Chapter 29
CHLOE
Dollie and Emma were waiting at the door.
The moment Josh’s truck pulled into the driveway, the porch light came on and the door opened and two figures appeared, one tall with red hair and one small with a stuffed dinosaur, and the sight of them standing there, safe and waiting, split something open inside me that I had been holding shut with nothing but willpower for the past twelve hours.
Emma ran. She was off the porch before Dollie could stop her, her bare feet on the cold gravel, her purple pajamas flapping, Sir Chomps-a-Lot abandoned on the steps. She hit me at full speed and I caught her and dropped to my knees and held her so tight that she squeaked.
“Mama,” she said. Just that. My name. Over and over, pressed into my neck, her small arms locked around me like she was never going to let go.
“I am here, baby. I am right here.”
Dollie was next. She waited until I stood up, waited until I could see her face, and then she pulled me into a hug that was not gentle. It was fierce. The kind of hug that said I was so scared and I am so angry and I love you so much, all at once, without words.
“The necklace worked,” she said against my ear.
“You are insane,” I whispered.
“I am your best friend. Same thing.”
We went inside. The house was warm. Dollie had been busy while we were gone.
The kitchen was clean. There was food on the counter.
Emma’s drawings were spread across the table, evidence that Dollie had kept her occupied and distracted for hours, and the normalcy of it, the crayons and the cookies and the warm house, made my eyes burn all over again.
Emma would not let go of me. She sat on my lap at the kitchen table while I drank the tea Dollie pressed into my hands, and she played with my hair and whispered things to Sir Chomps-a-Lot about Mama being home and the dinosaur needing to protect her better next time.
Sawyer stood in the kitchen doorway and watched us. He had not spoken since we came inside. His face was closed. Tight. The mask back in place, the one he wore when the feelings were too big and too dangerous to let out in front of other people. But his eyes, those green eyes, were burning.
Josh and Dollie left quietly. Josh squeezed my shoulder at the door. Dollie hugged me one more time and whispered that she would be back in the morning and that if I ever did anything like that again she would be the one tying me up.
I put Emma to bed.
It took a long time. She did not want me to leave the room.
She held my hand and asked me to stay and asked me to tell her a story, three stories, four stories, and when she finally fell asleep her grip on my fingers was still tight.
I sat beside her in the dark, listening to her breathe, watching the moonlight fall across her face, and let the tears come because she could not see them and I had been holding them for too long.
When her hand finally relaxed, I eased my fingers free. Kissed her forehead. Tucked the blanket around her shoulders and set Sir Chomps-a-Lot in the crook of her arm.
I walked down the hall to where he was.
Sawyer was in the bedroom. Standing by the window with his good hand braced against the frame, looking out at the dark forest like it held something he needed to see.
The sling was off. His shoulder was wrapped but he had discarded the immobilization, and I could see the bandage through his unbuttoned flannel, white against the tan of his skin.
I closed the door behind me.
He turned.
The look on his face stopped me where I stood.
It was not anger. It was not relief. It was something beyond both of those, something raw and vast and terrifying, the look of a man who had spent the last twelve hours confronting the possibility of losing everything he had just found and was now standing in front of the woman who had almost been taken from him.
“Sawyer,” I started.
He crossed the room in three strides. His mouth was on mine before I could finish the syllable.
This kiss was not soft. It was not tender.
It was not the kiss of a man who was glad to see me or a man who had missed me.
It was the kiss of a man who was staking a claim.
Possessive. Consuming. His good hand fisted in my hair, tilting my head back, and his mouth devoured mine with a hunger that bordered on fury, and I tasted the fear on his lips, the hours of not knowing, the terror he had buried under action and control and now had nowhere to put except against my mouth.
I kissed him back. Matching his intensity, pouring everything into it, the guilt and the relief and the desperate need to feel him alive and solid and real. My hands found his chest, slid up to his neck, pulled him closer even though there was no closer to get.
He walked me backward. My back hit the door and the impact sent a jolt through my body that he swallowed with his mouth.
His hips pinned me. His hand left my hair and found my wrist, circled it, pressed it above my head against the wood.
Then the other wrist, both captured in his one good hand, held above me while his mouth moved down my jaw to my throat.
“You left me,” he said against my neck. Low. Rough. The words vibrated against my pulse point. “You walked out that door.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“You left me.” He bit down on the curve of my neck, not gentle, hard enough to make me gasp, and the sting of it shot straight through me. “Do not ever do that again.”
He released my wrists and lifted me. My legs wrapped around his waist and he carried me to the bed and put me down on it, and the way he looked down at me, breathing hard, his eyes dark and burning, made every nerve in my body light up.
He pulled his flannel off. Carefully, because of the shoulder, but with an impatience that made the carefulness look violent. His shirt followed. Then he was leaning over me, one hand beside my head, his body caging mine against the mattress.
“You are mine,” he said. “Say it.”
“I am yours.”
“Again.”
“I am yours, Sawyer.”
He stripped my shirt off. My bra. His mouth found my breast and he was not gentle.
He sucked hard, teeth grazing, his hand gripping my hip with a possessiveness that would leave marks, and I arched into him and moaned and did not care about being quiet because the need was too big and too urgent and I had spent twelve hours thinking I might never feel his hands on me again.
He pulled my pants off. Everything. Left me bare on the bed while he stood and unbuckled his belt with his good hand, his eyes never leaving mine, and the way he looked at me, like I was something he intended to consume completely, made my thighs press together and my breath come in short, sharp gasps.
He was over me again. His mouth trailing down my stomach, biting my hip, his hand sliding between my thighs and finding me already wet, already aching, and the groan he made at the feel of me was dark and primal and sent a flood of heat through my entire body.
“Turn over,” he said.
I turned. Face down on the mattress, my heart pounding, and I felt him behind me. His hand gripped my hip and pulled me up to my knees, and then his mouth was at the back of my neck, biting, sucking, marking me in places that no one would see but we would both know were there.
He reached to the nightstand. I heard the drawer open.
Heard something slide, fabric maybe, and then his hand was gathering both my wrists behind my back.
The fabric wrapped around them. Snug. Not painful.
But firm. Holding me in place with a deliberateness that made my breath stop and my body flood with a heat so intense I felt dizzy.
“Too tight?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good.”
He positioned himself behind me. I felt him at my entrance, hard and hot, and then he pushed inside in one long, deep stroke that tore a cry from my throat. The angle was devastating. Deeper than before. The fullness of him stretching me, filling me, hitting a spot that made my vision go white.
He held still. Buried deep. One hand gripping my bound wrists, the other on my hip, and I could feel him everywhere. Behind me. Inside me. Around me. The weight and heat and power of him consuming every sense I had.
“Move,” I gasped. “Please.”
He moved. Not slow. Not gentle. Hard, driving thrusts that rocked my entire body forward with each one, and the sound of us, skin against skin in the quiet room, was obscene and perfect.
His hand tightened on my wrists, pulling my arms back slightly, arching my spine, changing the angle so that every thrust went impossibly deep.
“This is what happens when you try to leave me,” he said, his voice rough and broken. He drove into me harder and I screamed into the pillow. “You do not get to leave. You do not get to sacrifice yourself. You are mine, Chloe.”
“Yours,” I gasped. “I am yours.”
He leaned over my back. His chest against me, his mouth at my ear, and his hips never stopped moving.
The pace was relentless. Punishing. The kind of pace that was not about pleasure alone but about reclaiming, about pressing his presence so deeply into me that I would feel him for days and remember with every step that I belonged to someone who would cross hell to bring me back.
The orgasm built fast. Too fast. The combination of the angle and the restraint and his voice in my ear and the raw intensity of being taken like this after everything that had happened was too much.
I shattered with a scream that I could not muffle, my body clenching around him in waves that made him groan against my neck.
He did not stop.
He kept moving through the aftershocks, his pace unchanged, driving into me with a focus that was almost meditative, and the overstimulation hit me like a second wave.
My body was trembling, hypersensitive, every nerve ending firing, and each thrust sent a jolt of pleasure so sharp it bordered on pain.
“Too much,” I gasped.
“You can take it.” His mouth found my shoulder. He bit down and the sting of it mixed with the pleasure and I moaned, long and broken. “You can take it because you are mine and I am not done with you.”
He pulled out. Untied my wrists. Flipped me onto my back, and before I could catch my breath he was inside me again, this time facing me, his weight pressing me into the mattress, his forehead against mine. His hand found mine, fingers lacing together, pinning my hand beside my head.
“Look at me,” he said.
I opened my eyes. Green met blue. And he began to move again.
Slower this time. Deeper. Each stroke deliberate and consuming, his eyes locked on mine, and the intimacy of it after the roughness was almost more than I could bear.
He was not just claiming my body. He was claiming all of me.
Every piece. Every part. The woman who had walked out the door and the woman who had come back and the woman underneath both of them who had always, always been his.
“Come with me,” he said.
The orgasm was different this time. Slower.
Building from somewhere deep, somewhere fundamental, and when it broke it broke through my entire body.
I cried out and he groaned and his hips stuttered and then he was coming, his body rigid, his face buried in my neck, his hand crushing mine against the mattress as he emptied himself into me with a groan that sounded like surrender.
We lay tangled. Breathing. The room dark and warm and smelling like sweat and us and the cedar that seemed to be embedded in his skin no matter where we were. His weight was on me and I held it gladly because the pressure of his body on mine was the most reassuring thing I had ever felt.
He rolled to the side. Pulled me against him. Pressed his face into my hair.
The silence was thick and warm and full of everything we did not need to say. My body was humming, buzzing, every muscle loose and spent. His fingers traced lazy circles on my hip, and the gentleness of the touch after everything else made my eyes sting.
“You are really something else, Sawyer,” I said.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You needed to remember.”
“Remember what?”
“That you belong to me.” His arms tightened around me. “That no matter where you go or who takes you or what deal you try to make, you belong to me and I will come for you. Every time.”
My throat closed. The tears came again, quiet ones, slipping down my cheeks and onto his chest, and he did not wipe them away. He let them fall.
“I always belonged to you,” I said. “From the first day I showed up at your sawmill with those stupid cookies. I was yours before you even knew it.”
“I knew it,” he said quietly. “I knew it the second you smiled at me and I forgot how to breathe. I just did not know what to do about it.”
I tilted my face up. Looked at him in the dark. His eyes were soft. The mask gone. The walls down. The man underneath, the one that only I got to see, looking at me with a tenderness that was almost unbearable after the ferocity of what we had just done.
“I love you, Sawyer,” I said.
He smiled. Not the ghost. Not the almost. A real, full, wide smile that transformed his entire face, that made him look younger and lighter and like the man he might have been if the world had been kinder to him. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
He kissed me. Slow. Soft. The opposite of everything that had come before, a kiss that was all tenderness and certainty and the quiet devastation of a man who had finally stopped fighting the one thing that could save him.
“I love you too,” he said against my lips. “Now go to sleep before I decide to remind you again.”
I smiled. Tucked my head under his chin. And fell asleep in his arms for the first time since I had been taken, and the last thing I felt before sleep pulled me under was his heartbeat against my cheek, steady and strong and beating for me.