Mackenzie
He doesn't kiss me first. I notice that even now, some forensic corner of my brain still running its own program in the dark.
He waits, hands loose at his sides, the same coiled stillness I watched him hold over Jacob's tracks in the snow. I close the last of the distance myself, my fist twisted in his shirt like I've got a warrant for it.
Only then do his hands come up. One at my jaw, the same place he held it in that parking lot, except there's nothing clinical left in it now. The other flat against my spine. He doesn't pull me in so much as stop pretending there was ever any space between us to begin with.
I get his shirt off first, careful of the arm, some part of me still running triage.
He notices me noticing, catches my hand before it lands on the bandage, and moves it an inch lower instead, to skin that isn't holding stitches.
"It's fine."
"It's fine because I'm not an idiot about it." I press my palm flat to his ribs instead, feel his heart going under it. "Keep it that way."
"Yes, ma'am."
That gets a laugh out of me I didn't plan on, more breath than sound.
His mouth is at my throat, the exact place he's been staring at since a church pew, and the laugh goes somewhere else entirely. His jaw's gone rough again since the funeral, three days of stubble he hasn't bothered with. It drags against the soft skin under my ear, down the side of my neck.
I feel the burn of it land somewhere much lower than my throat.
He gets my shirt off slow and determined. Not tearing, working it.
Every inch of me he uncovers, he looks at first, before his hands or his mouth follow. Like he's confirming something he already believed and wants proof of anyway.
Grey cotton, plain, practical, the kind of bra a woman buys three of in the same color because she doesn't have time to think about it. He runs one thumb along the strap like it's the finest thing he's ever been handed.
"Federal issue?"
"Calvin Klein. Six-pack from a department store." I get his belt undone, an efficiency he clearly wasn't expecting from a woman he's spent all this time thinking is all discipline. "Don't make it a thing."
"Wasn't going to." He says it with none of the clip he's had since the airport. "Just glad it's real. Not the version I built."
"You built a version?"
"Started the second you got in my truck at the airport, before I’d even pulled us away from the curb, and you took your sunglasses off.
First real look I got at your eyes." His thumb drags along my jaw, slow.
"Honey. Didn't expect that. Spent the next ninety minutes finding reasons to check the mirror just so I could look again without you catching me at it. "
"I caught you at it twice."
"Third time's the one you didn't catch." He says it like a confession, because it is one. "I've wanted you since that day. Didn't let myself say it out loud till you had your hands on my belt."
"I'm not saying it back."
"Didn't ask you to," he says, and it comes out rough, almost a growl.
That's more words strung together than I've gotten out of him since the airport.
I want to ask him if he knows what he just did, talking to me like that, but his hand is already working the clasp at my back. The bra follows my shirt onto the floor, and every question I've ever had melts into his hands and the current running straight down my spine, pooling at my core.
He takes his time getting the rest of me bare.
When he's done, he lays me back on the bed like I'm something he's decided to be careful with, then hooks both hands around my ankles and pulls.
One long, deliberate drag that puts me crosswise on the mattress, hips at the edge, legs hanging.
I go up on my elbows to ask him what exactly he thinks he's doing and lose the sentence before it gets anywhere.
He doesn't come back up. He goes down instead, mouth trailing along the inside of one calf, my knee, the soft skin above it. In no hurry at all.
A man with nowhere else on earth he'd rather be. Every place his stubble drags leaves a rasp of heat behind that makes my breath catch out loud.
"Holt..."
"Told you. I've had a lot of nights to think about this." He lifts one of my legs, slow, deliberate, and sets it over his shoulder like he's got all the time this long, cold winter is going to give him.
The change in angle alone makes me squirm before he's done anything else at all. "Going to take my time with it."
"You don't strike me as a patient man."
"I'm the most patient man you'll ever meet." He takes the other leg next, just as slow, just as patient, and settles it over his other shoulder.
By the time he's got me open in front of him, I'm not holding still for anything. His voice comes muffled against my inner thigh, close enough that I feel his breath before I feel anything else. "Just never had a reason to use it on anything that mattered."
He gets to the top of my thigh and stops, just long enough to drag one deliberate inhale in against me. The sound he makes doing it, all gravel, almost reverent, drops straight through my chest like a stone through ice.
"God, Mackenzie, I knew you'd be this sweet."
Then his tongue licks a slow path from down low up to my clit, and every file I ever built on this man goes up like paper in a woodstove.
He's slow first. Deliberate. Reading me the way he reads snow and mirrors and a room full of liars. He’s adjusting when my hips move, when my hand finds his hair and pulls.
He groans against me like my pulling is the whole point, like he wants to feel me lose the argument I've been having with myself since the airport.
Somewhere under all of it, a very small and very stubborn part of me keeps trying to open a case file on exactly this information and gets overruled every single time.
He talks between breaths, filthy and generous, that bass going straight through me where his mouth is. I quit fighting it. Quit being anything but a body that's been telling the truth since mile one out of Great Falls, whether I let it speak or not.
"Don't stop," I hear myself say, wrecked, with both hands in his hair now. "Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't. He works one finger into me, then a second, until my whole body goes taut and greedy around them. His tongue never lets up while he does it.
"You taste so perfect." He says it against me, close enough that the words buzz through me. Like he means to make a habit of saying true things now that he's started. "Better than I let myself imagine. And I imagined a lot."
I'm coming undone already and he's barely started. His fingers curl and find some deep, exact place inside me that makes my spine arch clean off the bed.
He picks up the pace, thrusting and sucking. When my thighs start shaking, clamped hard around his head like I could keep him there by force alone, he covers me entirely, his whole mouth over me, tongue driving deep, and I shatter.
I hear myself scream his name and keep convulsing through it long after any of it makes sense, until there's nothing left of me but hormones, his name, and his mouth.
He takes his time after, and I'd be embarrassed by the sounds I'm making if there were anyone left in me capable of embarrassment.
He comes back up my body slow, mouth trailing the same path in reverse. When he finally levels with me, he goes still.
"Still yes?" Two words, and I can hear what it takes him to say them out loud instead of just reading the answer off me.
"Don't stop to ask me again."
"That's not a yes."
"It's a command. Take it as one."
The corner of his mouth ticks, not quite a smile, but close enough that it counts. After that he doesn't ask again, because he doesn't have to.
Then I get an honest look at exactly what I'm dealing with, and it startles a short, disbelieving laugh out of me even now.
"That's a lot of you."
"Didn't design it. Just carry it around.
" His eyes go warm at the edges. He reaches for his jeans on the floor, digs a foil packet out of his wallet, tears it with his teeth, steady, a man whose hands have done harder things than this, and gets it on without ceremony.
Careful even now, mindful of the arm without making a production of it.
Then, instead of coming down over me, he rolls onto his back and takes me with him, settling me over his hips, with both hands loose and open at my waist. He’s in no rush to take back the control he just handed me.
"Your pace," he says. "Take whatever you need."
I sit up over him, and his hands find my breasts before I've even settled, cupping, thumbs circling slow over both peaks until I feel it everywhere at once.
Then I take him in, an inch at a time, letting him stretch me open in increments instead of all at once.
I watch him fight to hold still for it: his breath goes ragged, his jaw sets, both hands tightening at my hips like he's losing an argument with his own control on purpose.
I keep both hands flat against his chest the whole time. One of them is resting right over the scroll worked into his right pectoral, careful to stay well clear of the stitched left forearm.
I don't stop until I've taken every inch of him, seated all the way down.
For one long second neither of us moves at all. Just breathes.
"Christ, Mackenzie."
"I know." I feel impossibly full, deep enough that breathing changes shape around it. When I finally start to move it pulls a sound out of both of us at once.
He lets me set it. Doesn't try to take it from me and doesn't flip me under him, which I half expect from a man built like this. He just lies there with his hands on my hips, guiding, not steering, letting me find the rhythm that works and then matching it. It’s that same iron control I watched him hold crouched over a dead man's tracks, except now it's aimed entirely at not taking over.
Cases, families, fence lines: gone. I'm not thinking about anything at all.
Except once. One beat, mid-roll, when his hands tighten on my hips and he says my name in a voice that has nothing left guarding it, and I think: the last man who held me like I mattered is in a box in a garage in Salt Lake, and I couldn't save him either.
My rhythm goes wrong for half a beat. Holt's thumb traces one slow circle against my hip bone, and he says nothing, and that is the exact right thing.
I roll my hips and pull a groan out of him low enough to feel in my own chest. A reckless, powerful thrill runs straight up my spine at the sound of it.
I chase it shamelessly, again and again, until his hands go tight enough on my hips to bruise and he's saying my name like it's the only word left in him.
"It's been a while," I tell him, breathless, half a laugh in it, half something far less steady. "God, this feels..."
I don't finish it. I don't need to.
He feels me say it in how I move, and answers by growing impossibly harder inside me, thicker, like my own words wound him tighter.
That's what finally does it: I detonate around him, shaking, his name breaking out of me in pieces, and he follows two heartbeats later with his whole body gone rigid beneath mine and my name in his mouth like a confession he's been saving.
We come down slow, tangled, a heap of sweat and spent breath, my forehead dropped against his collarbone and his hand moving in slow, absent circles up my spine.
After, I find his uninjured arm first, tracing the dark work down it, old lines gone soft with years, patterns I don't ask him to explain and he doesn't offer to.
My palm travels to his chest, the scroll over his heart, small numbers beneath it I don't understand and he doesn't volunteer.
I'm just looking, because he's letting me, and some of what's written on this man was never meant to be read by anyone at all.
He's flat on his back now, one arm looped loose around me.
I can't see the tattoo on his back from here.
But I saw enough of it, stitching his arm by firelight, to have it by heart whether I meant to or not: a mountain, black-inked, a ridgeline climbing to a summit between his shoulder blades, snow worked in pale negative space through what I'd swear, if I didn't know better, were couloirs.
"Holt."
"Mm."
"Your back."
He doesn't move to show me. "What about it?"
"It's a mountain."
"Is it?"
That's all he gives me. Not a name, not a why, not whose hands put it there or how long he sat still for it. I let it stay shut.
His heart is going slow and steady under my palm, and I've just been handed more of him tonight than in all the days before it. I'm not fool enough to spend it demanding the one thing he isn't offering.
Outside, the wind has quit completely. The stove ticks down to coals, and he pulls the blanket up over both of us without being asked. His arm is still looped around me like he has no intention of letting the cold, or anything else, back into this room tonight.
None of it has moved an inch, though: not the case, not the war, not the fence line his family's been guarding for a hundred and fifty years. It’s still sitting out there in the dark, patient, waiting for morning to remember it exists.
The case is still the case. The war is still the war. I say the line I said before we crossed this floor anyway, quieter this time, more for myself than for him.
"This changes nothing."
His hand finds the back of my neck, slow and sure, like he's already decided how this argument ends.
"No," he says. "But it happened."