10. Shiloh #2
She stands in the doorway with rain on her lashes and clear challenge sliding across her face like sunlight over a blade. The hunted look from the morning has not vanished. Nothing that simple. But it has been shoved back by something warmer, sharper, and infinitely more dangerous to my dignity.
Deacon moves to the coffee maker, shaking his head like he is above all this.
He is not above all this. He is listening with his two ears and his whole damn body.
Reva arches one brow at me. “Shiloh couldn’t handle three minutes of me warming his cock.”
My pride, exhausted and underfed, sits straight up like an idiot.
“That is some bullshit.”
Ever coughs something into his fist.
Nash’s face remains perfectly blank. He will pay for this. Somehow. Eventually. With interest.
Reva walks toward me.
Slow.
Not seductive in the polished way a woman uses when she wants to be admired. This is worse. This is Reva with mud on her leggings, wet hair, grief in her eyes, and enough fire in her spine to make every man in this room sit up and behave if that’s what she wanted.
My body reacts before she reaches me.
Her gaze drops, and she smiles. I am in trouble.
“Yank,” I warn.
“No, no.” She stops between my knees. I do not remember sitting on the chair by the island. I must have done it sometime between wanting to kill Nash and wanting to kill Ever. “You had thoughts. Let’s hear them.”
“I had no thoughts. Nash was being an idiot.”
“Shiloh,” Nash says, mild as poison. “Don’t back down now.”
I turn my head. “I will put you through a window.”
“Shatterproof.”
“Then I’ll use your face twice.”
Reva puts one hand on my chest and turns me back to her. Her touch shuts me up.
Her fingers spread over my shirt. She feels my heartbeat. I know full well that it is giving testimony against me.
“You snapped at me this morning,” she says.
The room changes. Just a little. Just enough.
My humor recedes. Not gone. Never gone. I need it to breathe. But the sharp performance drops away because she deserves the man under it.
“I did,” I say.
Her mouth tightens. “You were mad.”
“I was scared. Mad came easier.”
She feels that. I see it in her face.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Her fingers curl in my shirt. “Me too.”
“For making us crazy?”
“For making it harder.”
I shake my head. “Do not take my apology and turn it into yours. That is theft.”
“Fine.” Her chin lifts. “I’m sorry for exactly forty percent.”
I nod solemnly. “Accepted.”
“That is generous of you.”
“I’m known for grace.”
Ever mutters, “That is new information.”
Reva does not look away from me. “Still think I can’t last three minutes?”
My pulse kicks. “Sweetheart, I think you’re confusing mercy with confidence.”
Her smile widens, and she shimmies out of her leggings, panties going with them, and then climbs onto my lap. Every thought I have ever had leaves.
Her knees bracket my hips. Her hands slide around my shoulders. I grip her waist because gravity has become unreliable, and she is warm through damp clothes, warm and solid and mine for the length of this ridiculous dare I should never have accepted.
Nash moves behind me. For one wild second, I think he is about to commentate. Instead, a small foil packet lands on the counter beside my hand.
Reva looks at it. Then at Nash.
“I’m on the pill, you know. We are well past this.”
He lifts his hands. “Just trying to be helpful. And I thought…ya know…reduced sensation might help our boy here last longer.”
Deacon chokes on his coffee.
I grab the packet. “Everyone shut up.”
Reva leans close enough that her mouth brushes my ear. “Bossy.”
A shiver goes through me. She feels it. Her laugh is soft and mean and alive.
We deal with the practicalities with as much dignity as one can manage while three dangerous men stand around us and make zero pretense at not watching. Ever and Nash watch us with a mix of hunger and amusement. Deacon watches Reva because Deacon has never cared about pretending.
Then Reva sinks down onto me.
Slow.
Tight.
Hot enough to make my hands clamp around her hips and every joke in my mouth turn to ash.
Her breath catches against my cheek.
Mine stops entirely.
She settles fully in my lap, thighs pressed around mine, body holding me in a way that should be punishment and becomes immediate spiritual collapse.
“Timer?” Ever asks.
I glare at him over Reva’s shoulder. “I will murder you.”
Reva shifts. Barely. I curse under my breath.
She smiles against my jaw. “Problem?”
“No.”
“Good.”
She goes still then. Completely still. That’s worse.
Her arms rest around my neck. Her body stays locked around me, snug and wicked and pulsing gently with every breath she takes. I can feel everything. The damp heat of her. The small tremor in her thighs. The way her heart is beating fast against my chest.
I grip the edge of the chair behind her.
I can win this.
This is not hard.
I can do—
Nash says, “Two minutes.”
I bare my teeth. “I didn’t ask.”
Reva tightens around me, and my hips jerk. The sound I make is beneath me as a person.
Her eyes widen with delighted offense. “Was that—”
“Nope.”
“Because it sounded like—”
“No.”
Ever makes a thoughtful noise. “Interesting control issue.”
“You are dead to me.”
Reva does it again. Small, deliberate. A tiny clench of muscle, barely enough to count as movement and more than enough to send sweat breaking along my spine.
My forehead drops to her shoulder.
She laughs. The laugh changes everything.
The room, the morning, the fight, the dead nurse, the swamp, the hospital. None of it goes away. The pain stays where it is. The fear too. But Reva laughs in my arms with me buried inside her, and for one reckless second the whole house remembers how to breathe.
I lift my head.
Her face is flushed. Eyes bright. Smile wicked and shaky at the edges.
“You’re cheating, damnit.”
She lifts one shoulder. “You said I couldn’t handle you.”
“I said many things under duress.”
Nash says, “Three minutes.”
Reva smiles and clenches again, and I come hard enough to see God, Aunt Mildred’s china, and all the stars in Texas. From Louisiana, of course.
My arms lock around her. My face buries against her neck. I hear Ever laugh once, low and stunned. Nash makes a sound that might be approval. Deacon mutters something in Spanish that I choose not to translate because my dignity is already face-down in a ditch.
Reva pats my shoulder. Actually pats it.
I lift my head slowly.
She looks pleased with herself. Much too pleased.
“I believe that was two minutes and fifty-eight seconds,” she says.
“You are a menace.”
“You’re a minute man.”
My pride returns from the dead with a sword.
I stand.
She squeaks and grabs my shoulders as I lift her with me, still wrapped around my waist. My pants are somewhere around my thighs, which makes the first step a logistical insult, but I manage.
“Shiloh,” she says, laughing now.
I kick one leg free enough to move. “You want to discuss stamina, Yank? We can discuss stamina.”
Nash leans one elbow on the island. “Careful. Your pants are losing.”
“I hate every person in this kitchen.”
Ever’s mouth curves. “You’re welcome.”
Deacon steps aside as I carry Reva toward the hall. “Try not to damage the furniture.”
I point at him without looking. “You lost the right to speak after Nash’s desk.”
Reva laughs harder, face tucked against my shoulder, her body shaking around mine in a way that nearly makes me stumble.
Worth it. All of it.
The fear, the fight, the ugly little insecurity Nash sliced open because he is a bastard with good aim. Reva is laughing. The sound follows us down the hall, bright and cracked and real.
My pants slide down my other leg another inch, and I stop to kick them all the way off.
“Graceful,” she whispers.
“I am a goddamn gazelle.”
“You’re waddling.”
“I am conserving power.”
“For what?”
I kick my bedroom door open.
“For round two.”