Chapter 10 #2
He went, surprise flickering across his face for half a second before I straddled him and it was replaced by something much darker.
I kissed his jaw. His throat. The scar on his collarbone.
I worked my way down his chest, my lips and tongue tracing the ridges of muscle, the lines of scars, the trail of hair below his navel.
I tugged his remaining clothes off, and when I wrapped my hand around him, his head fell back against the pillow and the sound he made, low and broken and desperate, was the most honest thing I’d ever heard come out of Sawyer Cole’s mouth.
I stroked him slowly, learning him the way he’d learned me, watching his face for every twitch and clench and sharp inhale.
His hands gripped the sheets. His abs contracted.
His hips rocked into my touch with a rhythm that was involuntary and raw, and the sight of this man, this controlled, guarded, iron-willed man, completely undone by my hand was intoxicating.
“Chloe.” My name came out strangled. “If you don’t stop, I’m not going to last.”
I kissed his hip bone. “Then don’t last.”
“I want to be inside you when I finish.”
The words hit me like a match to gasoline.
I released him and he flipped me onto my back in one fluid motion, settling between my thighs, and the press of him against my entrance made us both go still.
We looked at each other. Rain on the roof.
His heartbeat against mine. The entire world compressed into the space between our bodies.
“Now,” I said. “Please.”
He entered me in one long, deep stroke that made my mouth fall open in a silent cry.
The stretch of him filling me was intense and overwhelming, my body opening around him in a way that felt like being completed, like a missing piece clicking into place.
He buried himself to the hilt and held there, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still.
“God,” he breathed against my skin. “Chloe. God.”
I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck and held him there, deep inside me, letting us both feel the fullness of the connection.
This wasn’t just physical. This was the culmination of every look, every touch, every night he’d let me sit in his sawmill and talk at him while he pretended to be annoyed.
Every wall, crumbled. Every defense, surrendered.
“Move,” I whispered against his ear. “Please move.”
He did.
The first thrust was slow, a long, deep withdrawal and return that made us both groan.
He set a rhythm that was unhurried and devastating, rolling his hips against mine with a control that spoke of a man who used his body for everything and knew exactly what it could do.
Each stroke hit deep, deeper than I thought possible, and I clung to him as the pleasure built again, climbing with an urgency that matched the growing intensity of his movements.
He shifted his angle, lifting my hips with one hand, and the next thrust hit something inside me that whited out my vision.
I cried his name and he did it again, finding that spot with merciless accuracy, and the sounds I was making were loud enough to fill the cabin, to compete with the rain, and I didn’t care.
Let the mountains hear. Let the whole forest know what Sawyer Cole did to me.
“Harder,” I gasped.
He obliged. The controlled patience gave way to something rawer, more desperate.
His hips drove into me with a force that pushed me up the bed, and I braced my hand against the headboard and met him thrust for thrust, my body moving with his in a rhythm that was instinct and need and nothing else.
The bed creaked beneath us. His breathing was ragged in my ear, broken and rough and mixed with sounds that were almost words but not quite.
I pushed against his chest and he pulled back, reading me, and I used the space to flip us.
I straddled him, sinking down onto him in one slow, devastating drop that made him groan so loud his voice cracked.
His hands found my hips, fingers digging into my skin hard enough to leave marks, and I didn’t care about that either. I wanted the marks. I wanted the proof.
I rode him. Slow at first, finding the angle that made my vision blur, then faster, my hands braced on his chest, my hair falling around us like a curtain.
His eyes were locked on mine, green and wild and stripped of every defense, and the vulnerability in them, the trust, the raw unfiltered wanting, was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“You’re incredible,” he said, and his voice was wrecked, rough and broken and reverent. “You’re so incredible.”
I leaned down and kissed him while I moved, swallowing his groans, giving him mine in return.
His hands slid from my hips to my back, pulling me flush against his chest, and the change in angle sent a bolt of pleasure through me that made me cry out against his mouth.
He held me there, tight against him, and thrust up into me from below with a force and depth that had me seeing white.
“I’m close,” I gasped. “Sawyer. I’m so close.”
“Look at me,” he said.
I opened my eyes. His face was beneath mine, flushed and intense and stripped of every wall he’d ever built.
His green eyes burned into mine, and in them I saw everything he hadn’t said and everything he couldn’t say and everything he was showing me with his body because words had never been his language.
His hand slid between us, his thumb finding the bundle of nerves where our bodies joined, and he pressed in a tight circle that detonated everything.
The orgasm tore through me, stronger than the first, a full-body explosion that made my muscles lock and my vision blur and my voice break on a cry that I felt all the way to my bones.
He followed seconds later, his hips driving up one final time, burying himself as deep as he could go.
I felt him pulse inside me, felt his body shudder, felt his hands grip my hips with bruising force as a groan ripped from his throat that was raw and exposed and more honest than any word he’d ever spoken.
I collapsed onto his chest. We lay tangled together, breathing hard, slicked with sweat, hearts hammering against each other through the thin wall of skin and bone between us.
The rain had softened to a whisper on the roof, and the cabin was warm and quiet and smelled like cedar and sex and something that felt dangerously close to love.
After a long time, he shifted me to lie beside him, pulling me against his chest, his arm heavy across my waist. His heartbeat was slowing under my ear, settling back into a rhythm that felt like home.
He opened his mouth. I felt the breath of it against my hair, the gathering of words, and I knew, with the instinct of someone who had spent weeks learning this man’s silences, that he was about to say something cautious.
Something designed to protect himself from the vulnerability of what had just happened.
Something that would try to qualify or categorize or contain this.
“Let’s sleep,” I said, cutting him off before the words could form, “before you decide if you regret this or not. Or whatever this is.”
He went still behind me. The arm across my waist tightened, pulling me closer until my back was flush against his chest and there was no space left between us.
His lips pressed against the back of my neck, warm and firm, and when he spoke, his voice was low enough to be a rumble in his chest that I felt more than heard.
“I might not know what this is,” he said. “But all I know is I don’t regret this.”
The words sank into me like rain into dry earth. I closed my eyes and pressed back into him, fitting my body against his, and his arm tightened in response, his hand finding mine in the tangled sheets and lacing our fingers together.
Outside, the storm was ending. The rain had thinned to nothing, and through the cabin window I could see the clouds breaking apart, letting the first pale stars show through. The world was washing itself clean.
Inside, Sawyer Cole was holding me like I was the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth. His breathing deepened. His body relaxed against mine, the tension that lived in him like a second skeleton finally, fully releasing.
I lifted our joined hands and pressed my lips to his knuckles.
“Goodnight, Sawyer,” I whispered.
His arms tightened. His lips brushed my hair.
“Goodnight, sunshine,” he murmured.
It was the first time he’d called me that. And I knew, with every cell in my body, with every beat of my heart pressed against his palm, that nothing between us would ever be the same.
I fell asleep smiling.