11. The Heat
ELEVEN
The Heat
ADDY
The stone bites into my spine.
It doesn't matter. The crushing, desperate heat of his mouth overrides the cold rock, overrides the shivering, overrides every rational thought left in my brain.
Wyatt kisses me like a starving man. His hands bracket my head, his fingers tangling in my wet hair, anchoring me against the wall while he takes exactly what he wants.
I open my mouth for him, pulling him closer, my fingers digging into the hard, scarred muscle of his back.
He groans, a dark, fractured sound that vibrates against my lips.
Three days of stepping around each other in the safe house. Three days of watching him sleep on the floor. Three days of the terrible, electric tension stretching tighter and tighter until the storm finally broke it.
His hands drop to my waist, finding the heavy metal button of my jeans.
"The drive." My voice is a ragged gasp against his throat.
Wyatt pauses for half a second. He strips the heavy, soaked denim down my hips, taking the wet material and the hardshell drive out of the equation entirely. He tosses the jeans near the fire, away from the damp entrance of the cave. My boots follow.
Then his hands are back on me.
Bare skin. The shock of his body heat is absolute.
I gasp, arching up into him. His hands grip the backs of my thighs, lifting me clean off the ground.
I wrap my legs around his waist on instinct. The cold limestone scrapes against my bare shoulders, but the friction of his body pressing flush against mine erases the sting. There is no gentleness here. It is the raw, violent need to prove we survived the tornado, the breach, the mud, the kill.
He claims my mouth again, swallowing my cry as he drives into me.
The impact knocks the breath from my lungs.
He doesn't pause. He doesn't ask. He sets a punishing, relentless rhythm against the wall of the cave, his hips driving up, his arms locking me securely in place. My hands scramble for purchase, gripping his shoulders, my nails biting into his skin.
"Wyatt—"
"Hold on." His voice is gravel, destroyed by the same feral need tearing through me. "Just hold on to me."
The adrenaline from the evasion spikes, mixing with a blinding, desperate heat. The smell of woodsmoke and rain and him. The sound of our breathing echoing in the small limestone hollow.
It's too fast. Too intense. The climax shatters through me in a violent rush, my body convulsing against his. I cry out, burying my face in the curve of his neck.
Wyatt groans, a harsh, tearing sound, his body locking rigid against mine.
He holds me there, pinned between his chest and the cold stone, our breathing ragged and loud in the quiet cave. The fire pops, sending a spark up the natural chimney.
Slowly, the adrenaline begins to recede. My legs are trembling against his waist.
He doesn't let me go.
He slides his hands down to my waist and steps back from the wall, carrying me toward the back of the cave. The floor here is banked high with generations of dry, soft pine needles.
He lowers me down onto the bed of needles, following me down, covering my body with his own.
The frantic urgency is gone, replaced by something heavier. Something utterly consuming.
He traces the line of my jaw in the firelight. His eyes are pitch-black, stripped of the tactical distance he wears like armor.
"You're freezing." He shifts his weight, his hand sliding down my ribs.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." He kisses the pulse point below my ear. "But you're going to be."
He moves over me again, entirely different this time.
Deliberate.
Possessive.
The frantic need to prove we're alive transitions into a slow, devastating claim. He dismantles whatever defenses I have left, his hands tracking every shiver, mapping the heat rising under my skin.
He takes me apart in the firelight, completely erasing the terror of the ridge, replacing the cold and the dark with the absolute reality of his body.
I give him everything. The control, the fear, the exhaustion. I surrender it all to the steady, dominant rhythm of his hips and the dark, unreadable depth of his eyes holding mine in the shadows.
When it breaks over me the second time, it's a slow, agonizing slide into pure sensory overload. Wyatt follows a second later, dropping his forehead against my shoulder, his breathing tearing through the quiet.
The fire burns down to a low, pulsing bed of orange coals.
I'm lying on my side on the pine needles, wrapped entirely in Wyatt's dry tactical undershirt. It hangs past my thighs, smelling of gunpowder and him. My wet clothes are spread out near the coals, steaming in the dry air.
The shivering is completely gone. My core is warm.
Wyatt sits beside me, his back against the limestone wall, his legs stretched out. He's bare-chested, his tactical pants still on, methodically breaking down and cleaning his sidearm in the dim light.
I watch the steady, efficient movement of his hands. The same hands that killed a man an hour ago. The same hands that just took me apart on the floor of this cave.
"We need to move before first light." He speaks without looking up from the slide of the Glock.
"How far?"
"Five miles east. There's an abandoned logging road. We find a vehicle, we get off the mountain, we find a hardline connection so you can confirm that drive."
He reassembles the weapon with a sharp, metallic click and slides it back into his thigh holster.
"Wyatt."
He looks at me. The firelight casts long, harsh shadows across his face.
"What happens when I confirm the drive?"
"Guardian HRS takes the intel. The Feds freeze Ares Global's assets. The contract is done."
"And us?"
He holds my gaze. The silence in the cave stretches, heavy and loaded. The absolute clarity of the last hour begins to fray at the edges, letting the reality of tomorrow bleed back in.
"I don't know." The admission costs him. He looks away, staring into the dying coals. "I'm a ghost. Frost drew a line four years ago. I don't belong in the light. And you don't belong in the dark with me."
"I think I proved tonight that I can survive the dark."
He looks back at me. The raw, unguarded hunger from earlier flashes in his eyes, shadowed by something that looks a lot like grief.
"I'm not usually that aggressive." His voice drops, thick with a sudden, dark vulnerability. "Not the first time."
I push myself up from the pine needles, the oversized undershirt sliding up my thighs. "Or the second?"
"Or the second." He tracks my movement, his jaw tightening. "I let go. I didn't mean to?—"
"You didn't do anything wrong." I crawl across the narrow space between us, pushing his hands away from the disassembled Glock. "You weren't too much of anything." I kneel between his outstretched legs, the heat of the coals warming my bare skin. "If anything, you were all kinds of right."
He goes completely still.
"Let me show you how okay I am with it."
I push the heavy undershirt off my shoulders, letting it pool around my waist. I don't give him time to argue or overthink. I lean down and take him into my mouth.
The groan he lets out is a harsh, fractured sound that echoes in the small cave. His hands immediately tangle in my hair, gripping hard, the rigid control he was trying to rebuild shattering instantly.
This isn't a delicate seduction. It's a claiming. I take him apart with my mouth, matching the desperate, bruising intensity he gave me against the wall. I want him to feel exactly how much I want the darkest, most feral parts of him. The parts he thinks he has to hide.
His breathing turns ragged, his hips driving up to meet me. The muscle tension in his thighs is absolute. He curses my name, his grip on my hair tightening as the climax breaks through him in a violent, shuddering rush.
He rides it out, his chest heaving in the firelight.
When the last tremor fades, he doesn't let go of me. He pulls me up, dragging me hard against his chest, wrapping his arms around me like I'm the only thing tethering him to the earth.
"I don't know what I did to deserve you." The words are a rough, broken exhale against my neck.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. The desperate hunger from earlier is gone, replaced by an agonizing, crystalline clarity. He traces the line of my jaw—a ghost of a touch.
"Surviving the dark isn't the same as living in it." He kisses my forehead, pulling his undershirt back up over my shoulders to keep the cold out. "Get some sleep. I've got the watch."