Chapter 19
Nineteen
Wren
For a man who just stopped holding the line, he’s in no hurry about crossing it.
Eli doesn’t lunge. Doesn’t grab. He comes to me slow across the shop, like he does everything, like he’s already thought it through twice and found no reason to rush.
When he reaches me, he doesn’t kiss me first. He lifts one hand, tucks a loose piece of hair behind my ear, careful, and lets his palm settle along my jaw.
Then he just looks at me, long enough that I feel it drop straight through my knees.
“Been wanting to do that since the flour on your cheek at the breakfast,” he says. Low. “Every day since.”
“You could’ve led with that.”
“I could’ve led with a lot of things, birdie.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “I don’t lead with anything. You’ve noticed.”
Then he kisses me, and it is nothing like the other two.
Rhett kissed me like a dare. Cal kissed me like a celebration.
Eli kisses me like a man who’s rationed himself for a long time and has decided, tonight, exactly this once, to stop.
Deep. Unhurried. Thorough past the point of fair, his hand cradling the back of my head.
It goes on until I’ve forgotten there was ever a plan to end my week any other way.
His scent wraps clear around me, coffee and rain on warm stone and old soft leather.
And where the other two lit me up, Eli’s does the opposite.
It settles me. Steadies me even while it wrecks me, like I’ve been out in weather for weeks and just now stepped inside.
He walks me backward, slow, one step at a time, until the counter’s at my spine. Lifts me onto it without breaking the kiss. Steps between my knees like he’s got nowhere in the world to be for the rest of his life.
He runs hot. That’s the thing I keep noticing, under all that stillness.
For a man who holds himself so carefully, there’s a furnace in him, and up close, forehead to mine, his breath going slow and deliberate, the heat of him is a promise the rest of him is too disciplined to make out loud.
I get my hands under his shirt just to feel it.
He lets me. He shivers, once, a hairline crack in the wall, and he files it away right in front of me, this new fact, that I’ve found a thing I can do to him.
“Tell me if you change your mind,” he murmurs against my mouth. “Any second. I mean it.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.”
“I know. Telling you anyway.”
He undresses me the same as he checks a building.
Unhurried. Thorough. Missing nothing. My shirt.
The clasp of my bra, one-handed, no fuss.
He takes his time looking, and his quiet is louder than anything Cal said out loud.
Because Cal narrated and Rhett teased, and Eli just looks at me like I’m the answer to a question he’s carried a long time, never once expecting to get it solved.
“Eli.”
“I’ve got you.” Plain, like a fact. Then his mouth is on my throat. My collarbone. Lower. His hands move sure and slow, everywhere at once, and the banked heat under all that stillness turns out to run very, very hot.
It should scare me, how much is under there.
A man that controlled, that quiet, letting the leash out one careful inch at a time, and even the inches are almost more than I can take.
It doesn’t scare me, though. That’s the part I can’t explain.
His hands could do anything, and instead they do exactly, precisely, only what I want, checked against my face every second, and being handled that carefully by a man that strong turns out to be an undoing all its own.
He gets my leggings off and settles his mouth between my thighs, and it’s the same as the rest of him.
Deliberate. Patient past the edge of mercy.
He learns me by degrees. He listens to every sound I make and keeps it.
He builds me up so slow I’m begging before I’ve decided to beg, my fingers fisted in his neat brown hair.
When I finally break, it’s long and deep and rolls through me the same as his scent does. Grounding and undoing at once.
He doesn’t rush the come-down, either. He kisses the inside of my knee, my hip, the soft of my stomach, taking the long road back up my body like there’s no such thing as too much time to spend on me.
Nobody has ever once made me feel like the point instead of the pit stop.
Eli’s done it twice now without a single word about it, and I decide, dizzily, that I am not going to think too hard tonight about what that’s doing to the wall I built my whole life to stand behind.
He works me down out of it and rises, and there’s a new roughness in him now, the control fraying at the edges at last.
“Off,” I tell him, tugging at his shirt, and for once he does exactly what he’s told.
He’s built like the others, broad and scarred and lovely with it. When he lines himself up he stops, forehead to mine, and I feel him gather all that held-back want in both hands and choose, on purpose, to let it off the leash.
“Look at me,” he says. Quiet. Not a request. “I want your eyes on me when I do this.”
Then he pushes into me slow, all the way, filling me by inches, and he watches my face the entire time.
It’s the most intense damn thing I have ever felt, because he will not look away.
He will not rush. He will not let me hide from a single second of it, and hiding is the only thing I’ve ever been truly good at.
“There,” he breathes. “There she is.”
He moves like he does everything else. Deliberate. Relentless. No wasted motion, every stroke deep and certain, one broad hand splayed warm at my hip to hold me right where he wants me. He barely speaks. He doesn’t need to.
The few words he gives me land like dropped stones. “Good. That’s it. Let me feel you. Take it, birdie.”
I take all of it, quiet and grounding and devastating. I come apart around him twice before he lets himself go at all. Eli was never going to be the first one over the edge. It isn’t in him.
By the second time I’m not quiet at all, and he memorizes me losing it like it’s the best thing he’s seen in years.
That serious mouth goes soft. A rare crack shows behind his eyes, the one he keeps locked up the rest of the time.
“That’s it,” he says, low and wrecked. “Let me have that. Let me have all of it.” And I do.
I give him the whole undignified truth of it, and instead of it costing me a thing, he gathers it up like it’s worth keeping, and asks me, without a word, for more.
The knot starts to swell, thick and catching, stretching me open.
This time I don’t just recognize it. I want it.
I clench down around it on purpose and hear his breath break, feel his careful control finally snap clean through.
He comes deep, forehead pressed to mine, my name low in his throat like a word he’s been saving for a rainy year.
“Not the real one,” he manages, tying us together, holding still and warm inside me. “Not till the heat. But when it comes…. If you’ll have us.” He doesn’t finish it, same as Cal didn’t. Not one of them will say the whole sentence out loud, like naming the thing might send it bolting.
And then he does the one I should’ve seen coming, because he’s Eli, and he does nothing by halves.
He gathers me in against his chest, knotted to me, and holds me like he means to stay exactly this long and not a second less.
Steady as stone. Breathing slow. And my whole rattled body goes quiet against him like nothing has managed in a week, a kettle finally lifted off the flame.
I brace for the exit. Pure habit. But I already know it isn’t coming, because not one of these three has left when they were supposed to, and that is fast becoming a whole situation I’m going to have to deal with in daylight.
So. Tally so far. In seven days, I’ve been thoroughly, comprehensively, and repeatedly had by the entire active roster of the Ember Hollow Fire Department on a series of surfaces I serve pastry off of in the morning. The sensible woman I used to be is appalled by every bit of it.
The sensible woman, I notice, has also gone very quiet tonight.
Because tangled up with Eli in my dark, closed shop, his heartbeat slowing under my ear, three scents worn into my skin now instead of two, I go looking for the panic I’m meant to feel, and it isn’t where I left it. I keep patting my pockets for it. It’s just gone.
What’s there instead is warm and unfamiliar and, right now, at least, bigger than the wall I usually keep it behind.
“You’re thinking loud enough to hear,” Eli says into my hair.
“I’m recalculating my entire life.”
“Mm.” I feel him smile against my temple, which is a thing that happens roughly once a season. “Do it in the morning. Right now you’re going to eat the soup while it’s still warm, and then you’re going to sleep, and I’m going to sit right here until you do.”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“There wasn’t a deal, birdie.” He reaches without looking and pulls the quilt off the back of the chair, tucks it around my shoulders one-handed, still knotted to me, still in no hurry at all. “There was you, telling me not to go. I’m only doing what I’m told. For once.”