Chapter 27 #2
I bend forward so I can put my mouth on her naked skin.
Her throat first, the salt of the trail still faint on her skin, then down, taking one nipple slow against my tongue until her fingers find my hair and pull, then the other.
The sound she makes is raw and hungered, and I want every sound she's got. Out here, nobody gets them but me.
Her hands go to my shirt and I let her strip it off me. She flattens her palms on my chest, runs them down my stomach, opens my belt, and when her hand slides in and closes around my cock, I suck in a sharp hiss that dissolves into a moan.
"Fuck." It comes out low and wrecked, and she smiles against my jaw, delighted with herself, stroking me slow through the fire-colored dark.
"Careful," I manage, catching her wrist. "I have plans, and you're shortening the itinerary."
We get the rest of our clothing off each other without hurrying, because hurrying is for people with somewhere to be. Her pants and lace-trimmed underwear drawn down her legs, my jeans gone, every layer its own event, until there's nothing between us but the cold air neither of us feels anymore.
I lay her back on the sleeping bag and start at her lips before taking the long way down her body.
Her throat, then her collarbone. The soft undersides of her breasts.
Her ribs, her belly, the crease of her hip.
Her thighs fall open for me, and I settle between them and take my first slow taste of her pussy.
She's already wet. Drenched and eager for me.
Her whole body arches, and I hum against her and set an easy pace with my tongue, working her clit patiently, learning tonight's version of her needs.
I build her up until her thighs start to tremble against my shoulders and her breath goes short and fast. Then I ease off and kiss the inside of her thigh.
The sound of protest she makes vibrates through my entire body.
I build her up again, slower this time, until her hips are chasing my mouth and her hand is fisted in the sleeping bag and the other in my hair. I ease off again.
"Finn." She sounds ragged and murderous at the same time.
I kiss my way up her body until we're face to face. "When you come for the first time tonight, it's going to be with me deep inside you."
Her eyes go dark. "Then get up here."
The condom box is in the duffel's side pocket, the first thing I packed, and I have never been happier to be a man who plans ahead. I roll one on and position myself over her, my weight on my forearms, and she pulls me the last inch down until our foreheads touch.
I push into her with a control I can't believe I still have.
She takes all of me, her breath leaving her in pieces, her eyes open on mine, and when I'm all the way inside her I stop and stay there, forehead to forehead, her heartbeat everywhere.
She's tight and hot around me and nothing in my life has ever felt like this woman.
"Slow," she says against my mouth.
"Glad to." It's the only speed I've got tonight.
Long, deep, unhurried. I rock in and out of her tightness, her legs coming up around me, her hands sliding over my back. This close there's nowhere to hide from what this woman does to me, and I don't want to be anywhere else.
"I had such a fucking big crush on you in school," I tell her on a slow stroke, because being inside her has knocked down whatever used to stand between my thoughts and the open air.
Her breath catches. Her hips rise to meet mine. "You told me you watched me read." Another slow roll that pulls the air right out of me. "You never said crush."
"The biggest. Nobody knew." I press deep and hold there and watch her eyes lose focus. "Fuck, why did we wait so long to do this?"
She smiles up at me. "Well, for one, we were just kids back then."
"Fair point."
"For another." Her hands slide up my back. "You were never short on admirers, as I recall. There was a long list of girls ahead of me. I was never going to compete with that."
I frown. "I don't remember any of them. Not one." I move in her, deep and easy, and her body answers every word. "There was never a list in my mind, Darcy. There was you."
She makes a sound at that, small and broken open, and pulls my mouth down to hers. Our pace deepens without speeding up, every stroke ground out and certain, her breath stacking higher against my lips.
"You feel like the only real thing I've ever touched," I tell her, the words ragged as I gaze down at her. "Feeling you wrapped around me like this. Being alone with you. Watching you come in my arms. Damn, Darcy. I can't get enough of this... of you."
Her nails bite into my shoulders. Her climax builds swiftly now, pressure I can feel everywhere her body connects with mine. It starts as a long tightening, her pussy clamping down on me in waves, and then a cry breaks out of her, loud and raw, and it takes the last measured thing in me with it.
I don't shatter. I detonate. Everything that's been holding me together all night lets go at once.
I come deep inside her with my face pressed to her cheek and a sound leaving me that I have never made in front of another human being.
Nothing to catch it. She catches it instead, her arms coming up around my head, holding on like she means to never let go.
For a long time we stay exactly where we are, her heartbeat slowing under me, mine refusing to.
Eventually I take care of the necessities and get us zipped into the double bag, her back against my chest, our legs tangled.
She laces her fingers through mine, pulls my hand up, and presses it flat between her breasts.
Her heart is still going quick under my palm.
I'd happily lie here until it settles, and then a long while after that.
She shifts her hips and groans. "This sleeping pad is still a crime against humanity."
"I'll have my team build you a better one. Full R&D priority. You can put your name on the patent."
Her laugh is low and sleepy and I feel it through my own chest. Then we go quiet, both of us awake, listening to the stream and the wind. Everything that's waiting for us is a long way down this mountain. Tonight it stays there.
Twenty feet from this tent is the flat rock where I drew the first Bardot Adventures logo on the back of a failed chemistry quiz. I thought I knew exactly who I was up here back then—the seventeen-year-old kid who was leaving to carve his own path, on his own terms.
Every plan I ever made on this ledge was the same plan. Get out. Go far. Don't stop. Don't look back.
Tonight I made love to a woman on this ledge, and I don't want to leave. Not the mountain. Not the tent. Not the town at the bottom of it. Not her.
I wait for the itch to hit me. The restless pull that has ended every good night of my adult life, the one that starts in my feet and finishes at a departure gate. I've trusted it my whole life. I lie still in the dark with Darcy's heart under my hand and wait for it to come take tonight apart.
It doesn't come.
The kid who sat on that rock had a name for everything he wanted. Fun. Adventure. A story worth telling at the table. I can't file tonight under any of them.
It should terrify me. It does.
Just not enough to let go.