Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Harper
His arm is a vice around my waist. I can feel every finger pressed into my hip, every ridge of muscle in his forearm locked against my spine, and I couldn't move if I wanted to.
I don't want to.
"And now I get to fuck you, pretty girl," he says.
The words empty my lungs like a punch to the chest. Not because they scare me. Not even close. My body has been waiting to hear them since the second I started running.
I'm shaking. I can feel it in my hands, my thighs, the base of my spine. My heart is hammering so hard he has to feel it through my ribs, pressed this close. I'm a mess. A breathless, trembling, soaking wet mess, and I've never been more turned on in my entire life.
God, his eyes.
They're black. Not brown. Not the warm amber they were on the dance floor when he was spinning me and laughing.
The color has been swallowed whole by something deeper.
Something that looks at me like I'm not a person anymore.
Now, I'm a thing he's been starving for, and he's finally allowed to consume.
I should be terrified.
My body responds the exact opposite way. Because above all else, I love this man.
Heat floods between my thighs so fast my knees almost give out.
He feels it. Feels the way my weight shifts, the way my fingers tighten in his shirt.
His jaw flexes. His grip adjusts. Tighter.
Until there isn't a molecule of air between us, and I can feel exactly what this chase has done to him, hard against my stomach.
Neither of us speaks.
Neither of us needs to.
I move first.
I don't decide to. Something snaps inside me. I grab the back of his neck with both hands and drag his mouth down to mine, and the sound he makes when our lips collide is feral. Something torn from the base of his chest, something that vibrates through my teeth.
He kisses me like he's angry. His hand finds the back of my head and grips a fistful of hair, yanking my head back so he can take the kiss deeper. His tongue pushes past my lips, and I taste beer and salt and adrenaline, and I bite down on his lower lip hard enough that he hisses.
He pulls back an inch, staring into my goddamn soul.
"Harder," I whisper.
Something detonates behind his expression. But I don’t have time to figure out what.
He slams me against the bank of the creek bed.
The sand gives behind my shoulders, but the impact still jolts through me, knocking the air from my lungs, and before I can gasp it back in, his mouth is on my throat.
Not kissing. Biting. His teeth sink into the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, and I cry out so loud it echoes off the creek walls.
"Ace. Fuck."
He doesn't stop. His mouth drags up the column of my throat, biting, sucking, leaving marks I'll feel for days. Claiming territory. Branding every inch of skin his lips touch with the message that I'm his and he's making sure I know it.
I rake my nails down his back. Through his shirt, hard enough to feel the muscles underneath tense and roll.
Hard enough that he growls against my skin and presses me harder into the bank.
I do it again. Harder. Dragging from his shoulders to his waist, and this time he pulls back from my throat and looks at me with an expression that makes my entire body clench.
"Do that again," he gruffs out.
I dig my nails into his chest. Drag them down.
Slowly this time. Feeling every ridge of muscle through the thin cotton.
I reach the hem and keep going, pushing underneath, finding bare skin.
I drag my nails up his abs, and his head tips back, and a sound leaves him that I want recorded and played on a loop for the rest of my natural life.
He grabs my wrists and pins them above my head against the bank with one hand. His grip is bruising, and I don't care. I arch into him as his thigh pushes between my legs, and the pressure makes me whimper.
"You," he breathes against my mouth, "are a fucking animal."
"You made me this way."
He bites my jaw. Drags his teeth along the bone. Finds my earlobe and bites that too, tugging, and the sensation shoots straight through me like a live wire. I writhe against his thigh, and he lets me.
His free hand grabs my jaw and turns my face back to his. He kisses me again. Slower this time. My blood and his blood pounding at the same desperate frequency.
I bite him again. His bottom lip. Pulling it between my teeth until he groans into my mouth. He retaliates by sinking his teeth into my collarbone, hard, sucking the skin between his teeth until I'm seeing stars and making sounds that don't belong to the version of myself that exists in daylight.
We're tearing each other apart. Mouths and teeth and nails, covered in dust and sweat, breathing like we've been underwater and just broke the surface.
My flannel is half open. His shirt is rucked up to his chest. There are scratches on his stomach that I put there, and marks on my throat that he put there, and I want more. I want all of it.
He pulls back.
I chase his mouth. He doesn't let me reach it.
"Ace."
"Shh."
He holds me at arm's length with my wrists still pinned and stares at me with his chest heaving. There’s blood on his lip from where I bit him.
Scratch marks disappearing under his shirt.
The bandana hangs loose around his neck.
He looks wrecked. The frenzy drains out of the air.
He releases my wrists and steps back. Just one step.
Just enough that the night air hits my skin where his body was, and the loss of contact makes me gasp.
"Don't move," he says.
I don't.
He reaches for the rope, lifts it from where he dropped it in the sand, and shakes it out. His eyes never leave mine.
"Hands," he says.
I hold them out, trying to be steady. The trembling gives me away, but I don't care. I want him to see what he does to me. I want him to see every single thing.
He steps forward and takes my wrists in one hand. Almost tender. The switch is dizzying. Thirty seconds ago, his teeth were in my skin. Now his thumb is stroking the inside of my wrist, tracing the vein, feeling my pulse hammer against his touch.
"Color," he says.
Even now. Even with the bitemarks throbbing on my neck and the scratches burning on his chest. Even with those pitch-black eyes and the rope in his hand. He checks. He always checks. Because underneath everything. He's the safest place I've ever been.
"Green," I breathe. "So fucking green."
The rope comes up. Rough fibers dragging across the inside of my wrist. A loop settling around both hands as he guides them together. Tight enough that when I pull against it, the friction sends a current straight between my legs.
He ties the knot with one hand. He doesn't even look at it. His eyes stay on the side of my face, reading every breath, every micro-expression, every beat of the pulse he can see jumping in my throat.
"Too tight?" he murmurs.
I test the give. Pull once. Twice. There's enough room to move.
Enough restriction that the choice has been taken out of my hands.
And something about that. About surrendering control to the one person I trust with everything I have.
About standing in the desert in the dark with my wrists bound and his body against mine.
Something about that makes me feel freer than I've ever felt.
"Just right," I whisper.
"Look at the mess you made of me," he murmurs. He takes my bound hands and presses them against his stomach. I feel the raised lines where my nails dragged through his skin.
"You're proud of that, aren't you?" he says.
"Yes."
He leans in and bites the curve of my ear.
"Fucking perfect," he says.
He walks me backward until my shoulders hit the sandy bank, and I'm pinned between the earth and him. His body blocks out the sky. All I can see is the width of his shoulders, the rise and fall of his chest, the blood still glistening on his lip where I broke the skin.
He plants one hand on the bank beside my head. Leans in. Close enough that his lips brush mine when he speaks.
"Now," he says. "Where were we?"