Chapter 7
IRIS
Something pulls me out of sleep.
A sound. Small and broken, like an animal caught in a trap somewhere in the dark. My heart lurches before my brain catches up and for a disoriented second, I don't know where I am. The ceiling is wrong, the smell is wrong, everything is—
Then it hits me. Woodsmoke. Cedar. The particular silence of a mountain at four in the morning.
My mountain man.
His cabin. My safe haven, inexplicably, after the most chaotic day of my life.
But that sound…
It comes again and this time it tears at something behind my sternum, fills my throat with sudden tears I wasn't expecting. Low and ragged, more moan than cry, the sound of someone in real pain. The kind that lives deep and doesn't let go.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand and squint at the screen.
4:07 a.m. No service—same as it was all day, not a single bar.
Outside the window, dawn is nothing but a thin pink line barely scratching the horizon, the mountains still dark and massive against it.
The stars are fading at the edges. Everything else is black.
I turn on the flashlight. The beam cuts across the room and finds Elias.
He's on the floor beside the bed on a sleeping roll I hadn't noticed when I climbed in and he's not still. His body’s rigid and thrashing at once, arms thrown out, legs pushing against the floor like he's trying to get purchase on something that keeps sliding away.
His breaths are shallow and choppy, each one catching in his throat.
The cabin settles around us with a low creak. Somewhere outside, far off in the dark trees, an owl calls once and goes quiet. The wind sighs through the pines outside.
Elias makes those sounds again. Small and wrecked and completely at odds with the mountain of a man I've spent the day watching hold himself together with iron control. It’s unbearable.
I push the covers back and move to the edge of the bed and nearly fall to the floor. My knees hit the hardwood with a crack that sends pain shooting up. I recover, eyes watering, and crawl toward him. I have to get to him.
Up close he's worse. His face is slick with sweat, hair damp against his forehead, his bare chest heaving with those ragged broken breaths.
The flashlight catches the scars in the low light.
Various sizes, various shapes, scattered across his chest and torso.
At his hip, a wide ridge of mangled flesh, angrier and deeper than the rest. This, I realize slowly, is the thing that makes him rub at his hip.
The tears that filled my throat earlier spill over and I swipe at them impatiently.
He cries out again—a raw, gutted sound.
I scoot closer, reach out and gently cup his cheek in my palm. His skin is burning hot under my hand. "Elias." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Wake up. Elias, please—you're okay. You're safe."
His arm comes out of nowhere.
The blow catches me square across the jaw and pain ricochets up through my face. The force of it nearly knocks me sideways. My eyes water. The cry that wants to slip out of me rises fast and I swallow it back down, pressing my lips together, breathing through my nose until the worst of it passes.
I'm not leaving him like this. I can’t.
He throws his arm out again and I move fast—swing my leg over him and lower myself onto his torso, my knees finding the floor on either side of him, my weight settling across his chest. I catch his wrists and pin them.
My bare thighs press against the hot skin of his sides and I feel the fever heat of him everywhere we touch.
"Elias." I lean down, my damp hair falling forward around us like a curtain, my voice low and steady even though my heart is slamming. "Elias, wake up. You're safe. You're in your cabin. Wake up."
His breathing changes. The choppy ragged rhythm stutters, catches, slows.
Then those green eyes open.
They find mine in the feeble beam of the phone light, disoriented for just a second before they sharpen. His chest rises and falls under me. The cabin is silent around us—just the low tick of the cooling stove and the sound of both of us breathing.
"Princess." His voice is gravel and sleep and something raw underneath it. "What are you doing on top of me?"
His hands, released from my grip, find my thighs. Large and warm and spanning almost the entire width of my bare legs.
Oh.
Oh.
It hits me all at once—where I am, what I'm wearing, what I'm not wearing, the fact that my core is spread open against the hot bare skin of his abdomen with nothing between us.
His sweat-damp skin against the most sensitive part of me.
His scent filling every breath I take. His sleep-rough, gravel-heavy words do something catastrophic to my body.
The panic that drove me to climb over him in the dark dissolves. Heat floods me, fast and overwhelming, and I feel myself grow slick against him. I actually leak against his skin and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Heat climbs my cheeks so fast I feel dizzy with it.
"You were thrashing in your sleep," I manage, my voice embarrassingly unsteady. "Crying out. I couldn't bear to leave you like that."
In one fluid motion, he jackknifes into a sitting position and somehow, with me still in his lap, reaches past me and clicks on the night lamp.
Warm amber light floods the room. I feel the shift of every muscle in his torso beneath me as he does it, the coiled, controlled power of him, and my breath simply leaves my body.
And then I feel it.
Hard and thick and unmistakable against my buttocks as he settles me in his lap. That’s his… shaft. Hard and aroused, for me.
My mouth goes dry. My thighs tighten instinctively against his hips and I watch his jaw clench in response. A vein dances at his temple.
His eyes come to my face.
And the heat in them dies, replaced by something else entirely. Something hard and furious and directed entirely at himself as his gaze tracks down to my jaw where the bruise from his arm is already darkening.
"You found a two-hundred-pound man—an ex-military extraction expert, a man who weighs three times what you do—thrashing around in a nightmare and you touched him." His voice is low and controlled and absolutely lethal. "What the hell is wrong with you? I could have seriously hurt you."
"Elias—"
"Jesus, Iris." The sound he makes is broken.
Completely broken, cracked right down the middle.
His hand comes up slowly, and with a gentleness that makes my chest cave in, cups my jaw.
His thumb grazes the bruise with the lightest possible touch.
"I hurt you. Already." Wetness shines in his green eyes, making my heart clench.
“This is what I do. Destroy beautiful things.”
I place my hand over his on my jaw, the warmth of his skin steadying me. "No, you didn't hurt me. It was an accident that happened out of my choice to wake you. My choices are important to me, mountain man. Even if they may not seem right to you.”
Something shifts in his eyes. The anguish seeps away slowly, like fog burning off in morning light, leaving something breathtaking in its place.
Wonder. Raw and unguarded and completely unintentional.
His thumb moves across my jaw in a slow, careful arc.
"Let me take care of this and I'll put you back to bed. "
Gruff. Matter of fact. But I hear the hunger living just below the iron restraint, thrumming and coiled and waiting.
I shake my head. "If you want to make up for this," I say, tightening my fingers over his, "there's something you could do for me."
His brows knit. "What?"
I move down an inch in his lap. Only an inch. It's enough.
The thick, hard length of him presses against my core—my empty, bare, damp core—and the contact sends a bolt of pleasure so sharp that the moan escapes before I can catch it. I hear the rough edge of his own, feel it vibrate through his chest against my palms.
The hardwood floor is unforgiving at my knees. A dull ache I barely register because every other nerve ending has rerouted itself to the place where I'm pressed against him. His abdomen is a furnace against my soft belly, the salt-sweat scent of him thick.
"The ache is worse everywhere else," I say, trying for another inch. I'm straddling his thighs now and he is so, so hard. The evidence of it against my bare center makes thinking nearly impossible. "Please, Elias. Won't you make me feel better?"
His powerful frame goes utterly still.
It's like watching a predator stop mid-stalk. Every muscle locks. His chest rises and falls in shallow, controlled increments. Like that's the only thing standing between now and something irreversible. "You don't know what you're asking for."
I laugh—surprised by the sound of it in the quiet cabin. Dig my fingers into his shoulders, feel the dense muscle shift under my grip. "I know exactly what I'm asking for. And believe me, I've never before been given the privilege of knowing what I want, much less asking for it."
"I'm not the right man for you." His eyes widen slightly, like he didn’t mean to betray the thought. “For this."
I skate my hips forward and back, just a few inches.
My eyes nearly roll back in my head. Pleasure skewers every nerve ending between my thighs, sharp and deep and desperately not enough. His groan this time is guttural—dragged up from somewhere low in his chest—and the sound of it does as much to me as the friction does.
"Looks like you're perfect for this," I breathe. "Because you want me."
I lean forward, let my chest graze his. My nipples catch against the hard plane of his chest and tighten instantly to stiff, aching points, the soft nap of the t-shirt scraping against them in a way that draws a sharp inhale out of me.
Another rough breath falls from his lips, his hands flexing on my thighs.
The amber light catches the planes of his face, the old scars on his chest and shoulders, the rigid set of his jaw.
He's barely holding on and I can feel it.
In the tension humming through every inch of him, in the way his fingers keep tightening and releasing against my skin like he can't decide what to do with his hands.
"All my life, all men ever see in me is a doll they could mold and undress and play with," I say, holding his gaze. "A woman they can acquire along with a piece of territory and a truckload of weapons. But you see me, Elias. You make me see myself."
He draws his head back and considers me. Long and slow and so intensely focused that I feel it like a physical thing, like heat from the stove, like pressure against my skin. It makes me want to melt and hold perfectly still at the same time.
"Unless," I say, rolling my hips in that slow pull and push again, watching his jaw tighten, "you're saying you don't find me attractive. And this—" I press down just slightly, feel him throb against me, "—is not for me."