Chapter 15 #3
Did she want a future with him? Every part of her answered yes with a violence that frightened her. Could she survive it? Could she outrun the one thing clawing at her spine since the moment she saw the skyline of this city again?
The need to go home.
Could she go home and reconcile her past to be worthy of such a grounded man?
The one thing she’d avoided for years. The thing that terrified her more than bullets or blood or watching him drop in Rio, half-conscious and bleeding out in her arms.
Home.
Her grandmother’s face rose before her, the disappointment weathered deep into the lines around her eyes. Bailee’s stomach knotted painfully.
What did she have to offer her people now? What right did she have to walk back onto that land after turning her back on the path? After becoming a CIA officer? After using that badge, that job, every access point she had to search for Taryn undercover?
Would her grandmother respect that? Would she call it betrayal? Would she call it survival?
Taryn. Sweet, bright Taryn.
Bailee’s jaw clenched. She had gotten so close.
She had run down every lead, every rumor, every whisper, and had lost her all over again.
Her cousin was still gone, and the bone-deep guilt of that failure lived in her chest like something with teeth, chewing through her every time she thought she could breathe again.
Shame had been bad enough. But guilt? Guilt was a blade she’d learned to live around. She dragged in a breath that felt jagged, raw.
If she didn’t face this, if she didn’t unravel the knots she’d bound herself in, she would lose him. Lose Bear. Lose whatever lived between them. Lose herself, and she could feel it. She was right at the edge. Something in her chest trembled. Something in her spirit listened.
She rose before she could talk herself out of it. Crossed the room. Stopped at the connecting door. Her hand hovered. Her breath shook. Her heart pounded so hard it hurt.
She turned the handle and pushed the door open. She froze at the sight that greeted her. Bear stood there. Just stood there. Like a sin. Like a prayer answered.
Water-slick and dripping from his hair, beads slid down his mahogany skin in slow, sinful lines, catching the last amber slant of sunset until he looked carved from heat and dusk.
He wore only his UDT shorts, those damn, scandalous strips of fabric Zorro swore were illegal in twelve countries, clinging low on his hips, molded to the thick, powerful lines of him, leaving nothing to imagination and everything to want.
His chest was a broad, gleaming plane of muscle, every breath flexing over hard pecs and sculpted abs, water tracking the ridges like worship. His obliques cut down in deep, shadowed grooves that disappeared beneath the soaked fabric, teasing a path her hands and mouth ached to follow.
His hair hung in wet, dark ribbons around his face and shoulders, dripping down the strong column of his throat, each drop sliding over the sharp line of his jaw, catching on the dark stubble there before racing lower.
He looked at her, and the room stopped breathing. That stillness, the one that lived in his bones, deep and primal, wrapped around her like gravity, drawing her in with a force her trembling hands couldn’t fight.
He wasn’t just a man standing in front of her.
He was a storm she had walked straight into, and her whole body answered like it had always belonged in the eye of it.
Her knees almost buckled.
She caught the doorframe with one hand because he shifted her world, unbalanced her. How was she supposed to remember why she’d come here? How was she supposed to form a single coherent thought with this man standing in front of her like that?
His eyes locked onto hers, bear-dark, fierce, quiet, and wanting, and the whole world collapsed to the heat in his gaze, like he was calling her home with nothing but the way he looked at her.
The water still clung to his body, beads sliding down every carved line of muscle, and something low inside her trembled, answering him before she could stop it.
“Bailee,” he said, low, still dripping, still devastating.
Her breath caught. Her mouth went desert-dry. Her pulse thudded in wild, helpless rhythm.
Every inch of him called to her. Every fear in her screamed. Every truth in her whispered, yes.
She swallowed hard, chest tight, heart hammering like it wanted out, wanted him, wanted to stop running from the thing she wanted most.
She had come here to give herself to him, not with a perfect explanation or a healed heart, but in the only way she knew wouldn’t break him further.
She didn’t want to keep hurting him. She didn’t want to keep pushing him away.
She hated herself for every wall she’d thrown up, and she didn’t know how to stop.
But with him standing there, water sliding over skin and silence wrapped around him like power, all she could think was—
Oh, Ancestors. I want him. Great Spirit help me, I want him.
The words she needed to say, the promises she needed to make, the life she needed to take back, all of it scattered like thin, useless ash.
Blown away in a mind that had been running for so long that stopping felt dangerous, unfamiliar.
Like finding footing on a rocky path she wasn’t sure she had the strength to climb.
Yet here she was.
Shaking.
Wanting.
Standing in front of the one man who made her feel seen…
and terrified
and alive
and unworthy
and whole
all at once.
She couldn’t run anymore.