Chapter 30
DARCY
The lock clicks home behind Finn's back, and neither of us reaches for a light.
I still have his collar in my fist. His eyes are on my mouth, heated and hungry, and there's nothing in his face I recognize from the man the rest of the world knows. No grin. No wry line on deck. Just raw need, all of it aimed at me, and I want him so badly my knees dip.
I pull him down and kiss him, and he gathers me up off my heels and kisses me back like the landing never ended.
None of his kisses have ever felt like this one.
There's no restraint left in it. Only urgency and desire, and underneath it, quiet, unspoken, is the awareness of everything we haven't said all weekend.
The reality that's going to make all of this hard to hold on to the higher we climb.
Neither of us seems willing or able to give that reality air or voice. I kiss him harder so I can't feel it, so I can't hear it whispering that the fall is going to hurt a lot worse than any of the aches I brought home with me from the trail.
We break apart long enough to fight our hiking boots off in the entryway, which is not graceful, and neither of us cares.
His hands are back on me before my second boot lands.
My shirt goes loose from my jeans, his palm slides up my bare spine, and I get two buttons of his shirt open and give up and just put my mouth on the notch of his throat, salt and woodsmoke and him.
"Shower first," I say against his skin. "Then I want you in my bed."
"Yes, ma'am." He follows me down the hall so close I can feel his heat on my back the whole way.
My bathroom has an old clawfoot tub, a curtain on an oval rail, and taps that need coaxing.
While the water complains its way toward hot, we finish what we started in the entryway.
I peel my shirt over my head and his eyes drop and hold.
He opens the clasp of my bra with one hand and draws it off me, his eyes darkening as he unveils me.
The cold air and his heated stare hit my nipples at the same time, and I hear his breath change.
Then it's his turn, and I take it as slowly as I can.
Shirt off his shoulders. The wide chest, the ridged stomach, the scar along his ribs I have plans for.
Jeans and boxer briefs shoved down and kicked away, and Finn straightens up bare in the small steam of my bathroom, his cock already hard and standing thick against his belly.
My mouth waters. He hasn't touched me yet and I'm already slick and ready for him. I don't bother trying to hide what the sight of him does to me. I'm beyond pretending I can be anything but ravenous when it comes to him and his body.
We climb into the tub carefully, his strong hand at my elbow holding me steady.
It's a tight fit for two, especially when one of us is six-foot-two and wrapped in muscle.
He stands with the spray behind him, his eyes still smoldering and steady on mine.
For the first minute the water running off us is the color of weak tea, which is what two days of honest mountain looks like going down a drain, and we stand in it grinning at each other like fools.
Then he takes the shampoo out of my hand.
"Turn around."
I pivot incrementally, until my back is facing him with just enough space for him to work.
I moan as he begins to wash my hair. Strong fingers working my scalp, tipping my head back into the spray, careful with my eyes.
Nobody in my adult life has ever done this for me.
The sweetness of it goes through me sharp enough to hurt.
I keep it to myself. I stand there in his hands and let him take care of me.
With my hair washed and rinsed, next he reaches for the soap. The floral scent and the steam wring a sigh from me, but when his lathered hands begin to caress me as he cleanses me, I melt into his strong fingers and attentive touch.
He takes his time about it, massaging my shoulders, stroking my breasts.
His hands move slowly, his thumbs dragging over my nipples until my head drops back against his chest. Then he moves to my belly.
Lower now, one long pass between my legs that makes my whole body clench, and then his hand leaves, and the sound I make about that is not remotely dignified.
"Patience," he says, rough, at my ear.
"Patience. From you?" I'm smiling as I turn around and return fire.
Soaped hands over his chest, down the muscled ladder of his stomach, and then both fists around his cock, slick and hot and iron-hard, and the groan that breaks out of him is worth every second of the drive home.
I stroke him slow and feel his thighs go rigid, feel how much he wants this in the twitch and weight of him against my palms, and it isn't enough.
I lower myself to my knees in the tub and take him in my mouth.
Clean skin, hot water, the taste of him underneath it.
He fills my mouth, heavy on my tongue, and I take him as deep as I can and hollow my cheeks, and above me Finn stops being a composed man.
He gathers my wet hair out of my face with both hands, not steering, just holding on, and when I look up the line of him is all tension, head back, throat bare, stomach carved tight.
The water beats on my shoulders. I moan around him on purpose.
"Darcy." His hand shoots up and finds the curtain rail. "You have to... I can't—ah, fuck."
He lifts me up off my knees and kisses me deep enough that I taste us both, and then he's the one going down to his knees, folding all that height onto the floor of my tub. He hooks my knee over his shoulder, presses my hips back into his strong, steadying hands, and puts his mouth on me.
Oh. Oh, God.
His tongue moves over my clit, slow, flat, devastating, then quicker. Two fingers slide inside me and curl, and the hot pull of it starts low in my belly and spreads down the backs of my thighs.
"Finn..." His name is devoured by a low moan of pleasure.
I'm loud. I clap a hand over my own mouth, teacher's reflex, because ground floor beneath us is the bookshop, and the walls and floors are thin. Without stopping he reaches up and pulls my hand away and pins it gently to my hip. He wants the sound. He can have it. He can have anything.
The build is slow at first, but it doesn't stay there for long.
My hips ride his mouth, my fingers find his wet hair, and everything in me pulls tight around the point where his tongue is working, tighter, until it lets go all at once.
I come with a cry that fills the whole bathroom, my body shaking against his mouth, his hands holding me up through every last pulse of it.
He kisses the inside of my thigh and stands, still achingly hard, his cock flushed and heavy against his belly.
There is no version of tonight where I leave him like that.
I soap my hands to make them slippery, then I take him in both of them, and this time he lets me have my way.
I work him in long, slick strokes and watch the last of his control go.
His forehead comes down to my temple. His breath saws.
His grip on the curtain rail goes white-knuckled, and he pushes into my fists—once, twice, gone—spilling hot over my fingers with a sound I have never heard from him, low and helpless and mine, the water carrying everything away while he shudders against me.
A curtain ring pops off the rail and pings into the tub.
We're both laughing before it stops rolling. Shaky, stupid, wonderful laughing, his face in my neck, my arms around as much of him as I can hold, and that is the exact moment my water heater, which is older than both of us, decides it's had enough and gives up.
The cold water hits with no warning at all. Finn yelps—an honest-to-God yelp—and we scramble out in a tangle of limbs and curtain and grab for towels. I'm laughing so hard I have to sit down on the tub edge to breathe.
Without explanation, I take his hand and lead him to my bed, and he stretches out across my quilt, damp and golden, watching me.
When I climb toward him, he gives me a rueful look. "The condoms are in the Jeep with my gear."
I grin, because I know something he doesn't. "I've got it handled."
Leaning over him, I open the nightstand drawer and drop an unopened box on his chest. It's the same brand, size, and count as the one he had in his nightstand.
He holds it up. Looks at it. Looks at me. "You bought condoms."
"Last week. After the guesthouse. What can I say? I'm a planner."
He's fighting a grin and losing. "Old Mr. Henderson still running the town pharmacy?"
"Yep. I thought his eyebrows were going to jump right off his forehead when I brought them up to the counter."
Finn laughs. "Darcy Gable, you harlot. I love it. Come here."
He pulls me down and kisses me, long and unhurried, the condom box digging into my ribs between us.
By the time I've torn into the cardboard, the question of whether he needs more recovery time after the shower has already answered itself against my hip.
I roll the condom onto him myself while his hands fist in the quilt and his stomach hollows.
Then I swing my leg over him and sink down.
The stretch of him steals my breath, my focus, everything.
I take him all the way in and go still, seated deep, full of him, both of us breathing like we're back on the trailhead climb.
His hands come up but they don't go to my hips.
They find my hands. His fingers lace through mine and hold on, and something in my chest turns over, because that grip isn't want.
It's the other thing. The part we're not saying.
I ride him the way I'd ride him if we had years with each other.
Slow. Deep. My weight in our joined hands, the drag and press of his cock inside me on every roll of my hips, the ache blooming low in my belly and spreading everywhere. He watches me move on him, and I let him look at everything, because there is nothing left in me tonight being managed.
"I think about you all day," I tell him, still moving, because it's true and because I can say this one. "Every day. It's a problem."
"Same. Every day," he echoes, and his voice is barely holding together. "Since the auction. Before."
God, I do love him. That's not news to me anymore.
But with him this deep inside me and his fingers wrapped hard around mine, it stops being a fact I carry around and becomes a thing that wants out.
I don't let it out. I can't. If I start saying true things tonight, then I'll have to be ready to hear the truths I'm not sure I can take.
That sooner or later, he'll be leaving. That whatever we've built these past weeks will be over.
So I say how I feel with my body instead.
I say it with every slow roll of my hips, but the slow doesn't last, because it can't. He pulls our joined hands to his chest and sits up into me, wraps me in, chest to chest, my legs going around him, his arms a band across my back, and the new angle drives him so deep my vision whites at the edges.
We move like that, grinding, mouths together in a kiss that doesn't end, breathing each other, his hands splayed wide on my back holding me against him like distance is the enemy.
"Darcy," he says into my mouth. Just that.
The heat winds tight, low, intense, everything in me narrowing to where we're joined and the pressure building there.
When it breaks, it breaks through both of us at once.
I come apart around him with my cry swallowed up by his kiss, and he follows me in the same breath, arms crushing me closer, his groan raw against my lips, both of us shaking through it and wound so tight around each other that nothing else fits.
We come down slow, foreheads together, his heart hammering against my breasts.
Eventually he takes care of the necessities and comes back, and we end up under my quilt in the dark, my ear over his heart, his hand moving in my damp hair, the whole apartment quiet around us.
He hasn't said he's leaving. I haven't asked him not to. His boots are lying next to mine in my entryway and his shirt is on my bathroom floor, and neither of us has said one single word about any of it. But it's there, an undercurrent running beneath everything good between us.
Somewhere out past the sound of his heart slowing under my ear, there's the decision we can both feel coming.
Tonight I choose to live in the version of us where none of that decision is true yet.