibration of it rolls through me.
And then he picks me up, his hands cradling my bum as my legs wind around his waist.
He carries me into his bedroom, the door pushing shut quietly behind him. He lays me down in the dim moonlight, sets the baby monitor on his bedside table, and then drops his forehead to mine.
We breathe the same air for a few uneven seconds, our lips still close enough to brush with every exhale.
"That," he murmurs, "was worth shaving for."
I can't speak.
“Can I take my jeans off?” he asks.
I manage to nod, and then add a single, hungry syllable. “Please.”
He strips down to his underwear, then climbs onto the bed again, taking me in his arms. We kiss again, and our limbs find a way together, different now that we’re stretched out on his bed and have more room than we did on the couch or in the kitchen.
Or the tack room.
I remember how he wedged his thigh between my legs yesterday, and I want to take the initiative to grind against him now, but I don’t.
I’m thinking about it, and maybe I’m thinking too loud, because after a few kisses, he tucks me into the side of his body, brings my hand to his bare chest, and says, “Do you want to talk?”
No!
I want to climb him like a tree and lick him like a popsicle.
But my pulse is also racing a million miles a minute, which I know he can feel as he rubs the inside of my wrist.
And maybe I’m a little lightheaded, too.
I drag in a breath.
Let it out.
Breathe again.
“We have all the time in the world,” he promises.
I’m not sure we do.
But I can only move as fast as my fear lets me, so… “Can I ask you about something Ridge said this morning?”
“Sure.”
“I asked him if I should go to the police, now that Derek is maybe coming after me or whatever.”
“Is that something you want to do?”
“Not really. I don’t have a lot of faith that it will do anything, and I’m terrified it might put me more directly on his radar anyway.”
“That’s my instinct, too.”
“Your brother basically said the same thing. He said the cops won’t help me in advance, and depending on what happens, they might use whatever I said before against me. Is that about Cash?”
Zane takes a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“Oh.”
He draws a circle on my arm. “You know how when you’re a kid, you have a simplistic idea of what being a grown up will be like?”
“Very painfully so, yes.”
“Sorry, dumb question.”
“Mmm, it’s okay. You weren’t my rude awakening.” If anything, he’s the opposite. My soft salvation. A gentle refuge from the cold, hard truth of adulthood and consequences.
“In high school, Cash had this antagonistic relationship with a few guys in his grade. He never liked them, they never liked him. But after he graduated and joined the army, he would come back here for leave, and he’d go to parties where they were at, that sort of thing.
He didn’t see them as a danger. And so he sometimes talked shit about them, you know?
Just…talk. But when he was arrested, some of that talk was used against him.
Even though he was standing up for someone.
It hardened Ridge the most, to think that people we knew would turn on Cash like that. ”
“Can I ask what happened?”
“In classic Kincaid style, he got between a woman and a fist. It’s what we do, and we’ll never apologize for it.”
“That doesn’t sound criminal.”
“He was twenty-two and jacked. The guy who he pulled off the woman was a skinny little shit. Cash could have stopped before he did, and when he didn’t…that became aggravated assault.”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah. He could have pled guilty and maybe missed jail time, but he wouldn’t do that. He maintained it was reasonable defence and the judge did not agree. He was sentenced to two years, and served every second of that time because he got in trouble inside, too.”
“Good trouble or bad trouble?”
“Depends who you ask. But he used that time to think hard about what he wanted when he got out. He set his sights on owning a garage, and now he does. So in the end, he got there. It was just a horrible run in the middle. And now…”
“What now?”
“I don’t want you to think that Dragonfly Creek is perfect.”
“I don’t think anywhere is perfect,” I promise. Except maybe this room. This man. This ranch. “But tell me more.”
“It’s not like we were innocent of how the world is when we bought this place.
I had a decade in the military. Watched my brother get railroaded by the justice system and abandoned by our unit leadership.
I know how callous the world can be. But I think we came back here with a bit too much nostalgia for a small town simple life that maybe never existed.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t make a different choice.
This is home, and we needed to come back.
For my mom, for my brother—but for ourselves, too.
We needed to choose ourselves, and it felt like this place was where we could do that. But.”
He screws up his face and takes a deep, frustrated breath.
“But?”
He groans. “There’s so much under the surface. And sometimes right on the surface, too. Power struggles, backstabbing. And there’s some unbelievable wealth, which is a form of power that outstrips any kind of hard work.”
As he talks, I push myself up, wanting to see his face clearly.
“I know life isn’t fair, but there are times when it feels very unfair.
When Cash was sentenced to jail time, that was the first time that I really thought…
oh, sometimes life really isn’t going to go your way.
” His voice cracks at the end and he shoves himself up the bed to lean back against the headboard.
Wanting to comfort him, I climb on top of him.
“What are you doing?” He doesn’t sound like he’s complaining, just asking. Just being sure.
“You sound like you need a hug.”
“Do I?” But he’s smiling as I wrap my arms around him. “Mmm, maybe I did need your hug.”
His hands settle on my hips and he pulls me in close.
I started this, but he’s taking it over.
“You’re good to me,” he whispers into my hair. “So good to me. So sweet. My little healer.”
I turn my face so my lips are brushing against his jaw.
“That’s it. You could heal me with kisses.”
I cover his mouth with mine.
Kissing Zane feels like it’s a kind of destiny.
Like I was meant to find my way into the circle of his arms and surrender to the confident warmth of his lips, his tongue. His groan, for me alone to hear and feel as it reverberates through the kiss, into my mouth, right into the secret core of my body.
And I know what he means now, about longing for the simple future we imagined when we were younger.
When I was a teenage girl who stayed up late dreaming of finding a man, of quenching the ache in my body by finding someone else with a matching ache, I thought it would be like this.
And it wasn’t. I hate that it wasn’t, that I know how bad it can be. How the wrong kisses can lead to the worst kind of empty ache after, ten times worse than the pulsing ache before.
Deep down, I know that Zane would never leave me feeling used. There would be no shame.
But as he says, real life is more complicated than our idealistic dreams.
And kissing him and wanting more than just kisses means staying here, where I have no future beyond these kisses.
Staying would mean depending on him entirely. Trading one homestead for another, one man’s promised kindness for another.
But leaving him… God, leaving Zane would hurt on a whole new level.
“Do you want to stop?” he asks.
“No.” That…that’s very clear. “Don’t stop, Zane. Please don’t stop.”
He drags in a rough breath that fills his chest, puffs it against my body. Big. Hard. Broad. He burrows his hands in my hair and tightens his grip, making my thoughts scatter. And between my thighs, his hips flex in invitation.
I rub my core against his erection.
Right now, I just want.
The future can wait.