Chapter 2 #3
He reaches between us and positions himself.
Holds my gaze while he pushes inside me.
A single, controlled press that stretches me open around him until he's seated fully and the fullness is so complete my pulse hammers where our bodies meet.
The noise that leaves my throat has no training behind it.
No strategy. Just my body answering his, unguarded and entirely his.
He sets the pace, and the pace is devastating.
Long, deep strokes that pull back until I'm nearly empty and then fill me completely, friction dragging over every nerve ending until the sensation blurs the line between pleasure and something closer to breaking.
His grip locks on my hip, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks I'll feel tomorrow, and the pressure anchors me to something physical and immediate while everything else dissolves.
His free hand catches my wrists and pins them above my head. One hand. Both wrists. The grip is firm enough that testing it would be pointless, and I don't test it. I don't want to. The surrender doesn't feel like loss. It feels like the first honest thing I've done in years.
He drops his forehead to mine. His breathing is ragged now, the control starting to fray at the edges, and the exact moment he stops holding back registers in every cell of my body.
The pace changes. Harder. Deeper. He hooks his free hand behind my knee and pushes my thigh higher, opening me wider, and the angle shifts just enough that the next stroke hits a place inside me that makes my entire body seize.
His hips drive into mine with an intensity that replaces the breath in my lungs with something that sounds like his name and feels like falling.
This. This is the moment it hits me. Pinned beneath him. Wrists held. His weight pressing me into a mattress in a cabin on a mountain in a town I chose because I had nowhere else to go. I am more exposed than I have ever been.
I am not afraid.
I spent years after Baker died convincing myself that forward motion was the same as purpose.
New city. New job. New identity. Alaska.
I kept moving because stopping meant sitting still with the silence, and the silence sounded too much like a negotiation I'd lost. Rhys didn't fix me.
He didn't save me. He gave me one honest thing in a life full of calculated decisions, and I chose it.
The way I chose this town. The way I chose this cabin.
The way I chose to build something instead of running toward the next crisis that would give me a reason not to think. The way I chose him.
Home. The word surfaces from somewhere I've been protecting for months, and it doesn't mean the cabin or the town or the mountain.
It means the weight of his body on mine.
The grip of his hands. The sound of him letting go of everything except this moment.
Home is not a place I found. It's a choice I made the day I stopped running and decided that the man in front of me was worth the terrifying act of staying still.
He comes apart with his face buried in my neck, releasing my wrists to grip the sheets on either side of my head.
The last thrust drives deep enough that it takes me over the edge with him.
My spine lifts off the mattress. His name tears from my throat in a sound I couldn't hold back if my life depended on it.
His forehead drops to the curve of my shoulder. His breathing slows against my skin, each exhale warm and ragged, evening out by degrees until the tension leaves his body and his full weight settles over me.
We lie there. His arm heavy across my waist. My back fitted to his chest. The cabin is dark except for the light from the woodstove leaking through the grate, and the quiet that settles over us is the kind that doesn't need filling.
His thumb traces a slow line along my hip bone. Back and forth. Unhurried. I close my eyes and let my breathing match his, and for the first time since I can remember, my body isn't running threat assessments. Not the exits. Not the sight lines. Not the distance to the door.
There is just his arm. His warmth. The steady rise and fall of his chest where it presses to my spine.
Home.
The next morning I take the north road toward Palmer for supplies. The route runs along the river for the first stretch, then climbs through spruce forest where the trees press close to the pavement and the sky narrows to a pale strip above the asphalt.
The Stoddard property is visible from the road where the terrain opens up, timber stretching up the mountain in rows that took generations to grow.
Liam's truck is parked near the access road, which means he's on his land doing whatever Liam does.
From the highway, the property looks the way it has always looked. Permanent. Rooted. The kind of land that doesn't change because the people on it won't let it.
A white SUV is parked near the tree line, facing the property. Rental plates. Tinted windows.
Probably a lost tourist. Maybe a hunter scouting for fall. Rental vehicles end up on strange roads in Alaska all the time.
I keep driving. The SUV shrinks in the rearview mirror until the trees close behind me and the road curves south.
I don't mention it to Rhys. Probably nothing.