16. Ember
EMBER
We don't make it through the kiss before it turns into something neither of us is willing to stop.
His hands come up into my hair like he's been waiting years to do it, and maybe he has.
I get fistfuls of his shirt and walk him backward toward the stairs, and the dead man's phone is still glowing on the table behind us and I don't care, the clock can run, the clock can do whatever it wants, because for the first time since the ravine I've stopped running from the one thing in this house that's been pulling at me longest.
"Upstairs," I tell him against his mouth. Not a question. I've had enough of questions tonight.
He breaks the kiss just long enough to look at me, and there's a war in his gray eyes, the same one that's been there since he set me down in that bed.
The man who tracked me for two years. The man who buried me on paper so I'd be free.
He's looking at me like he's still not sure he's allowed this, like letting me go was supposed to be the end of his part of the story.
"Ember." My name, rough. "You don't owe me anything for what I did. I didn't tell you so you'd?—"
"I know why you told me." I take his face in my hands.
"This isn't payment. I don't do payment.
I clawed my way out of a life that ran on it.
" I make him hear the next part. "This is me, choosing the man who lost me on purpose.
Now take me upstairs before I change my mind about being gentle with you about it. "
Something in him breaks open. Not grief this time. Relief, maybe, years of it.
He takes me upstairs.
The spare room is dark and the rain's come back soft against the window, and he lays me down careful of the leg, careful of all of me, like a man handling the one piece of work he was ever proud of.
Pine and gunsmoke and the warmth of him coming down over me, and the last of the wall I keep between myself and everything comes down with him.
He undresses me like he's unwrapping something he was never supposed to be allowed to keep.
Slow. Every layer a decision he keeps expecting to be told he can't make.
He peels my shirt up and off and goes still at the sight of me, gray eyes moving over me in the dark, and where Cass looked at me like he meant to ruin me, Rhys looks at me like he's relieved I'm real.
He gets my jeans down my legs careful of the wound, his hands learning the shape of me as he goes, the dip of my waist, the jut of my hip, the soft inside of my thigh, until I'm bare under him and he still hasn't taken a thing off himself.
"You can touch me," I tell him, because he hasn't yet, because he's holding himself over me like a man afraid the wanting will show. "I'm not going to break, and I'm not going to disappear. You spent two years proving how good you are at finding me. I'm right here. Stop looking and have me."
That undoes the last of his restraint.
He strips his shirt over his head and I get my hands on him finally, the lean hard plane of his chest, the old scars I don't ask about, the heat coming off his skin.
His mouth finds mine, then my throat, then lower, unhurried, reverent.
Not worship. Grief. Every kiss an apology he won't say out loud and a thank-you he can't, for the years he kept me dead so I could stay free.
He closes his mouth over one nipple and the pull of it goes straight down between my legs, and he feels me arch and does it again, slower, until I'm making sounds I don't recognize.
Then he kisses his way down my body and settles between my thighs, and when his mouth finds my cunt I lose the thread of every coherent thing.
He licks into me slow and deep, learning me the way he learns everything, patient, total, his tongue working my clit until my hips lift off the bed chasing it and his hands come up to pin them down and hold me still for him.
He takes his time. He takes so much time it becomes its own kind of torture, the patient tracker following a thing all the way to its end.
"Two years I tracked you," he says against me, low, filthy and reverent in the same breath.
"I can spend one night learning the taste of you.
" And he does, and I get a fist in his hair and I'm not sure if I'm pulling him closer or trying to get away from how good it is.
"Rhys." It comes out wrecked. "Rhys, I need?—"
"I know," he says against me, and the rumble of his voice does something, and he slides two fingers into me while his mouth stays on my clit and curls them until he finds the place that makes me cry out, and he works me there, steady and relentless and unhurried, until I'm shaking apart on his hand and his mouth with my thighs clamped around his head.
He works me through it. "Trouble," he murmurs against the inside of my thigh, the word he handed Cass in the ravine gone soft and possessive in his mouth, and I'd bite him for it if I had one working bone left in my body.
Only when I've gone boneless does he come back up my body, and his cock is hard against my hip, and he's still braced over me holding himself back like the wanting is a thing he doesn't trust himself with.
"Now," I tell him. "Rhys. Now."
He notches the head of his cock against me and pauses there, his forehead dropping to mine.
"Ember." Wrecked. A question and a confession at once.
"I know," I tell him. "I know. Come here."
He pushes into me slow and the stretch of it pulls a sound out of both of us, inch by inch until he's seated deep, and then he's still, buried in me, his breath ragged against my neck, holding us both at the edge of the thing like he wants to live in the moment just before.
Pine and gunsmoke and the warm weight of him and the rain on the glass.
Then he moves, and it's nothing like the truck, nothing like Cass's certainty.
It's slow and deep and devastating, a man making love to the woman he chose to lose.
He pulls almost all the way out and drives back in on a long stroke that I feel in my teeth, and I wrap my good leg around him and meet him and forgive him with my body for a thing my mouth doesn't have words clean enough to forgive.
It builds between us like weather. His rhythm stays deep and patient even as his control frays, even as the sounds I'm making climb, even as I clench around his cock and feel the whole careful structure of his restraint start to come down.
He gets a hand between us and finds my clit with his thumb and works it in time with his thrusts, and the second wave gathers bigger than the first, and what comes out of me isn't his name anymore, it's fuck and please and sounds with no spelling at all.
He says my name again, like he can't stop, like it's the only word he has left.
He's losing the rhythm now, hips snapping into me, the bed frame knocking the wall, and when I come it's slower than the truck and deeper, a long unraveling that drags on and on, my whole body clenching around him.
He follows me over with his face buried in my throat and my name in his mouth and something that might be a sob caught somewhere in his chest, holding himself deep, shaking with it.
He doesn't knot me. He could, his body wants to, I can feel it swelling at the base and he pulls back from it, gives me only what we agreed, and the restraint of that, the keeping of even this last promise, is its own kind of tenderness.
After, we lie tangled in the dark, his heartbeat slowing under my ear, the rain steady on the glass.
Neither of us reaches for anything to say.
Some quiet you don't fill. I've spent six years in silence and learned the difference between the kind that's empty and the kind that's full, and this one's so full it aches.
His hand moves slow through my hair. I feel him gathering something, the way he gathered the truth on the porch, a man who doesn't speak until he's decided the words are worth their weight.
"I never told him you were alive," he says.
Into the dark. Into my hair. Like it's the thing he most needs me to have.
"Six years, Ember. He's asked after the file twice through Sutter and twice I gave him bones on a mountain.
Whatever happens when they come, however this goes, you should know that.
Your father has never once known you were breathing.
I made sure of it. It's the one clean thing I've got. "
I think about what that cost him. A contract abandoned. A lie maintained for six years against the most dangerous man either of us has ever run from. The slow patient work of keeping a dead girl dead so she could stay free.
"I know," I say.
And I do. I knew it the second he told me on the porch, knew it in the way I didn't reach for the knife, knew it in my body before my brain caught up the way my body always knows the true things first.
He pulls me in tighter. I let him. Outside the rain comes down and somewhere out in it a dead man's phone is waiting for an answer and Sutter is waiting for the phone and a clock is running on all of it, and for this one stretched-out moment I let all of that be tomorrow's problem and lie still in the dark with the man who buried me to save me.
The knock comes too soon.
Three knuckles on the door, sharp, and then Cass's voice through the wood, low and stripped of everything but the work.
"Get up." A beat. "Knox is on the roof."
Rhys is already moving, the tracker surfacing through the man, reaching for his shirt in the dark.
Knox on the roof means Knox saw something. Knox on the roof means the clock we left running on the kitchen table just came due.