Chapter 25
MAGNOLIA
He was filthy, and I had never wanted anything so much in my life.
That's the truth of it, the thing I'd have been embarrassed to say out loud to anyone but him.
It had been the longest day I had ever lived through, and he hadn’t washed it off. The man under me still carried the entire day on his skin. Sweat and salt. Gun oil and dust. The note underneath that was just him, just male, the smell my body had filed away in a parking lot and never once deleted.
I should have wanted him clean. Any sensible woman would have pointed him at that marble shower and made him presentable first. But I didn't want him presentable.
I wanted him exactly like this—unwashed, unguarded, real, the day still on him, nothing polished or arranged.
I pressed my face into the side of his throat where the scent of him was strongest and breathed him in like I'd been holding my breath.
Something low in me pulled tight and went liquid all at once.
"You should let me shower," he said, low, his hand already spreading wide and warm across my back. But he didn't move toward the bathroom. He read me the way he read everything, and what he read was that I did not want him to.
"Don't you dare," I said into his neck. "I've been wanting to get my hands on you all day. I'm not waiting on hot water."
I felt the rumble of his laugh more than heard it. Then, his hand came up into my hair and tipped my face back. The laugh was gone and something else was in its place, something that had been building in him all day and had nowhere left to go.
"Mags." Just my name. He said it like a man setting something down he'd carried too far.
"I need to tell you something before—" He stopped.
Started over, and I watched it cost him, this man who never hesitated at anything.
"I've never said it to another woman. Not one. I want you to know that going in."
"Say it."
"I love you." Plain. Flat. Bedrock, the way he said every true thing.
Somehow, that made it hit harder than any pretty version ever could have.
"I have loved you since Virginia Beach. Since before there was a before. I loved you and I walked away from you. I was wrong. I’ve never been so grateful to have been wrong about anything in my life. "
My eyes filled so fast, it startled me.
"I knew," I said. My voice came out cracked.
"That's the thing, Cash. I knew, back then.
Everybody thought I was crazy—my mother thought I was mooning over a man who wasn't interested—but I felt it.
There was something there. I wasn't wrong.
I stood in that parking lot with a coin in my hand and I felt the wanting come off you and I wondered if I'd made it up.
I hadn't." I pressed my palm flat over his sternum, over the heart that was going quick under my hand, for me, only ever for me.
"You just weren't ready. That's all it was. "
"No," he agreed. "I wasn't."
"Maybe you just had to catch up."
Something moved through his face, slow. "Maybe I did."
"So, tell me," I said. "The walls. All of it. I've got the rest of my life to hear it, but I want to start now."
And he told me. Standing there in the gold light with the day still on him and his hand in my hair, he told me the shape of it, if not the whole of it—that he'd spent his life keeping everyone at the edge of the light on purpose.
That a man who did the work he did couldn't afford a single soul on this earth whose loss could reach him, because the day one of them could reach him was the day he was no good to the ones who needed him steady.
That he'd looked at me in Virginia Beach and understood, immediately and with something close to fear, that I was exactly the person who could get all the way in—that I looked at him and didn't step back, didn't go careful.
And that a woman who could see him all the way down was the one woman who could cost him everything.
"So, I gave you a coin instead of myself," he said. "And I told myself it was the decent thing. It was the hardest decent thing I ever did, and I did it for you, and I'd have gone on doing it forever."
"What changed?"
"Everything." His thumb moved along my jaw.
"I came here and the ground moved under me.
I found out I have a home. A family. A place to put down and people to put down with.
The leaving's done, Mags. I'm not a man passing through anymore.
I'm a man with something to stay for." He looked at me like the whole world had narrowed to the space I took up in it.
"Two somethings, if I'm counting the dog. "
I laughed, undone, and he caught the sound the way he always did, like he wanted to keep it.
"Then, catch up the rest of the way," I whispered against his mouth. "I've been waiting long enough."
He kissed me.
Not the gentle, decent way a man kisses a woman he means to go slow with. He kissed me like the leaving really was done, like every wall he'd ever built had finally come down at once and there was nothing left holding him back from me. His hands were in my hair and then everywhere.
I got my fingers into the front of his shirt and pulled, and the sound he made low in his chest when my hands found bare skin was a sound I intended to spend the rest of my life earning.
The scent of him flooded me—the day, the salt, the raw, unwashed maleness of him—and it undid the last thread of anything careful in me.
I wanted all of him. Now. Filthy and unguarded and mine.
He turned me on the bed, his mouth never leaving mine, and lowered me down into the soft dark of it. He came down over me like something inevitable.
"I've got you," he murmured against my skin, already moving lower, his intent unmistakable. "Let me."
I felt the scrape of his stubble first, rough and perfect against the sensitive skin of my inner thighs as he settled between them.
Cash didn't rush. He never did. His big hands spread me open with a reverence that made my breath catch—thumbs stroking slow circles over the crease where leg met body, like he was mapping every inch of territory he meant to claim.
The salt-and-cedar scent of him rose thick and heady. It wrapped around me like smoke, making my head spin.
"Look at you," he said, voice low and rough, almost awed. His breath ghosted over my slick folds, and I shivered. "Beautiful." One thick finger traced my entrance, teasing, not entering.
I reached down, threading my fingers through his short hair, gripping tight as he lowered his mouth. The first slow, flat lick from entrance to clit drew a broken sound from my throat.
He groaned against me, the vibration rolling through my core, and then he truly began—unhurried, thorough, worshipful.
His tongue circled my clit with devastating patience, learning exactly how much pressure made my hips jerk, then sucking gently until my thighs trembled around his ears.
He feasted like a man starved, like this was the only thing he'd ever wanted to do for the rest of his life.
"Cash—" I gasped, pulling his hair harder.
He answered by sliding a big finger deep inside me, curling it just right while his mouth stayed relentless on my clit.
The stretch, the wet sounds of him devouring me, the low, reverent growls vibrating against my flesh—it was too much.
I came apart hard, crying out his name as pleasure crashed through me in long, shuddering waves.
He didn't stop. He gentled his touch just enough to ease me down, then built me right back up again, tongue fucking into me alongside his finger, murmuring filthy praise between licks.
I shattered a second time, harder, my back arching off the bed as stars burst behind my eyes. He stayed with me through it, steady and possessive, until my legs were boneless and my hands were slack in his hair.
Only then, did he rise up over me, lips glossy, eyes dark and fierce and tender, all at once. He gathered me close for a moment, our foreheads pressed together, sharing breath. I could feel him, thick and hard against my thigh, but he held still, letting me come back to myself.
“I want you. In me,” I whispered, reaching between us to wrap my fingers around his cock. He was heavy, burning hot, the skin velvety over steel. A low groan tore from his chest at my touch.
"You sure?" His voice was gravel. "I won't be able to hold back once I'm inside you."
I nodded, tugging him closer. "I want all of you. Now."
He shifted, settling his hips between my thighs.
He braced one forearm beside my head, the other hand guiding himself to my entrance.
The blunt head of his cock nudged against my soaked folds, rubbing up and down, coating himself in my wetness.
Then, he pushed in—slow, inexorable, stretching me open inch by thick inch.
The burn was exquisite. I gasped at the fullness, my nails digging into his shoulders.
"Mags," he breathed, forehead dropping to mine. He sank deeper, bottoming out with a shared groan, our bodies locked together completely. For a long moment, he just stayed there, buried to the hilt, trembling with the effort of holding still. "You're mine. All mine."
He began to move then—deep, rolling thrusts that dragged against every sensitive spot inside me.
Unhurried at first, savoring, each stroke a deliberate claim.
His mouth found mine in a messy, open kiss, tasting of me and desperation.
The salt-and-cedar scent of his skin surrounded me as sweat slicked our bodies.
One of his hands slid under my ass, tilting my hips to take him even deeper.
"Look at me," he commanded softly. Our eyes locked as his pace built, steady and powerful.
The pressure coiled tight again, faster this time. Every thrust ground against my clit, his body covering mine completely. I came undone a third time, clenching hard around him, crying out into his mouth. He cursed, low and reverent, fucking me through it with gritted teeth.
His rhythm faltered, turning rougher, more desperate. "I'm close."
I gasped. "Please, Cash. Stay inside me."
With a broken groan that sounded almost pained, he drove deep one last time and spilled, pulsing hot and endless inside me. His whole body shuddered, muscles locked as he emptied himself, face buried in my neck like he was anchoring himself to me.
We stayed locked together, trembling, tangled in a mess of limbs and sweat and heaving breaths—spent, hearts hammering against each other.
Afterward, we lay wrecked, my head on his chest, his heart finally slowing under my ear. Neither of us in any hurry to be a separate person again.
"I love you," I told him, because I hadn't said it back yet, not in words, and he deserved the words. "For the record. I have loved you since before I had any sense about it. I'm just glad I got stubborn enough to still be standing here when you caught up."
"Thank God for stubborn," he said into my hair, and I felt him smile.
We were quiet a while. Somewhere, through the adjoining door, I could hear the soft thump of a dog resettling, Max keeping his watch. It made me smile against Cash's skin.
"We have to figure out where we live," I said eventually, because a woman's mind wanders to the practical even in the afterglow, especially a woman who'd spent the last day watching her whole life come apart and get put back together.
“My dad gave me the down payment on my house.
It's the first thing I ever owned that was only mine.
" My throat tightened. "I don't want to give it up.
Even after—everything that happened in it.
Maybe, especially after. I don't want them to have taken it from me.
I want to walk back in and have it be mine again. "
"Then, it's yours," he said, simple as that. "Nobody's taking your house. My brothers are making it like last night never happened—by the time you walk back in, it'll be your house and nothing else." His hand moved slow down my spine. "But I'm not letting you sleep in it alone, if I have my way."
"So, what do we do?"
“Both." He said it like the answer had been obvious to him the whole time and he'd only been waiting for me to arrive at it.
"This suite's mine now—ours. Dominion Hall's the safest ground, and it's where my family is.
I want you inside these walls with me until we unravel the mess.
But that house is you, Mags. It's the first thing you built alone in a new city, and I'd cut off a hand before I'd ask you to walk away from it.
" He tipped my chin up so I was looking at him.
"So, we go back and forth. Here when it makes sense.
Your place when we need to breathe air that doesn't have a guard tower attached to it.
The dogs won't care where they sleep as long as we're there. Neither will I."
It was the most sensible, generous thing anyone had ever offered me, and it undid me a little, because it meant he wasn't asking me to dissolve into his life and disappear the way I'd spent my whole childhood watching people disappear into the bigger thing.
He was going to let me keep my crooked corner of the world and fold me into his. Both. I got to be both.
"Both," I said, trying it out. "I like both."
"Both," he agreed, and kissed the top of my head. "And your father gets here tomorrow, so we'd better rest, because something tells me the colonel's going to have questions. I intend to answer every one of them like a man."
I laughed, and I burrowed into the warm unwashed bulk of him. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I fell asleep without one single part of me braced.