9. Deacon #2
Reva looks at the small dark spots on my skin. For the first time since the hospital, her mouth shifts. Not a smile. A tired recognition that the sky has joined the conversation.
The rain starts soft. A scatter through leaves. Small rings forming on the water around the boat. The heron lifts again, annoyed by weather or by us, and disappears into gray.
I reach for the motor, but stop when Reva stands, rocking the skiff. My hand leaves the motor and grips the side of the boat. “Sit down.”
She ignores me with the focused dignity of a woman who has made a decision. Two careful steps bring her to me. She uses the edge of the bench for balance, rain dotting her hair, her lashes, the shoulders of her shirt.
I narrow my eyes. “Reva.”
She comes to stand between my knees, rain darkening the fabric of her shirt. Her face is too pale, and her eyes burn.
For a moment, I think she is going to cry.
Then she hooks her fingers in the waistband of her leggings and pushes them down.
My body reacts before my mind catches up. Three seconds, maybe less, and I’m hard enough to hurt.
“Little Ghost.”
She steps out of one leg, then the other, awkward because the boat is small, and the world is wet, and nothing about this should be graceful.
It is still the most devastating thing I have ever seen.
She is not performing. She is not trying to seduce her way out of pain.
She is choosing contact because words have become too thin to hold what she needs.
I set one hand at her hip when the boat rocks again.
Steadying. Warning. Welcoming.
She straddles me, and my breath leaves my lungs in a rush.
Her fingers go to my belt with fierce concentration. Buckle. Button. Zipper. Her hand slides inside and wraps around my cock, firm and sure enough that my eyes close for one brutal second.
“Look at me,” she says.
I do.
Rain gathers in her hair and rolls down her temple. Her mouth is inches from mine. Her fist moves once, slow, making the base of my spine tighten.
“This is a terrible place for impulse control,” I say.
“Then don’t have any.”
That sounds like permission and challenge wrapped up in one.
I have been surviving this woman’s challenges since she walked back into my life with revenge in her eyes and no idea she had already rearranged every loyalty I owned.
She leans in and kisses me.
Open-mouthed. Searching. Not soft. Not gentle. Her tongue touches mine, and at the same time she rises on her knees, angles herself over me, and sinks down in one stroke.
We both gasp into the kiss.
My hands clamp around her hips. The skiff rocks beneath us, water lapping hard against the hull. Rain falls heavier now, pattering on the benches, the motor, our shoulders. She is hot around me, impossibly tight, her body taking mine while the bayou goes silver and blurred at the edges.
I should slow this down.
I should think about the boat, the rain, the fact that anyone watching the channel would get an education in poor judgment and obsession.
I do not slow down.
Reva’s forehead touches mine. Her fingers grip the back of my neck, nails biting. Her body trembles around me, but her eyes stay open.
“I know what you’re doing for me,” she says.
The words slice deeper than they should, and I go still inside her.
She swallows, rain sliding over her cheeks, her mouth. “All of you. But you especially.” Her breath catches when I shift under her. “You keep standing between me and the ugly parts so I don’t have to look straight at them. You kill for me. You take the pieces no one else knows where to put.”
I try to look away, and she catches my jaw in one wet hand.
“No,” she says. “Look at me.”
I look at her.
“I don’t take it lightly,” she says.
My chest goes tight enough to hurt. I have no answer for that. None that belongs in a human mouth.
I grip her ass in my palms and lift her.
She gasps as I bring her down again, my body driving up to meet hers.
The rain turns the world to sound. Water striking leaves.
Water striking skin. Her breath breaking against mine.
The wet slap of her thighs against me as I guide her rhythm, lifting and lowering, taking and giving with nothing civilized left between us.
Her legs lock around my waist.
“Hold on.”
She moves with me, awkward at first, then desperate, learning the balance of the boat and my body at the same time. Each roll of her hips sends heat snapping through me. Each soft, wrecked sound she makes goes straight behind my ribs and claws there.
I kiss her throat.
Her head falls back, rain running down her neck, and for one second she looks like something the swamp made and sent to ruin me. Fierce. Wounded. Alive. Mine in no way that can be caged and every way that matters.
“My little ghost,” I say against her skin.
Her hand fists in my hair. “Don’t make it sweet.”
“It was never sweet.”
“Good.”
I thrust harder.
The boat knocks against a submerged root with a dull bump. Reva laughs once, breathless and shocked, then moans when I hold her tighter and change the angle.
“That’s not funny,” I say.
“It’s a little funny.”
I bite the side of her neck, careful enough not to break skin, hard enough to make her clench around me.
Her laugh disappears.
The rain comes down in earnest now, soaking us through, turning her shirt translucent where it clings to her breasts, dripping from my jaw onto her collarbone.
I slide one hand up beneath the wet fabric and cover her breast. Her nipple tightens against my palm.
She rides me harder, both arms around my neck, mouth finding mine again and again as if she can put every unsaid thing there and make me swallow it.
I do.
I would take all of it from her if I could. Every memory that burns. Every closed door. Every hour in the closet. Every lie told in the name of keeping her breathing. I would take Cal’s wound, Delia’s chains, Shiloh’s bruised softness, Ever’s terror, Nash’s guilt.
I cannot.
I can take this, though.
Her body shaking around mine. Her rage turned to heat. Her need entrusted to my hands.
I slide my hand between us.
She breaks almost immediately, crying out into the rain, muscles locking, forehead dropping to my shoulder as pleasure tears through her. I hold her through it, thrusting shallow and slow until the worst of the tremors pass.
Then she lifts her head.
Her eyes are wet from more than rain.
“Come with me,” she says.
The words ruin me.
My hands dig into her ass. I drive up once, twice, burying myself as deep as the boat and her body and the angle allow, and the release hits hard enough to blank the marsh from existence.
For a few seconds there is only her. Her arms around my neck.
Her pulse against my mouth. Her body holding mine while the rain hammers down around us.
I come back to myself slowly.
The motor is silent.
The boat drifts.
Reva is still wrapped around me, breathing hard, face tucked into the side of my neck. Her hair is soaked. My shirt is plastered to my back. We are both going to be cold in about thirty seconds.
I do not move.
Neither does she.
The rain softens at the edges, steady now instead of violent. Water runs down the inside of the boat and gathers near my boots. Somewhere beyond the reeds, the heron calls once, sharp and disapproving.
Reva huffs against my throat. I feel it more than hear it.
“What?” I ask.
“I think the bird is judging us.”
“It should mind its own damn business.”
Her arms tighten.
The small silence that follows is different from the one we left at the cabin. Less hollow. Still full of pain, but the pain has room around it now. It can breathe without swallowing her whole.
I press my mouth to her wet hair.
“We should go back,” I say.
She does not lift her head. “I know.”
That is not agreement yet.
I wait.
At last, she loosens her legs from my waist and sits back carefully.
I hold her until she is steady, then help her stand in the rocking boat and pull her leggings up over wet skin.
When she sits on the middle bench again, she looks wrung out, soaked through, and more present than she did when I brought her out here.
I start the motor and turn the skiff toward the cabin. Rain dims the marsh ahead of us, but I know the way back. I always know the way back from here.
Reva sits facing forward, arms wrapped around herself, eyes on the channel.
After a while, she says, “Shiloh needs someone to tell him it wasn’t his fault.”
“He will not believe me.”
“You think he’ll believe me?”
“Maybe.”
She nods once, storing that away.
Then, quieter, “And Cal?”
“Nash will call if anything changes.”
“If nothing changes?”
“We call him when we get back.”
She looks over her shoulder at me. Some of the fire has returned. Not all of it, but enough.
“And Delia?”
My hand tightens on the tiller.
“We find her,” I say. “Then we pull her out.”
“No hiding forever.”
“No.”
“No letting Nash turn tomorrow into next week.”
A faint smile touches my mouth. “You tell him that.”
She faces forward again, rain dripping from the end of her braid.
The cabin is still hidden by cypress and distance, but I can feel it ahead. Nash’s walls. Ever’s cameras. Shiloh’s wounded heart. Homer’s furious little body probably pressed to a window, waiting to accuse us of abandonment.
For now, Reva is quiet.
I brought her into the swamp because silence has teeth out here, but it also has mercy.
It let her rage pass through. It let her touch me with rain on her face and grief still alive in her hands.
It let her remember, for one stretch of water and weather, that she is more than the blood Isabel spilled and still wants to spill.
I steer us home through the rain, and Reva does not look back again.
She doesn’t need to.