Chapter Forty-Two
Interrupted
Crew
I wake up slowly, which never happens.
My internal clock is a merciless thing. It doesn’t care about weekends or holidays or the fact that I was up until two in the morning doing certain… activities.
But this morning, something’s different.
This morning, I surface in layers. The first thing I register is warmth. The kind that seeps into your bones, the kind that has a heartbeat. The second thing I register is the smell. Vanilla and coconut and something underneath that’s just… her.
Emmie.
My Emmie.
She’s pressed against my back, her arm draped over my ribs, her face tucked between my shoulder blades.
I can feel her breath through the thin cotton of my shirt, warm and slow and even.
Her left hand is curled loosely against my chest, and the ring catches a sliver of light from the window.
The diamond is modest—she didn’t want anything big, said she’d knock it against everything in the kitchen—but it’s there.
Real. On her finger because she said yes.
I shift onto my back carefully, trying not to wake her, but Emmie has the spatial awareness of a heat-seeking missile when she sleeps.
The second I move, she follows—rolling into my side, pressing her cheek to my chest, her arm tightening around me.
A small, satisfied sound escapes her throat.
Barely a hum. I feel it vibrate against my ribs.
I trace the line of Emmie’s spine through her sleep shirt. My shirt, actually. An old bureau academy tee that’s been washed so many times it’s soft. It hangs off one shoulder, and the exposed skin is warm under my fingertips.
“Time is it?” She mumbles into my chest, eyes still closed.
“Early.”
“How early?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s Saturday.”
One eye opens. Hazel, hazy with sleep, the gold flecks muted in the low light. She studies me for a second, then yawns, and presses her face back into my chest, and wraps herself tighter around me. “You’re warm. Stay.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Promise?”
“You’re wearing a ring that says I promise, Em.”
She smiles against my skin. I feel the shape of it—the slow curve of her lips, the press of her cheek lifting.
She tilts her chin up, and I know what she wants before she asks. I meet her halfway, pressing my mouth to hers in a kiss that’s slow and unhurried.
“Morning breath,” she warns, pulling back an inch.
“Don’t care.”
She grins and lets me kiss her again, and this time neither of us pulls back.
One second it’s lazy and sweet, her fingers curling against my chest and my thumb tracing her jaw. The next, her hand slides down my stomach and my breath catches somewhere behind my ribs, and the lazy part evaporates like it was never there.
She shifts, swinging one leg over me so she’s straddling my hips, and the covers pool around her waist. My hands find her thighs on instinct. She’s warm from sleep, and the oversized shirt has ridden up, and there’s so much bare skin under my palms that my brain just… empties.
She leans down and kisses me deeper, her tongue sliding against mine in a slow stroke that makes my hands tighten on her thighs.
I sit up with her still in my lap, and the shift in angle presses us together in a way that draws a low sound from both of us.
Her legs lock around my waist, her arms around my neck, and I’m holding her so close I can feel her heartbeat against mine.
I drag the shirt over her head and toss it somewhere behind me.
She’s in nothing underneath—just bare skin and freckles and the locket resting in the hollow of her throat—and I have to stop for a second, because the sight of Emmie Marshall in the early morning light of our cabin hits me the same way it always does.
Like a fist to the sternum.
“Stop staring.” Her cheeks are pink.
“Can’t.” I press my mouth to her collarbone, and she arches into me with a soft sound that goes straight through me. I take my time. Kiss across her shoulder. Down the center of her chest. Along the curve of her breast, where her breath hitches and her fingers dig into my shoulders.
She tugs at my shirt and I pull it off. Her palms land flat on my chest, and she runs her hands over me like she’s appreciating the terrain—the muscle, the scars. All the things that make me me.
She pushes me onto my back, and the look on her face as she straddles me again—a mix of tenderness and intent that is uniquely, devastatingly her—makes my pulse hammer.
“Lie back,” she says. “Let me.”
I let her.
The rest of our clothes come off slow. No rush. No urgency. Just Emmie’s hands sliding my waistband down while she kisses my hip bone, my stomach, lower. I work her underwear off and pull her back up to me, and when she sinks down onto me, we both go still.
Her forehead drops to mine. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are parted, and the small sound she makes—somewhere between a gasp and a sigh—is my favorite sound on the planet. I’ve heard it a hundred times now and it still rewires my brain every time.
“Okay?”
She opens her eyes, and they’re hazy when they meet mine. “You feel so good, Crew.”
My hands settle on her hips. Not guiding—just holding. She doesn’t need guidance. She never has.
She starts to move, and the whole world narrows to this.
To her. The roll of her hips, slow and deliberate.
The way she braces her hands on my chest. The flush spreading across her skin in the warm light.
I watch her face—the way her eyes flutter, the way she bites her lower lip when something feels particularly good—and I think, for the thousandth time: How the hell did I get here?
A year ago, I was surviving protein shakes in a quiet apartment, arguing with a cat and dreading a transfer to Alaska. Now I’m in a cabin I built with my own hands, in a bed that smells like us, with a woman who saw every broken piece of me and decided to stay.
I pull her down and kiss her, deep and slow, matching the rhythm she’s set. She moans into my mouth and the sound lights me up from the inside.
“There,” she breathes, shifting her angle. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
She laughs, and it turns into a gasp when I grip her hips tighter and meet her on the next stroke. The pace builds the way it does when we’re like this—not frantic but steady, like we’re both heading toward the same place and neither of us is in a hurry to get there.
I run my hands up her sides, her ribs, the undersides of her breasts. She drops her head back, throat exposed, and I lean up to press my mouth there.
“Crew—” She’s getting close. I know the signs. Her thighs tighten around me, her breathing goes shallow, and she grabs my hand and laces her fingers through mine like she needs an anchor.
I hear the distinct crunch of tires on gravel.
We both go still.
The sound is unmistakable out here—there’s no traffic on this road, no neighbors close enough to hear. Just the long dirt drive that leads to our cabin, and now there’s the sound of a vehicle slowly rolling to a stop outside the house.
Emmie’s eyes lock on mine. Her chest is still heaving, her fingers still laced through mine. “Please tell me that’s a delivery truck.”
I’m already scanning, my brain flipping into a mode that does not pair well with what’s currently happening below my waist. I lean toward the window without pulling out—because some delusional part of me is still hoping this is a wrong turn, a lost tourist, someone who’ll see the dead-end and reverse back down the drive.
Still hoping we can finish what we started.
A champagne-colored Buick Enclave rolls into view and parks behind my truck.
I know that car. I know that car the way I know my badge number, because it’s been parked in the Marshall family driveway every single Sunday for the past six months.
“Who is it?” Emmie’s voice is tight. She hasn’t moved. We’re still connected, still tangled, and the contrast between where I was ten seconds ago and where I am now is giving me emotional whiplash.
“It’s your parents.”
A beat of silence.
“No.”
“Your dad’s getting out of the car.”
“No he is not.”
“And your mom’s holding a casserole dish.”
Emmie makes a sound like a deflating balloon. She drops her forehead to my shoulder, and for two full seconds, neither of us does what we both know we need to do.
Because here’s the thing.
We are still very much together. As in physically joined. As in I am inside her right now, and she was thirty seconds from finishing, and I was right behind her, and Robert Marshall—her father—is currently stretching his legs in our driveway like he just wrapped up a casual Saturday drive.
“We have to—” Emmie starts.
“Yeah.”
She lifts off me and the disconnect is—
I don’t have a word for it. Wrong is close.
Criminal is closer. My whole body revolts, every nerve ending firing a protest so loud it drowns out my tactical instincts.
Emmie gasps and grabs my shoulder, her legs shaking, and the look on her face—flushed, frustrated, borderline devastated—is a mirror of everything I’m feeling.
“I was right there,” she says, and her voice cracks on it like she might actually cry. “Right. There. Crew, I was—”
“I know.” I press my forehead to hers, both of us breathing hard. My hands are on her thighs and hers are on my chest and I’m having to physically override every instinct in my body telling me to pull her back down and finish what we started. “I know, baby. Me too.”
She closes her eyes. Opens them. Squares her jaw in a way I’d find incredibly attractive if I weren’t busy having a crisis.
“How long do we have?”
I calculate. Robert will unload slow—he’s methodical, takes his time. Linda will want to rush to the porch, but she’ll follow his lead and probably grab her bags first. Maybe a cooler, whatever else she packed, because Linda Marshall doesn’t do anything without provisions.
“One minute. Maybe two tops.”
She rolls off me and immediately wraps herself in the sheet, like being naked in our own bedroom is suddenly a liability. Which, given the circumstances, it kind of is.