Chapter 2 #2
I'm on the couch with case files spread across my lap, and I am reading exactly none of them.
My mind keeps circling back to the café.
Rhys's hand on my thigh. The slow deliberate pressure of his thumb through denim while he drank coffee and discussed federal case files like nothing was happening underneath the table.
The man is a menace. Badge-wearing, coffee-drinking, and completely aware of what he does to me. He deploys it with the tactical precision of someone who spent three years hunting a killer and never lost the instinct for patience.
I hear his truck on the road before I see the headlights. The engine cuts. The door closes. His boots on the porch.
He walks through the door, and his stance in the frame tells me everything. The day is over. Whatever he carried through it, he's setting down. What he's picking up is me.
His eyes lock on mine across the room, and every nerve ending I own fires at once.
"You did that on purpose," I say. "At the café."
He crosses the room without answering. One hand closes around the case files, lifts them off my lap, drops them on the floor beside the couch.
The other goes to the side of my neck, thumb tilting my jaw up. Rough fingers. Callused palms. Every ridge of hardened skin registers where it meets mine like a current finding ground.
"The thumb thing," I clarify, because apparently I need to keep talking while his hand is on my throat. "With the jeans. In front of Marc and Sela. You—"
"Stand up."
I stand. His grip slides from my jaw to the back of my neck, tightening until the pressure makes the decision for both of us about where this goes next.
I've negotiated with armed men in barricade situations. I've talked down suspects in burning buildings. My voice has been the only thing standing between a bullet and a bystander more times than I can count.
Rhys Blackwater makes every shred of that training go quiet with his hand on the back of my neck.
He walks me backward until my shoulder blades hit the bedroom doorframe. His mouth drops to the spot below my ear that unravels me fastest, and my hands grip his shirt at the ribs hard enough that the fabric twists in my fists.
"Let go," he says against my skin.
He means more than the shirt. He always means more than the words.
I let go. The fabric. The tension in my shoulders. The part of me that runs contingency plans for every room I enter. All of it releases under his hands, his mouth, the steady pressure of a man who doesn't rush because he doesn't have to. I'm not going anywhere, and we both know it.
He strips me the way he does everything. Thorough. Unhurried. Each button is a decision he's already made. Every inch of skin he uncovers gets the full attention of his hands before he moves to the next.
His palm spreads flat across my stomach. Calluses dragging over skin that has never once stopped being shocked by the contrast. Scarred on unmarked. Earned on inherited. Hands that work timber and rope and iron, touching a woman who spent her career behind a desk and a badge.
The shirt hits the floor. His mouth replaces his hands on my collarbone, open and hot, teeth grazing the ridge of bone hard enough to pull a gasp out of me that I don't authorize.
He takes his time there. Tasting. His hands slide my bra straps down my shoulders with the precision of someone who has mapped this terrain before and knows exactly which route gets the response he wants.
The bra drops. His palms close over my breasts, and the roughness drags across my nipples and sends a jolt straight through my center. Thumbs stroking. Pressure building until my spine bows into the doorframe and my breathing goes ragged.
"Easy," he says. Low. Steady. A command, not a comfort.
He drops to his knees. My jeans go next, pulled down my hips, taking everything underneath with them.
His mouth follows the line of my hip bone, the crease of my thigh, breath hot on skin that is already flushed and hypersensitive.
His grip spreads my thighs apart, and the noise I make when his tongue presses into me is something I will never admit to outside this cabin.
He takes me apart slow and relentless, reading my body with the same focused patience he brings to everything he considers his.
Every shift of my hips, every hitch in my breathing, he registers and uses.
Fingers pressing into the muscle of my thighs, holding me open, holding me still, and the pleasure builds with devastating precision.
He knows exactly where the edge is. He has no intention of letting me reach it yet.
When my legs start shaking, he stops. Stands.
Lifts me off my feet and carries me to the bed.
The mattress catches my weight, and his body covers mine in the space between one breath and the next.
Forearms braced on either side of my head.
The hard planes of his chest and stomach pressing mine into the sheets.
The rigid length of him through the fabric he hasn't removed yet, heavy and hot where it presses into my thigh.
He pulls his shirt over his head. Sheds the rest.
Bare skin on bare skin, chest to chest, hip to hip, so immediate and raw that my body arcs up into him before conscious thought has any say in the matter.
"Look at me," he says.
My eyes open. His face is close enough that I can see the flecks of darker blue in his irises, the lines that grief carved into the skin beside his mouth. He is looking at nothing and no one except the woman beneath him.