Chapter 6
Kai
It’s eight o’clock.
I’ve been on the deck for two hours. Sitting. Not eating. Watching the river run below and thinking about Tori Lane’s mouth and the sound she made when I kissed her and the way she nodded without saying a word when I told her I needed to see her again.
The knock comes. Two beats.
I know who it is before I open the door. The crunch of tires on my gravel road. One car door. Footsteps that are purposeful and unhesitating because Tori Lane does not hesitate.
I open the door.
She’s in a sundress. Not the river gear.
Not the tank top and shorts. A dress, simple and blue, the kind of thing a woman puts on when she wants to be seen as something other than capable.
Her hair is down. Not the braid. Loose, blond, falling past her shoulders in waves I’ve never seen because she’s always had it pulled back for function.
For a second, we only stare at each other.
“Marissa gave me your address,” she says. Before I can respond, she adds, “I’ve been running a differential diagnosis on my heart rate all afternoon. I’ve ruled out everything except you.”
I pull her inside.
The door closes. My hand is on her waist. Hers is on the front of my shirt. We’re doing the thing from the gravel bar except this time there is no pulling back and no stopping and no restraint that costs me anything because I spent all of mine already and I have none left.
Her mouth finds mine. The flood I’ve been holding back breaks and I kiss her against the door with my hands on her waist and her back against the wood and her fingers already at the back of my neck, gripping with the focused pressure of a woman who knows where the nerve clusters are and is using that information deliberately.
She tastes like wine and spearmint and underneath that, her.
The taste I’ve been replaying since the gravel bar.
I press closer. She pulls me in. My thigh between hers, my hands sliding up her ribcage, my mouth on hers and then on her jaw and then on the side of her neck where I can feel her pulse hammering against my lips.
Fast. Getting faster.
“Inside,” she says against my mouth.
“You’re inside.”
“Further inside.”
I laugh against her skin. She smiles and I feel it in the curve of her neck. I want to feel it everywhere.
I lift her. Her legs wrap around my waist and the dress rides up her thighs. She’s warm against me. I carry her to the bedroom because I’m going to need a surface for what I want to do to this woman and a doorframe isn’t sufficient.
The bed. I set her on the edge. She looks up at me. I look down at her. Blond hair loose around her shoulders. Hazel eyes. Lips swollen from the door. The lamplight warm on the skin I’m about to learn.
I kneel.
Her breath catches. Her hands find my shoulders. I push the dress up her thighs, slow, watching the fabric move over her skin. Her legs are toned and smooth and I press my mouth to the inside of her knee. She makes a sound I want to hear for the rest of my life.
I work higher. Inner thigh. The soft skin where her leg meets her hip. My mouth and my breath and her fingers tightening on my shoulders with each inch I close. I hook my fingers in her panties and pull down. She lifts her hips.
I put my mouth on her.
She gasps. The sound of a woman whose control is a professional asset and a reflex and I just took both of them away with my tongue.
I learn her. The way I learn a stretch of river I’ve never run. What changes the current. Where the tension gathers. Where she goes quiet and where she goes loud. Her hand finds my hair and her fingers grip and I can feel her pulse in her thighs, fast and building.
She’s close. I can read it the way I read water before a rapid. The tension gathering, the breathing shifting, her body drawing toward a single point.
I don’t rush. I hold her at the edge. My mouth on her, my hands gripping her hips, my focus narrowed to her and nothing else. She says my name. A request. The vowel stretched long.
I give her what she needs. I slip a finger inside her, then two, and thrust in tandem with my tongue against her clit.
She comes with her fingers in my hair and her thighs tight against my shoulders. The sound starts as my name and finishes as something open and wordless.
I stay with her through it. Every wave. Every aftershock. My mouth gentle now, easing her down. Her breathing is ragged and her hand in my hair loosens and her fingers trace my scalp and the tenderness of that small motion after the intensity of what just happened does something to me I can’t name.
I rise. She grabs my shirt and pulls it over my head. Her eyes follow her hands across my chest. She’s reading me. Even now. Even after.
“You’re beautiful,” she says. Not a compliment. A finding.
“That’s my line.”
“I said it first. It’s mine now.”
I reach for the hem of her dress and pull it up and over. She lifts her arms and the dress is gone. She’s in a bra, nothing else, sitting on the edge of my bed with her hair falling and her eyes steady and the lamplight gold on her skin.
I stop. I let myself look at her the way I’ve wanted to since the parking lot. The curves underneath the tank tops and river gear, now bare. The line of her waist. Her breasts rising with each breath. The pale skin that’s been warming all week in the Montana sun.
She holds my gaze. She doesn’t cover herself. She doesn’t deflect. She lets me see her the way she lets me read her: directly, without flinching, daring me to keep looking.
I keep looking.
I reach for her bra. She reaches for my belt. We undress each other with the focused purpose of two people who are good with their hands and finished waiting.
I lay her back. She pulls me down. Skin to skin. The full length of her pressed against me. The contact hits so hard I have to close my eyes and breathe.
“You okay?” Her fingers on my jaw. Her eyes searching mine.
I kiss her. Deep and unhurried. My hand trails down her body. The swell of her breast. The dip of her waist. The flare of her hip. She arches into my palm and the response is involuntary. Honest. I catalog every reaction because that’s what I do. I read what she gives me and I use it.
My hand slides between her thighs. She’s wet. My fingers find her again and she bites her lip and the controlled woman, the woman who holds everyone else’s emergencies, is losing hold of her own composure and I want to watch it happen.
“Kai.” My name a request.
“I know.”
I position myself between her thighs. The head of my cock against her. I look at her face. Her eyes are on mine. Not reading. Not assessing. Just here.
I push in. Slow. Watching her.
The way her lips part. The way her eyes close and then open because she wants to see me the way I want to see her. We’re both watchers. Even now, even here, we want to witness this.
She’s tight around me. Warm. The sensation is so acute I have to hold still.
Just breathe. She wraps her legs around me and pulls me deeper.
Her heels press into my lower back. I’m fully inside her and neither of us is breathing right and I don’t care because breathing is secondary to the feeling of being inside a woman who matches me in every way I didn’t know I was looking for.
I move. Slow at first. Long, deep strokes. Reading her the way I read the river. Every response. Every shift. She runs her nails down my back when I hit the angle she needs. I file the angle. I use it again.
“There,” she breathes.
I stay there. I build the rhythm around her. My hips finding the pace that makes her breath catch. The depth that makes her dig in. The angle that pulls my name out of her mouth like a word she invented for this.
She pushes on my chest. I let her roll me.
She climbs on top and the view from here is the best thing I have ever seen.
Her hair falling forward. Her hips moving.
The muscles in her thighs working as she rides me.
She puts her hands on my chest and finds her own rhythm and I grip her hips and let her take what she needs because this woman has spent her whole life being the one in control, and the control she takes here is the same kind: confident, certain, aware of exactly what her body wants.
My thumb finds her clit. She makes a sound that isn’t a word. Better than a word.
“Look at me,” I say.
She does. Her eyes, hazel and gold, hazy but focused because she’s Tori and she focuses on everything, even the things that are taking her apart.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I say. “I noticed you in July. On the raft. I’ve been thinking about you since then.”
Her rhythm falters. Not from losing it. From the words landing somewhere she wasn’t ready.
“Since then?” she whispers.
“You didn’t scream on the rapids. You watched the water. And I watched you watch it and I couldn’t stop.”
She leans down. Kisses me. Her hips don’t stop. The kiss is open and deep and tastes like want and the truth I just gave her. She’s moving faster. Chasing it. I grip her hips and push up into her and the friction is precise and devastating and I can feel her body gathering again.
I roll her. She goes willingly. Her back on the bed, my body over hers, my hand cradling her head, my hips driving.
Faster now. The patience I’m known for is gone.
What’s left is need and focus and the knowledge that I am inside a woman who reads the world the way I do and I never want to be anywhere else.
Her legs lock around me. Her hands find my shoulders and grip. I can feel her tightening around me. The build, the edge, the wave about to break.
“Come for me,” I say against her mouth.
She does.
The sound of it. The feel of her body pulling me in.
Her face, her eyes closing, her mouth open, her hands gripping.
It takes me over. I push deep. I stay. I come inside her with my face buried in her neck and her heartbeat hammering against my chest and the river running outside the window and the last clear thought I have is her name.
We lie there. Her head on my chest. My arm around her. The room is warm and the breeze through the screen carries pine and cooling earth and the steady sound of water below the deck.
Her fingers trace slow patterns on my chest. Idle. Automatic. The fingers of a woman who cannot have completely still hands even when the rest of her is boneless.
“Your heart rate is coming down,” she says.
I laugh. “Are you monitoring me right now?”
“Force of habit. You’re at about seventy-eight.”
“What’s yours?”
She presses her fingers to her own neck. Counts. “Eighty-two.”
“I win.”
“That’s not how heart rates work.”
“Lower is better. I win.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me with those hazel eyes. The expression I know now. The one that means something dry and true is coming.
“You’re funny,” she says. “I genuinely didn’t expect that. When I met you, you were the quietest man I’d ever encountered.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re the man who didn’t say a word to me for three hours and then said the best things anyone’s ever said to me while I was on top of him.”
“I save my material.”
She puts her head back down with a laugh. Her fingers resume. We’re quiet. The river sounds through the window. The night is warm and the breeze carries something that smells like summer holding on.
“I go back on Saturday,” she says.
The words drop into the quiet like a stone into still water.
My arm tightens around her. A fraction. The reflex of a man who has spent sixteen years holding on to things the current might take.
“I know,” I say.
Saturday. Her PTO ends. Charlotte Metro is waiting. The ER doesn’t staff itself and Tori Lane doesn’t abandon responsibilities. She’s the reliable one. The one who shows up. She doesn’t blow off commitments for a man she barely knew a week ago.
I know this about her the way I know the river. I’ve been reading her since the moment she stepped out of that car.
“We don’t have to talk about it now,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I just wanted you to know the clock is running.”
“I know.”
She presses closer. I hold tighter. The river runs below us in the dark. I’m not going to waste the time we have left thinking about what comes after.
But the stone is in the water. And the ripples are spreading.