Chapter 17 MAYA
MAYA
I feel every nerve ending I own firing at once, my whole body still pulsing from what just happened, my thighs trembling against Reid's hips where he still has me pinned to the cedar.
That was the most powerful thing I have ever felt in my life.
My mind is still rattled by it, trying to reassemble itself.
But my body isn't interested in waiting.
I can feel him between my legs, still hard, the length of him pressed directly against my sex through the layers between us.
The contact is specific and unavoidable and my hips move toward it on instinct. Wanting more.
The groan Reid makes starts deep in his chest. His beard drags against my neck as he drops his mouth to it, and his voice comes out rough against my skin.
"Careful." Half breath, half sound. "Hold still for me. One more move and I lose it."
This man. This enormous, contained, controlled man who carries steadiness in his bones. He is shaking with the effort of holding himself together and it is because of me.
I move my hips again.
Slow. Deliberate. A roll of my pelvis that drags me against the full length of him, and I watch his face while I do it.
The wind comes across the ridge. Cold and clean, carrying pine and wet earth. The valley sits enormous and patient below us. Reid is looking and I watch his control cracking at every edge, everything underneath it pressing hard against the surface.
He pulls back creating distance between us. His eyes find mine directly and I can see it, the specific torture of a man deciding whether to hold the line or let it go. The muscle at his jaw ticks once.
"If you keep doing that," he says, "I'm going to take you. Right here."
I hold his gaze.
"I want you to."
The growl that comes out of him is low and certain and then his mouth is on mine, hard and consuming, and I feel the exact moment his restraint breaks in the way his hands tighten and the kiss stops being careful and becomes something else entirely.
He lowers my legs to the ground. My feet find the snow.
He keeps kissing me while his hands go to his jacket, shrugging it off in one motion.
I watch him reach inside. His hands move along the interior, finding something at the back panel, unzipping a seam I hadn't noticed.
A few quick adjustments and then he is shaking the jacket out and laying it flat across the snow, and I understand.
The back panel has opened into something wide and insulated, spread across the white ground, like a blanket.
He straightens. Looks at me.
"Come here, sweetheart."
He takes my hand and helps me down. I lie back and the snow compresses beneath the insulation, cold through the layers at my back, and then Reid is above me, lowering himself over me, bracing his forearms on either side of my face.
His weight settles against me, not all of it, just enough to feel real and solid and entirely him.
He reaches down and moves a strand of hair from my face. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
Then he kisses me. Slow. Patient. Like we have all the time there is and he intends to use every second of it.
We start to move against each other and I notice, distantly, that I am not cold. His body radiates heat through every layer still between us. Everywhere we touch I am warm. Everywhere he hasn't touched yet I want him to.
He sits back on his knees and pulls his thermal over his head in one gesture.
I forget what I was thinking.
His chest is broad and deep, heavy muscle, dark hair across the pectorals narrowing as it tracks down the center of his stomach.
A scar along his ribs. Another near his hip.
The body of a man who has done hard things in hard places and carries the evidence without comment.
I reach up and put both hands flat against his chest.
The warmth of him under my palms. The give of muscle over bone. The dark hair softer against my fingers than I expected.
He watches me touch him. Doesn't move. Lets me have it.
We undress each other slowly. His hands on my layers, mine on his. The cold air finds my skin each time something comes off and then his hands find it faster, and warmer, and the cold stops mattering.
Then he starts to move down my body.
His mouth at my throat. My collarbone. The curve of my breast, his tongue circling my nipple before he moves on, and I am already trembling by the time he reaches my stomach.
His hand slides under me, cupping my hips, lifting me toward his mouth.
His other hand travels up my side and finds my breast, fingers closing on my nipple with a pressure that pulls a sound of pleasure out of me.
And then his mouth finds the center of me.
His tongue moves in slow, deliberate strokes, learning me, and every pass sends sensation spiking up through my core and into my chest. He works me unhurried, thorough and completely focused.
His fingers at my nipple tighten when his tongue circles, loosen when he flattens it against me in a long slow drag, and the coordination of it, the precision of it, the fact that he is paying that quality of attention to every signal my body gives him, undoes me faster than anything has in my life.
I push my hands into his hair.
He makes a sound against me that I feel everywhere.
The tension builds in waves, each one higher, each one tightening through my thighs and up through my belly, and I am pulling at his hair and moving against his mouth and I cannot stop either thing.
I come apart. Long and rolling, my whole body lifting off the jacket, his hands the only thing keeping me anchored to the ground.
The aftermath settles slowly. My chest heaving. My hands still in his hair.
Reid lifts his head.
His beard is wet. His eyes are dark and completely steady and he is looking at me with an expression that tightens my stomach all over again.
He moves up my body settling his hips between my thighs and I feel him there, thick and heavy, the blunt head of him pressing against my entrance, and I pull in a slow breath.
He braces above me. Looks at my face.
"I'm clean," he says. "It's been a long while."
"Me too." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I have an implant."
His eyes stay on mine. One beat. Two.
He presses forward.
The stretch is immediate and total. A slow, deep push that goes on longer than I'm prepared for, and I grip his forearms and breathe and he watches my face the entire time, reading every flicker of it.
He moves in increments, giving me time with each one, and when he is fully seated inside me he stops completely. His forehead drops to mine.
Nothing between us. Just this. Just him, filling me so completely that I can feel my pulse around him.
"Okay?" His voice is strained at the edges.
"Yes." The word barely clears my throat.
He holds. The stillness of a man exerting serious control, visible in the locked set of his shoulders and the tension running down his arms into the ground. His breath comes out through his nose in one long measured exhale.
"Reid." I shift my hips. "Move. Please."
He moves.
Long, slow strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pressing back in to the hilt, deep and deliberate.
"Good girl." His mouth at my jaw. "You feel so perfect."
I arch up into him.
"I know." His lips graze my ear. "I know, sweetheart. You're taking me so well."
The pace builds. The snow beneath the jacket compresses further with each stroke. Above us the pine branches are still and the wind comes in intervals across the ridge and none of it reaches me. I am entirely warm. Entirely here. Entirely his in a way that should frighten me but it doesn't.
After a while he goes still inside me. Braced above me, he shifts his weight in one smooth controlled motion and then I am on top of him, his hands firm on my hips, and somehow the connection hasn't broken.
I look down at him.
He looks up at me. Completely patient. Completely present. Waiting.
I start to move.
Tentative at first, finding the angle, learning the weight and depth of him from this position.
My hands go to his chest, the warm solid muscle under my palms, and I find a rhythm.
His controlled stillness fractures, degree by degree, something raw and unguarded pressing through, and the sight of it makes me move with more purpose.
He sits up.
My legs wrap around his waist and we are chest to chest, his face level with mine, his eyes wild.
He ducks his head and takes my nipple into his mouth, his tongue working over it in slow pulls, his teeth grazing just at the edge of too much.
His hands grip my hips and he lifts me and lowers me in rhythm with his tongue, taking on my weight like it's nothing, setting the pace with his hands and his mouth simultaneously, and the groan he makes against my breast travels through his chest and into mine and I feel it in my spine.
"You feel so good," he says against my skin. "Christ, Maya."
I press my face against his temple. His arms tighten around me.
We are moving together and the ridge is below us and the sky is above us and the mountains are holding all of it and I think, with the small clear part of my mind that is still capable of thought: this is what it was supposed to feel like.
All along. This is what it was supposed to be.
His hand slides between us. His thumb finds my clit, pressing in slow firm circles, and the combination of that and the depth of him inside me and the heat of his mouth still working my nipple brings me close to explosion.
"Come for me, sweetheart."
I do.
It crests and breaks all at once, my whole body locking around him, and the sound I make is muffled against his neck.
I feel every pulse of it from the inside out.
His arms come around my back, pulling me flush against him, and then he is growling low into my hair.
I feel him release inside me, warm, real, his whole body shudders once, hard, and then goes still.
We stay there.
His arms around me. My face against his neck. The cold air sits on my bare shoulders and his hands are warm against my spine and his pulse is slowing under my lips and the valley is somewhere below us, patient and enormous.
His mouth presses to my temple.
Stays there.
I don't move. He doesn't move. The wind comes once across the ridge, lifts my hair and settles again. Neither of us speaks. Neither of us needs to.