Chapter 41
Tessa – Writer’s Room
The duvet was crisp, faintly lavender.
Tessa stared at the cream ceiling until the molding blurred. The clock ticked in the corner, loud in the silence. Somewhere in these walls, her captor waited for her to write. She hadn’t.
Her hand slid across the sheet beside her—cool, untouched. No one had warmed that space. No one had slept in this bed but her.
The last time she’d woken in a strange bed, there’d been heat at her back and woodsmoke in her hair.
Scout had been behind her—solid, alive, real.
She shut her eyes.
And went there instead.
The fire at the Grady cabin had burned down to a low, steady glow by the time she drifted off. The storm’s rage dulled to a muffled hiss against flannel curtains. It was quiet now, but it didn’t feel calm.
She’d fallen asleep on her side, facing the wall, quilt tucked up under her chin. Sometime between one heartbeat and the next, the mattress dipped behind her, warm weight settling in.
She woke to the warmth of him on the back of her neck.
For a few long seconds, she lay perfectly still, body and brain on a delay.
The quilt was heavy over her hips. Her bare legs were tangled with his.
His chest pressed along her spine—solid, anchoring heat.
A big, callused hand rested at her waist, fingers hooked just under the hem of her T-shirt, palm wide and sure on the skin of her stomach.
They’d already burned through the worst of it—fear and adrenaline and the wild need to prove they were still alive. She’d told herself that was all it was. A storm thing. Heat and relief and poor impulse control.
Then his mouth brushed the nape of her neck.
Not an accident.
A slow, deliberate press of lips over the place where her pulse beat too fast.
She sucked in a breath.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Scout murmured, voice rough with sleep and something darker. His words warmed the fine hairs along her skin. “Was trying to behave.”
His thumb slid over the raised scar on her shoulder. She went still for a second.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t say anything. His touch just moved on, drawing a lazy line that made her toes curl under the quilt.
“You’re doing a terrible job,” she whispered.
He huffed a quiet laugh against her shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “Figured that out about five minutes ago.”
He pulled her back into him, every solid inch of unmistakable intent along her backside. Heat flared low in her belly, sharp and sweet. Her body answered before her brain caught up, arching the smallest fraction into his touch.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmured, lips ghosting over the place where her neck met her shoulder. “I will.”
She should’ve. They were snowed in. Shot at. Exhausted. They had no idea what waited for them when the storm broke.
But his hand was warm on her stomach and his mouth was soft at the shell of her ear, and for the first time in a very long time, she didn’t feel like she had to carry every worst-case scenario by herself.
“If I wanted you to stop,” she said quietly, “you’d already know.”
He stilled for a heartbeat, breath catching against her skin.
“Copy that,” he said, even softer.
The kisses changed after that—no wild rush, no frantic edge.
Just his mouth trailing a slow path from the nape of her neck to her shoulder, unhurried, thorough, like he was memorizing the shape of her in the dark.
His hand slid higher under her shirt, splaying wide over her ribs, pulling her deeper against him.
His thumb skimmed her shoulder and hesitated, just briefly, over the place she never talked about.
He just drew her closer.
She let her eyes close and felt instead: the rasp of his stubble against the curve of her neck, the low sound he made when she pushed back into him, the way his fingers tightened at her waist like he was bracing himself against the urge to rush.
“Been thinking about this,” he admitted into her skin, voice barely more than a whisper. “Longer than I should’ve.”
“Same,” she said before she could talk herself out of it.
If it shocked him, he didn’t show it. He just held her tighter, dipped his head, and kissed a line down her shoulder that made her hand clutch at the quilt.
After that, the details blurred—the slow slide of his palm, the shift of his hips, her soft, helpless sound when he found exactly the right way to fit his body to hers.
No frantic tearing of clothes this time, no graceless scramble.
Just two people who had already crossed that line, choosing to take their time with it.
He stayed behind her, arm banded around her middle, every movement careful, controlled, like he understood that this—this quiet, this willingness to be gentle—was more dangerous to her than anything they’d done against that mattress the night before.
When it was over, he stayed where he was, chest to her back, heat still pouring off him against the curve of her neck. His hand didn’t move from her stomach.
“In case there was any doubt,” he said finally, voice rough and honest in the dark, “this wasn’t a panic move.”
She swallowed, throat tight.
“What was it, then?”
He pressed a slow kiss just below her ear.
“Me finally stopping being an idiot,” he said. “We get off this mountain, I’m done pretending I don’t want you.”
A pause.
“I’m done pretending I can.”
Her heart did something reckless and painful in her chest.
“That a promise, Wilson?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It is.”
She didn’t say it out loud, but the answer settled in her bones all the same.
Me too. She hadn’t told him she was afraid of what daylight would do to that promise.
She hadn’t told him she wanted to test it anyway.
The cream ceiling came back into focus when she opened her eyes.
No storm. No woodsmoke. No weight at her back—just silence and the soft hum of hidden vents.
He hadn’t just taken her job and her freedom. He’d taken the morning she was supposed to have with Scout — the awkward coffee, the daylight test of that promise.
Anger slid in, clean and sharp.
“You’re not the last man who gets to touch me,” she said to the ceiling, voice low but steady. “Get used to disappointment.”
Somewhere in the wall, a relay clicked. No answer.
Fine.
She rolled to her side, reached for the journal on the nightstand, and flipped it open to the back. The pages waited.
Tessa uncapped the pen.
Special Agent Tessa Quinn. Status: Alive. Not finished. Assessing.
Action: Survive. Get back to the man who promised me a tomorrow.
And make sure he gets it. Make him regret thinking he could turn me into one of his characters.
She underlined survive once, hard enough to dent the page.
Then she started to write.