Chapter 19 Lara #2
Time passed only by the deep breaths that filled my lungs with his rich, masculine scent. It dissolved in the rain, electrified by the storm, and dug its greedy fingers into my veins, holding on until the scales tipped from exhaling grief to inhaling him.
The entire time, I buried my face against the warmth of his chest and listened to his steady heartbeat. His hand drew slow circles in my hair at my nape, and his chin rested on top of my head.
By the time my cries subsided, the rain camouflaged the damage done to his shirt by my tears.
Hesitantly, I turned my head and angled it back. I couldn’t cry anymore, but neither did I want to leave his embrace.
I couldn’t have saved Ian. I couldn’t have done enough to change his fate. But in this moment, there was something I could do to change mine.
“Calder,” I murmured huskily.
Rain soaked our faces, but it was nothing compared to the way lust drenched his pupils, mine overflowing the same.
I dragged my tongue across my lips, clearing the water for the taste of him.
His head dipped lower. Closer. Resisting him—resisting us—was too much for nature to hold back, too.
And then a rip of lightning tore through the sky, illuminating the whole of his face. And there, his vivifying ache that haunted every ridge and dip, every muscle and crease, was so damningly obvious, as embedded in his expression as oxygen in his blood, that I knew what he’d said earlier was true.
“All it took was one look.”
“Come on. We have to get inside,” he ordered in a low voice.
He kept his arm around my shoulders as we jogged into the woods, Calder leading us by flashes of lightning back to our tent.
It was a downpour by the time he zipped us into shelter, both of us panting and our clothes soaked through.
For a moment, he stayed there, unmoving and facing the flap of the tent, like he wasn’t sure that we were completely out of danger, or maybe it was because he knew that we definitely weren’t.
Something in my chest twisted. The hungry ache that had throbbed in the woods now a sharp, wringing need.
“Calder . . .” I said softly and stepped closer to him.
The smallest movement sent a cascade of tension from his shoulders all the way down his spine. I imagined this was what it would look like if a human were able to turn to stone. Perfectly still. Entirely unbreakable.
I held my place. My breath. My heartbeat. Afraid if I didn’t, his rules, his restraint, would get the better of us again. And then he slowly turned until our eyes met, like electricity to water.
The funny thing about electricity in water is that if the water is pure, the shock does nothing. It’s when the water isn’t pure—when the water is charged with impurities—that electricity can take hold.
Well, there was nothing pure about wanting my sister’s ex-boyfriend.
Not. A. Single. Thing.
And maybe that was why what happened next wasn’t a singular charge of electric current, but the complete electrocution of all our reservations.
I didn’t know who moved first. All I knew was the moment we collided. My arms grounded around his neck, his hands bracketing my waist. Our mouths fused together, a detonation of lips and teeth and tongue into desire.
I kissed him frantically. Desperately. Wildly.
I’d lost so many people. I couldn’t lose anyone else; I couldn’t lose Calder. Not tonight.
“Fuck, Lara,” he growled, his large hand sliding up to cradle my head, fingers firm in my hair. With a low, helpless groan, he angled my mouth and kissed me hard.
I couldn’t lose Calder, but I did lose myself in that kiss.
In the drive and slide of his tongue scorching my senses, in the hot sear of desire and destruction embedding all the way into my bones.
I clung to him in the storm, scoring my nails against his scalp and anchoring myself to the broad hardness of his chest.
I’d never felt so not-in-control before—never so at the mercy of someone else—as I did in this kiss.
The way he charted the spots that made me tremble and quake, tracked the spots that made me moan.
I wasn’t surprised by his surgical-level awareness of the minutiae of my undoing, but neither was I prepared for it.
“Please,” I begged, uncertain what I was begging for exactly but knowing the only word to describe it was more.
A second later, Calder slid his hands to my ass and hauled me to him, with him, as he moved toward one of the chairs, sat in it, and pulled me onto his lap.
He could’ve been pulling me straight down to hell and I still wouldn’t have protested. Not if it meant never breaking this kiss.
We dripped all over the chair. All over the floor.
Our sopping clothes were stuck to us, and stuck us to each other.
But the only thing I felt was the slide of his tongue along mine.
The heat of his chest pressed to the painful points of my nipples.
And the thick ridge of him intruding against my core.
Whether it was instinct or muscle memory from this morning, I started to rock against him. Along his length. And it wasn’t like adding gasoline to a flame, but cartons of dynamite to a wildfire, pleasure ravaging through every inch of me.
“Fuck.” Calder’s husky rumble quaked over my skin as he slid his hand up under my shirt and pinned it to the damp skin of my waist, guiding my movement.
I wanted this—needed him. My sister’s ex-boyfriend.
Calder’s other hand returned to my nape, taking my wet hair and winding it like a rope around his fist. I didn’t realize his intent until my head was being firmly arched back, baring my throat and the greedy thrum of my pulse to his lips.
“What are you doing to me?” he rasped, his breath hot where it blew over my damp skin.
Whatever answer he wanted, he was going to take it directly from my skin.
His teeth scraped over the erratic beats of my pulse, back and forth like a predator playing with his prey.
I whimpered, feeling his cock thicken, stoking the heat in my stomach that unraveled me from the inside out. “Please, Calder . . .” I squirmed against him, begging for more pressure. More friction. More dynamite.
The bracket of his hand cinched on my waist, stilling me. “Fuck,” Calder muttered like a man losing his grip on reality.
He wasn’t the only one.
Crazy or not. Cult or not. I needed from Calder exactly what Dr. Julia had said—I needed that part of him that let me take without worry, that let me be needy without fear of not being in control.
Breathing heavy, he took the bottom of my shirt and peeled it like wrapping paper from my torso and over my head; it landed with a wet thwack on the ground.
Calder held my gaze for a torturous second, my breasts coated in goose bumps, aching for the burn of his stare. And then his jaw fired, the tension like a bullet loaded in the chamber, ready to fire and ravage anything in its path.
I pressed my fingers to the knot of muscle like I could coax it to release, and in reply, he turned his head and sank his teeth into the meat of my palm until I gasped in delicious pain.
“Calder . . .”
He buried a savage sound into my palm, an incoherent confession of a need there were no words to describe, and then released my flesh, his hunger finding a new destination.
His chin lowered and leveled with my chest, my breasts so heavy and aching, I could’ve cried for his touch. But he didn’t move—didn’t touch. Instead, he stared, his pupils blown wide as my nipples drew into even tighter beads, begging for attention.
Sliding his palms to span my ribs, Calder let out a ragged breath and muttered, “God, how I’ve dreamed of you.”
My unsteady pulse went into a riot, throwing my heart against the wall of my chest. I wanted to confess to dreaming of him, too, but lost my ability when he bent forward and pressed his lips to my sternum in a reverent kiss.
A slow, tender second elapsed before his teeth marked a fresh path toward my aching nipple, searing a sizzling agony to my skin.
My hands slid from his broad shoulders toward his neck, needing something to hold on to. Bracing for when his feral mouth reached my—
Boom!
Calder froze, his exhale the only part of him that ever reached my breast.
“Calder,” I murmured, the fugue of my desire forced to clear.
Was that—no, that wasn’t thunder. It was too sharp. Too piercing.
My stomach dropped. “Was that—”
“Shh,” he warned with a finger to his lips and his head cocked, listening.
If there was something else to hear, I couldn’t through the storm or over my pounding heart.
“Calder—” I broke off with a small cry as he rose, taking me with him as easily as if I were a rag doll. But he didn’t take me far. Turning, he set me right where he’d been sitting.
His head jerked again, and I heard it, too: the sound of shouting in the distance.
“Stay here,” Calder ordered and pulled free from my limp, panicked limbs.
“Wait—”
“Lara,” he growled, his gaze piercing wildly into mine.
“Okay,” I acquiesced with a nervous nod.
He picked up and handed me my top, a subtle message that the moment had officially ended.
He strode to his side of the bed and pulled out an . . . axe?
“Where did that come from?” I whispered.
“I made it this morning,” he grunted. So that was what he’d done during our reflection time: made an axe from a sharpened stone attached to a carved tree branch.
Calder turned back to me, his gaze dropped for a split second, his entire body tensing. Glancing down, I realized I’d wadded my top into a ball in my lap rather than pulling it back on. Crap.
“I’ll be back,” he murmured before opening the flap. “Don’t come looking for me.” And then he was gone.
Wriggling back into my cold, wet top, I went to the entrance and drew down the zipper once more. Standing there, I looked for Calder in every flash of lightning and listened for whatever was going on through the cacophony of the storm.
The longer I listened, the more I heard the strains of an argument threading between the thunder. An argument that had involved a gun.
Calder had told me to stay back to protect me, but if I was here, who was going to protect him?