Chapter 18 #2
There’s a blade. I see the glint before I process what it is.
“Ever, knife—”
He moves before I can finish, jerking his head back as the knife slices air where his face was a second earlier.
He drives a fist into the man’s ribs, then another punch, short and vicious, and finally does something violent to his arm with a crunch of sound.
The attacker folds enough to wrench free.
The knife flashes once more.Then the bastard bolts. One second he’s there, crashing through brush.
The next he’s shadow and sound and gone.
Ever takes one step like he might go after him, then checks himself and turns back to me instead.
He’s still barefoot, breathing harder than usual but not by much. Sweat darkens his shirt at the chest. There’s a thin red line near his forearm where the blade nicked him. His eyes are flat and lethal when they land on me.
He crosses the distance and offers me a hand. I stare at it and push myself up without taking it.
“You lost me,” I spit, fear turning sharp and mean on my tongue. “You lost me and then what—just waited?”
His jaw flexes. “I lost sight of you for thirty seconds.”
“It felt longer!”
The spot under my ribs pulses again—dull heat, wrong heat. I press my palm there without thinking and feel damp under my fingers. Shit. That’s not…
I’m shaking. Badly now. The adrenaline crash is hitting hard and humiliatingly fast, knees weak, hands jumpy, throat aching where the man grabbed me.
Ever steps in and reaches for my face.
I slap his hand away. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
His eyes go dark with something I can’t sort. Anger. Relief. Guilt. All three.
“Let me help you.”
“Don’t boss me around.”
He ignores me and checks me anyway, quicker this time, less gentle than before because I make gentle impossible. Fingers at my jaw. My throat. Collarbone. The lump rising on the back of my head where it hit the tree. He turns my chin left, right, searching for blood, bruising, damage.
His hands skim my ribs—too fast, too high—then he’s back at my throat again, eyes on my face, not my shirt.
The scrape of his calluses over my skin sends a stupid burst of heat through me under all the fear.
I hate my body.
I hate that safety has his scent.
I hate that my pulse won’t choose what it’s reacting to.
“What was that?” I demand, voice rough. “Who the hell was that?”
Ever’s gaze cuts to the trees, then back to me. “Someone who thought he could take what isn’t his.”
My breath catches.
The possessive edge in it should piss me off. It does. It also slides under my skin like a match.
“Deacon?” I ask. “You think he works for Deacon?”
The instant the name leaves my mouth, Ever changes. Everything in him shutters tight. His face goes blank. His eyes colder.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
He grips my upper arm to steer me, and for one bad second every part of me remembers the attacker’s hold. I jerk, and he feels it immediately. His fingers loosen at once, the pressure changing from control to contact.
“Reva,” he says, lower now. Careful. “Look at me.”
I do.
His eyes are dark enough to drown in. Mine probably look wild.
My chest rises hard against his. I hadn’t realized we were this close. At some point in the shouting and the shaking and him checking for injuries, he moved in until there’s barely any room left between us.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
“I know.”
“Come back down. This is shock and anxiety. Come back to me, Reva.”
The words should calm me. Instead they drag heat through me so sudden it makes me angry all over again.
I’m alive because of him, and that makes me furious. I want him so badly it feels like another kind of injury.
The cut under my ribs throbs in time with my heartbeat—easy to ignore until I breathe too deep. Then it flares, sharp as a reminder.
His hand slides from my arm to the side of my neck, thumb brushing once under my jaw. Testing. Comforting. Calming. I can’t tell which and maybe he can’t either.
I should step back, but I don’t.
His mouth hits mine like a detonation.
Hot. Hard. Claiming.
I make a sound I don’t mean to make and grab his shirt in both fists.
He kisses me like he’s still full of the fight, like the violence has nowhere to go now except into me.
Teeth scrape. Tongues clash. It’s messy and hungry and exactly the wrong thing to want with my throat throbbing and my ribs cut and dirt on my knees.
I want it anyway.
He backs me into the tree I’d braced against a minute ago, bark pressing rough through my shirt, and the sting only makes everything sharper. His hand splays over my ribs, then my waist, then higher, palming my breast through cotton hard enough to drag a broken sound from me.
His palm brushes the spot under my ribs and a quick, hot sting cracks through me. I flinch so small I pray he doesn’t notice.
“Ever—”
He groans into my mouth, the sound low and wrecked, and bites my lower lip before soothing it with his tongue. The kiss turns rougher, needier, his control fraying in little flashes I feel more than see.
Good. I want that. I want him off-balance the way I am.
My nails bite through his shirt and he hisses, hips jerking forward on instinct. The hard line of him presses against me, hot and unmistakable, and my whole body answers before my brain can catch up.
A shudder runs through me.
His mouth leaves mine long enough to drag across my jaw, my throat—careful where the bruising will bloom, then not careful at all when he gets lower and sucks at the skin above my collarbone. Heat punches low in my belly. My knees go weak.
“You don’t run off on me,” he says against my neck, voice gone dark and ragged.
It should piss me off.
Instead I turn into him, breath coming fast, and fist a hand in his shirt to keep him close. The woods feel too quiet around us, the air thick and wet and charged, but all I can register is him—his mouth, his hands, the weight of him pinning me to the tree like he’s trying to make sure I’m real.
I slide one hand between us, over hard muscle and damp cotton, and he catches my wrist before I can get where I’m going.
His eyes lock on mine.
Dark. Blown wide. Barely controlled.
“Reva.” My name is a warning.
I smile anyway, mean and breathless, and rub against him on purpose.
His restraint snaps in his face before it snaps anywhere else.
And then it’s everywhere all at once.
Shattered.
Dragging me along with him.