Chapter 11 #2
He shuddered, deep, deep inside her, his cock pulsing as she closed around him.
They shattered, crying out, straining, clinging, the sounds torn from them and swallowed by the final knock of the headboard settling behind them.
Damp skin, hot breaths, trembling hands.
The room smelled like smoke and wine and sex, like his soap, like lavender in the ruined sheets beneath them.
For a bit, neither of them moved. They only breathed, hard and uneven, his mouth pressed to her shoulder, her hands still locked on his back as if she hadn’t quite remembered how to let go.
He collapsed atop her, but only for a moment, bracing his weight before it could become too much.
Then, with a rough sound against her neck, he gathered her close and rolled them carefully to their sides, taking her with him instead of away.
“Don’t forget this” was all he said as he tucked her against his side, then promptly, sweetly, fell asleep.
Gabi followed soon after, the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, the slow pull of his breathing quieting everything inside her.
A rhythm she could have mistaken for forever if she let herself.
Gabi discovered a lot about Dallas in those borrowed thirty-six hours.
His middle name was Francis, after his mother’s favorite uncle.
He liked showers. He adored certain activities in showers.
He didn’t believe in playing games. He slept on his back.
He ripped the top sheet off the bed and tossed it to the floor the first night, declaring it a waste of everyone’s time.
He was affectionate, kind, and funny—he found his missing shirt button stuck to his ass and claimed, very seriously, that the cabin was haunted.
And he worried, like she did, about this relationship thing they were playing at.
He was also impatient, arrogant, and elusive, the rough edges he showed the world.
The rest, the softer pieces, he seemed to save for her.
They spent the weekend alternating between cooking, talking, and sex.
Their little mountain cabin, upon further exploration, had lots of options for the latter.
A full-length mirror put to good use. A shaky porch railing they nearly destroyed.
A kitchen counter that ended up being the ideal height.
The coarse rug before the hearth that gave them burns on their knees and elbows.
Dallas liked to tease her, work her into a sensual frenzy, then slow to a crawl, his strokes long and lazy.
He liked foreplay a lot. While she liked to challenge him, dare him, then watch him lose his careful control.
Then there was the most intimate thing: sleeping next to him.
Hearing the small changes in his breathing. The weight of his arm when he drowsily reached for her, pulling her in next to him. Tangled together, then waking hours later with only a knee touching, or the sides of their feet, because they’d gotten hot and drifted apart without letting go entirely.
He’d had a nightmare the night before. Nothing dramatic.
No shouting, no thrashing. He’d simply woken too fast, breath held, eyes open but not quite seeing.
She’d put her hand on his chest. I’m here.
For a moment, he’d gone perfectly still, then his fingers had closed over hers, hard enough to tell her he’d heard.
He’d held on that way, measuring his breathing against hers until the silence settled around them and he fell asleep again.
She’d stayed awake, watching, knowing it might be her last chance.
In sleep, he looked younger, closer to the boy she’d kissed beneath the bleachers than the man who would leave her.
The simplicity of it, when nothing was simple, rocked her.
Gabi stood by the bed that final morning, backpack hanging off her shoulder, as the wanderer, the journalist, stared out the window, his fingertips pressed to the glass.
Far away. Somewhere she couldn’t follow.
She wanted to reach for him again, but this version of him felt new—the part he closed off from the world.
But, oh, how she wanted to know everything. Because, like it or not, this was love.
Gabi was many things, but confused about her feelings wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t convenient. In fact, the timing sucked. Dallas was nowhere near ready to hear it, and maybe she wasn’t ready to say it.
He had grand plans, Cairo among them, but remarkably, so did she.
Wilder Grounds, where she planned to feature work from local artisans and make the space feel like Promise, not some polished chain café.
She’d even been offered a small catering gig, pastries mostly, with steady enough income on the side that she might be able to hire another baker.
This wasn’t a romance novel with a promised happy ending.
It was possible that Dallas had changed her life, and she’d changed his, but they weren’t each other’s to keep.
Chances were, they were going to have to be adults about this.
Say goodbye, then run into each other at the Magnolia Grill in ten years, given how rarely Dallas came home, and try to forget how wonderful that long-ago weekend had been. How perfect.
“I can hear you thinking, Wilder.” Dallas turned to lean against the windowsill, arms crossed over his chest, employing his ruse of folding himself away.
His jeans hung low on his hips, his long-sleeved henley pushed to the elbows, and a Chicago Cubs cap sat backward on his head.
Damn him. That stupid move had always captivated her.
Like now, he rarely said more than he needed to.
Same as in bed, keeping her on the verge until she begged.
Breaking first, she touched the bridge of her nose. “Contacts back in, I see.” She missed his glasses. Missed the sexy geek panache they gave him, especially paired with inked skin and reluctant swagger. She loved the whole maddening package.
Dallas almost smiled, a crack in the melancholy facade. “Can’t do glasses and a helmet.”
Gabi gave a more-breath-than-sound laugh, and adjusted the strap of a backpack that didn’t need adjusting. “Makes sense.”
Neither of them moved. Evidently, this was what leaving looked like. Small talk and spotty eye contact and pretending the relationship hadn’t changed shape around them.
Then his emerald gaze dropped to her mouth for half a second before moving away, but half a second was enough.
Her mind betrayed her completely, offering flashes: him behind her, gasping against her shoulder, driving into her, whispering roughly in her ear—Do you like this?
—as if her body hadn’t already told him everything.
Heat swept her, and she glanced down, too late to hide a face that had given her away.
Dallas exhaled through his nose. “Gab, I’m barely holding it together over here, so maybe don’t think about that where I can see it. And I can see it.”
Before she could come up with a response—a lie—for what she’d been thinking, he complicated things.
“I like you like this,” he said, his gaze roaming over her. He gestured with his long fingers, a loopy half-circle, but didn’t add more. “Though I’ve never seen you look anything but riotously beautiful.”
Riotously beautiful. There went her writer.