Chapter 16
“We’re going hiking?”
Finn shut the rear hatch on his Ford Explorer. “Not exactly.”
After driving for about twenty minutes, he had pulled over, parking on the side of a narrow dirt road leading to a trailhead marked by a catawampus wooden sign nailed to a white oak.
“It sure looks like we’re going hiking.”
“It’s not even half a mile. It is off the trail, though, so watch where you’re stepping.” With a hand on the small of her back, Finn guided her over a rotting log and into the woods.
“Okay, see? A trail? Call it what you want, but this is hiking, Finley.”
Finn gave her a long-suffering look. “Do you want a piggyback ride?”
“Oh, please.” She checked him with her hip. “You just want to feel me press my tits against your back.”
He stumbled and she had to pinch her lips together to keep from laughing.
“Careful,” she teased. “Terrain’s uneven.”
For all her joking, the terrain really was uneven, verging on treacherous.
Over more felled trees they stepped, branches, too, and roots that grew up from the ground, thick and gnarled, covered in slippery green moss.
After about ten minutes, they came upon an outcropping of bedrock 150, maybe 175 feet up from the floor of the gulley they stood in.
“Okay,” Finn admitted, his smile a touch sheepish. “This part may technically classify as hiking.”
The slope was steep and the earth loose, the rocks under Effie’s feet constantly shifting. When he offered her his hand, she took it, already feeling the pull in the muscles along the backs of her legs.
“This reminds me a little of—and don’t take this the wrong way—Hell.”
Finn laughed. “ ’Cause it feels like torture?”
“No.” She’d have poked him had the risk of sending him tumbling down the hillside not been too great. “To reach the seventh circle of Hell from the sixth circle, you have to climb down this—never mind. You probably don’t want to hear about that.”
“Why not?” Finn asked, sounding confused.
“It’s all sort of…grisly.”
He looked her dead in the eye and said, “Tell me about it.”
And she did. She told him all about the topography down under, the barely passable terrain that led into the first ring of the seventh circle and the Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood that flowed through it.
With every unsavory fact she shared about Hell or demons or what she did, Effie held her breath, expecting each to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the thing that finally made him recoil in horror, to look at her with fear, disgust. Instead, he asked her questions.
Why boiling blood? And for that matter, where did the blood come from?
If a person committed multiple sins, to which circle of Hell would they be condemned?
His questions were insightful and thought-provoking, and his open-mindedness, curiosity, and easy-going acceptance that a world existed beyond the one he knew made her warm inside.
She liked that he wanted to understand, that he wanted to know her, and not just the parts of her that were palatable.
Was it weird that she was kind of…besotted with him? Sure, technically he was her husband, but…She wasn’t going to overthink it. Not right now.
At the top of the ridge, she set her hands on the bedrock and leaned forward, trying to glimpse what was on the other side. Another ravine, much steeper, the drop several hundred feet.
“This is nice.” Not exactly what she was expecting when Finn had asked her on a date, but honestly?
It was nice, standing there at the top of this ridge overlooking the trees, Finn’s hand still holding hers, quietly content in a way she couldn’t remember being in a long, long time.
Was it a little mundane? Sure, but she liked it.
Maybe that was why she liked it. Because it felt so normal, she could easily picture another hundred days just like this one, a thousand.
More, even. All of them spent with Finn by her side.
“This isn’t it,” he said, crouching and pointing to the rock face. “This is.”
What at first glance had looked like a fissure in the limestone was actually the mouth of a cave. It was small, no bigger in circumference than a water slide tube.
“I think I’m beginning to understand why you told me to wear something I wouldn’t mind getting dirty.”
“It’ll be worth it,” he said, getting down on his knees. “You’ll see.”
“If something bites me,” she warned, crawling after him, “I can’t promise I won’t bite it back.”
The air inside the cave was damp and fecund, cool but warmer than she expected.
It wasn’t as dark as she’d thought it would be, the cave less of a cave and more of a tunnel, one that sloped downward, winding slightly to the left.
Somewhere nearby, water roared, the sound growing louder the farther she crawled.
At the end of the tunnel, Finn, already standing, held out a hand, helping her to her feet. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
He stepped back and she gasped.
They were in a grotto, a pit cave surrounded by rock, and ahead, a waterfall flowed from an open vertical shaft, a giant skylight. Like champagne being poured into a punch bowl, the water cascaded down into a pool of crystalline green water.
“Holy shit. Finn, this place is…It’s amazing. It’s— What are you doing?”
He had one boot off and was in the middle of taking off the other.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
She gawked as he stripped off his thick white socks and tucked them inside his shoes. “It looks like you’re taking your clothes off.”
“Do you normally go swimming with your clothes on?”
“No, but…it’s October.”
“And? It’s been in the seventies all week. I bet the water’s perfect.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”
“Okay.” He reached behind his head and in one smooth move, stripped off his shirt. “Neither did I.”
Her mouth went dry, her knees weak.
“What?” He squinted at her, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
Not in more than four hundred years, she hadn’t.
He looked broader now, an impressive feat, and sturdier, too, with a solidness to him that hadn’t been there before, his chest thickly muscled and covered in a dusting of dark, coarse hair.
“You want to take a picture?”
“What?” Her eyes snapped up to his, heat gathering in her cheeks. “No! I— Shut up.”
“I’m serious.” His hands dropped to the waist of his jeans, unfastening the button before lowering the zipper, shucking the denim down his hips and over his thighs, kicking them to the side. “I’ll hold still.”
“Oh my god.” She toed out of her boots. “You are insufferable.”
He grinned. “And yet, here you are, suffering me.”
She stole another glance at his bare chest, at the dark trail of hair that led from his belly button into the fitted, dark green boxer briefs that clung to the tree trunks he called thighs, and swallowed a sigh.
He had no idea.
She grabbed the bottom of her shirt and pulled it over her head.
A strange choked-off noise fell from Finn’s lips, followed by a sputtered cough. He smacked his chest with the side of his fist and cleared his throat.
“Are you all right?” she asked, dropping her shirt on top of her socks and boots, a pile of her clothes forming beside Finn’s.
He appeared to struggle to swallow. “I’m guessing those are new.”
She frowned. “What are?”
His eyes dropped to her chest.
Her balconette bra was thin and sheer, strategically embroidered tulle and stretchy black lace that did nothing to hide the silver bars through her nipples.
Effie bit back a smile.
“Oh, these?” She trailed her fingers over the swell of her breast, where the delicate lace trim met her skin.
They were new, but only in the sense that she certainly hadn’t been pierced the last time he’d seen her in a similar state of undress.
She peeked at him through her lashes, watching him watch her under half-lidded eyes. “Do you like them?”
Maybe it was a little wicked, teasing him like that, but he could consider it payback after he’d razzed her for ogling him.
Sunbeams caught on his lashes and cast shadows across his eyes, making his pupils seem wider and darker than they were, as he put one foot in front of the other, prowling toward her.
Each step he took ratcheted up her heartbeat, her pulse tripping by the time he stopped in front of her, his hand curling around her hip, drawing her to him.
His cock, already half-hard, pressed against her stomach, and her breath caught in the back of her throat.
He dropped his head, his lips brushing her ear, his voice a low, delicious rasp that made everything south of her navel tighten and throb. “What do you think?”
Before she could even try to string together a response, he had already stepped around her, his hand skimming across the bare skin of her abdomen before falling to his side, leaving her dizzy and bereft at the loss of his touch.
“You coming in or what?”
Her fingers trembled around the button of her jeans, and it didn’t seem to matter how many steadying breaths she drew, she couldn’t slow the racing of her heart.
“Tell me.” She slid her jeans down her legs. “Did you bring me here to seduce me?”
“Happenstance.” He grinned, water lapping gently at his sides. He didn’t seem cold, but she wasn’t entirely convinced she wasn’t about to freeze her tits off. “I saw an opportunity, and I took it.”
“I didn’t say it worked.”
“Huh.” Amazing how much disbelief he could pack into one tiny word. “So you’re not…thinking about it? Not even a little?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied, wading into the water until it lapped at the bottoms of her breasts. It was cool but far from cold, the perfect temperature.
“No?” One brow arched slightly higher than the other. “Because the way you told it, you couldn’t keep your hands off me. What was it you said? When you want someone so badly, all you can think about is the way they smell, how they taste, the sounds they make? Did I get that right?”