Chapter 9
RAVEN
The bedroom ceiling has a crack running from the light fixture to the far corner, and I've been studying it for twenty minutes.
Sleep isn't coming tonight. I knew that the moment I pulled the door shut behind me, but I lay down anyway, still dressed, my mind cycling through the same loop it's been caught in since Jesse Hollister muttered five words that rearranged everything I thought I understood about my life.
I was waiting for you.
The rational part of my brain has been building its case all night.
Jesse is complicated. The timing is catastrophic.
We're hiding from the cartel in a cabin off the grid, and this is the worst possible moment to lose my head.
I wait for that argument to land the way it should, for the cool logic of it to settle over me like a weighted blanket I can pull tight and use to stay in this bed where I belong.
It doesn't appear. What arrives instead isn't second thoughts or the careful voice that's kept me functional through every difficult situation I've survived. The wanting moves through me like something with its own pulse, and it is utterly uninterested in my rational objections.
That ceiling crack isn't getting any more interesting, and neither is the argument for staying in this room.
A huff escapes me as I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed, my feet finding the floor.
The cabin is quiet around me, nothing but the distant sound of wind moving through the cedars outside.
No threat, no urgency. Just the night, this need, and the thirty feet of open space between me and the kitchen where Jesse is probably still standing at that window with a glass of whiskey he isn't drinking.
Good sense had its chance, and it wasted it.
My hand finds the doorknob, and I turn it before the last sensible nerve in my body can mount a protest. The kitchen light is still on, casting a warm glow across the open living space, and Jesse is exactly where I expected him to be.
He stands with his back to me, one hand braced against the window frame and the other tucked into a pocket.
The whiskey glass sits on the counter behind him, untouched.
He turns before I reach him, unhurried the way he does everything, like he's been waiting without expecting anything.
The expression that crosses his face when he sees me isn't quite surprise.
It's something quieter than that, something closer to the look of a man watching the one thing he'd stopped letting himself hope for walk toward him in the dark.
I close the distance before I can talk myself out of it.
Jesse doesn't move as I approach, doesn't reach for me or offer me an easy exit.
He just watches with that glacial blue gaze until I'm close enough to feel the heat radiating off him, and then my hand is flat against his chest and my mouth is on his.
My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, and for one unguarded second he goes completely still beneath my hands, like every thought in his head just shorted out at once.
Then he takes over.
One hand finds my hip and the other cups my jaw, tilting me exactly where he wants me, and he kisses me back with a thoroughness that makes my knees threaten to give.
He walks me backward without breaking contact, each step slow and deliberate and certain, until the edge of the counter presses into my lower back and there's nowhere left to go.
Not that I'm looking for an escape route.
Jesse lifts his head just enough to meet my eyes, and the pale blue has gone dark with something I'd need a lot more oxygen to name properly.
"We need to talk first." His voice has dropped low and rough, the kind of sound that does real damage to a woman's ability to think clearly.
"Can it wait?" The question comes out more breathless than I intend it to.
"It can't." His thumb traces a slow arc along the line of my jaw, and the tenderness of it is somehow more undoing than the kiss was. "I'm clean. Tested three months ago." His gaze holds mine, steady and unhurried. "You?"
"Clean. And birth control's handled." I hold his stare without flinching. "Tonight, I just need to feel something other than fear and adrenaline."
The thumb at my jaw goes still. Something shifts behind his eyes, a heat that has nothing tentative about it.
"I can give you that." The words land quiet and sure, and he pauses long enough to read my face for whatever confirmation he needs.
Whatever he finds there seems to satisfy him, because when he speaks again, his voice has dropped even lower.
"But once we start this, Raven, I'm not going to be gentle. "
My breath catches, and the way my body presses closer against him answers before I do. "I don't want gentle."
Something low and involuntary rumbles through his chest, and his hands shift from holding to claiming in the space of a single breath.
His mouth returns to mine, and this time there's nothing held back.
Jesse finds the hem of my shirt and strips it over my head, then reaches back and pulls his own off in one fluid motion.
The sight of him steals whatever air I had left.
He's built like the weapon he is, broad through the shoulders with defined muscle and a triangle of dark chest hair that tapers to a narrow line bisecting his abdomen before it disappears below his waistband.
Pale scars map a history across his skin that I don't need explained, and my hands find him before my brain gives permission. My palms press flat against his chest, slide over his ribs, and my fingers dig into the warm skin stretched taut over muscle because I need something solid to anchor me.
Jesse lifts me onto the counter without effort, stepping into the space between my thighs, and the shift puts us eye to eye.
He cups my face in both hands and goes still for a moment, studying me with an expression that carries more than heat.
There's something careful underneath it, something almost tender that I wasn't prepared for.
"This was always going to happen," he murmurs.
The next kiss is slower, more thorough, and absolutely devastating, and somewhere in the middle of it I stop trying to track what's happening to me.
I let his hands and his mouth do their work while my body answers on its own.
His lips drag down my throat, and his teeth close on the spot just below my ear with enough pressure to pull a gasp out of me that I couldn't have swallowed if I'd tried.
"You have no idea how incredible you look right now." The words land hot against the skin still burning from his bite.
His hips roll forward between my thighs, and the hard length of him grinds against me through the denim with enough deliberate friction to make my head fall back.
My legs wrap around him and pull him closer, and the sound he makes against my collarbone is raw and greedy and exactly what I needed to hear.
When he lifts me down and takes my hand, I follow without a word.
The bedroom is dark except for a sliver of moonlight finding its way through a gap in the plaid curtains, and Jesse doesn't bother with the lamp.
He lays me back against the pillows and follows me down, his weight settling over me with a familiarity that shouldn't feel this natural.
His mouth finds the curve of my neck and works a slow path toward my collarbone, teeth grazing the sensitive skin there, and my hips roll up against him before I have any say in the matter.
"Patience." The word vibrates against my throat, and his hand pins my hip flat to the mattress with enough authority to make the breath stall in my lungs. "We're not rushing this."
He unclasps my bra with one hand and pulls it free, tossing it somewhere neither of us will think about again tonight.
His mouth closes over one nipple, tongue circling slow and wet, and a moan slips out of me that I couldn't have held back if my life depended on it.
His other hand finds the opposite breast, his thumb dragging across the peak in lazy passes until I'm arching into him with my fingers twisted in his hair.
He switches sides and gives the same unhurried attention, and every pull of his mouth sends a line of heat straight between my thighs that has me pressing them together around his hips.
"You have any idea how long I've thought about this?" His voice is low against my skin as his mouth tracks down my ribs, across my stomach. "Having you beneath me. Hearing the sounds you'd make."
He drags my jeans and underwear down my legs in one rough pull and tosses them aside, then hooks his hands beneath my thighs and spreads me open with the same quiet confidence he brings to everything.
The first stroke of his tongue is slow and flat and devastating, dragging through my folds from bottom to top, and the sound that tears out of me echoes off the cabin walls in a way that should embarrass me but doesn't. He doesn't tease.
His mouth seals over my clit with intent, his tongue circling at exactly the pressure I need, and two fingers slide inside me, curling forward against the spot that makes my vision go white at the edges.
"Jesse—" My fist tightens in his hair hard enough that it has to sting, but the groan he gives me in response vibrates directly where his mouth is working and nearly sends me over the edge right there.
He reads every hitch of my breath, every involuntary clench of my thighs, and adjusts his rhythm with the kind of focused precision that makes it clear he's paying attention to nothing in this world except the way my body is responding to him.
By the time my legs lock around his head and my hips are grinding against his mouth, shame is a concept that belongs to someone else entirely.
"That's it." The words land rough and muffled against my skin. "Let me have it."