Chapter 29 The Scar He Shamed
Liza POV
I found him in the bunkroom after dark. All day I’d known where he was.
Dominic had sent Everett to the riverside patrol hut at dawn to replace the roof the fire had taken.
Everett couldn’t swing a hammer with his arm strapped, but he had experience from when he’d helped put a new roof on the East lodge the summer before he left the valley, and Zeller’s crew had the materials staged and the hands to do the lifting.
Everett kept them at it until the light failed.
I heard it on the radio while I swept the upper mountain with Kristen.
Zeller mentioned it in passing, the way he mentioned anything that didn’t require his opinion.
East wolf ran my crew on the hut roof repair.
Knew what he was doing. Decent job. Abe’s storing fresh gear in there tomorrow.
Decent job. From him, that was a commendation.
Now it was past eight, and the lodge had gone quiet after supper.
Shane was in the garage going over the morning’s tour bookings.
Dominic had kissed me at the cabin door and gone to check the north fence with two of his wolves, his left side stiff under his coat but moving better than the day before.
The plows had the river road open again.
Nobody had seen Kurt’s people since the bridge, and nobody believed that would last.
I stood in the corridor outside Everett’s bunkroom with my hand on the latch.
I was still angry. The anger hadn’t gone anywhere. It lived in the same place it had lived since the night he’d looked at my face and found it lacking. His confession at East lodge, his kneeling, and his silence afterward had not dissolved what he’d done.
I wanted him.
The wanting had been there longer than I’d admitted, buried under the fury and humiliation of the night I’d crossed the bridge alone. Everett’s scent. The jolt when our hands first touched. The raw grief in his roar from the yard.
I’d kept the wanting locked down because the shame he’d handed me stood in front of it. His rejection had built a wall, and I’d reinforced it with every refusal, every flat denial, every time I told him he was out of things I’d give.
The wall was still there. But the humiliation wasn’t holding it up anymore.
He’d knelt on the floor where he’d broken me and told the truth. And the morning after, he’d gone out and managed to put a roof back on a West patrol hut without argument.
I wanted to know what his mouth felt like on the scar, and I’d quit pretending I didn’t.
I opened the door.
Everett sat on the edge of the narrow cot in borrowed flannel and canvas pants, his left arm still strapped against his chest. A single lamp threw yellow light across the small room. His hair was damp from washing, darker gold than usual.
He looked up, and he didn’t try to hide what came into his face.
“Liza.”
I closed the door behind me.
The click of the latch filled the room. I reached up and pulled the tie from my hair and let it down.
Then I turned my head and gave him the left side of my face.
The scar. The full length of it, from below my eye across my cheek and jaw and down the side of my throat, pale and raised in the lamplight.
“Look at it,” I said.
He looked without the flinch I’d once seen behind his eyes. His gaze held the same hunger I saw in Dominic and Shane. The scar belonged on me, and he was looking at it like something he wanted to keep.
“I see it,” he said.
“You called it a distraction.”
“I was wrong.”
“You were a coward.”
“I was,” he said. “I’m sorry, Liza.” His good hand pressed flat against his thigh, fingers spread, like he was keeping himself from reaching for me.
“Stand up,” I said.
Everett stood. The effort showed. His legs were unsteady, and the strapped arm threw off his balance, and the sickness had taken too much of his weight. But he stood, and he waited, and when I crossed the room to him he kept his hand at his side.
I stopped close enough to feel his breath. Pine resin and cold stone. His scent. The one that had reached across a crowded hall and found me before I wanted to be found.
“This isn’t forgiveness,” I told him.
“I know.”
I took his hand and brought it to the scar. His fingers touched my cheekbone, and the bond opened all at once. The sickness drained out of him so fast I felt it go. His breathing steadied. Color came back to his face in a slow flush, and his pupils widened as the nausea simply stopped.
His thumb moved along the raised edge of the scar on my cheek, unhurried.
He kissed the scar.
His kiss was hungry, open-mouthed, and deliberate, without the caution of a man trying to prove something.
He started at the highest point on my cheekbone and worked down.
His lips followed the scar’s path across my jaw, and I felt his breath hot against my skin, and then his tongue traced the ridge where the tissue had healed thicker, and my hands went into his hair.
He kissed down the side of my throat. The scar narrowed there, running along the tendon, and his mouth found every inch of it. My head fell back. My fingers tightened in his damp hair, and I heard the sound I made, low and rough, and didn’t care.
When he reached the base of my throat, he kept going.
His hand found the hem of my shirt and pushed it up.
I helped him, pulling it over my head and dropping it on the floor.
I unhooked my bra, and he dragged it away with his one working hand.
Then he pressed his mouth to my collarbone and lower, kissing the top of my breast while his hand spread flat against my ribs.
I was braced against the wall before I realized I’d backed into it.
The cool timber hit my bare shoulders and I let it take my weight because my knees weren’t reliable anymore.
Everett knelt in front of me and unfastened my patrol pants, pulling them down along with everything underneath.
His mouth trailed across my stomach, his breath shaking against my skin.
I stepped out of the clothes and he looked up at me from his knees, one arm bound and useless, his face flushed and alive.
“Liza,” he said again, and the way he said it was nothing like the polished voice he’d used at his ascension.
I lifted my left leg and set it over his shoulder.
He pressed his mouth between my thighs, and I stopped thinking.
His tongue found my clit with the care he’d given the scar, beginning with light strokes, adding pressure, then easing back as he read my reactions through the bond.
My hips rolled against him, and he answered with a groan that vibrated through me.
His good hand gripped my thigh, holding me open against his shoulder.
Pleasure built at the base of my spine, and I tightened my fist in his hair hard enough to hurt. Everett didn’t pull back. He pressed closer, his tongue stroking, flattening, circling, and when I came, I swore his name, my back arching off the wall and my thigh clamping against his ear.
He held me through it, his good arm and shoulder keeping me upright while his mouth stayed on me and I shook. His satisfaction came through the bond, dim on my side, along with a pulse of desperation.
I pulled his head back by the hair.
“Get up,” I said, breathing hard.
He stood. I stripped the flannel shirt off his good side and worked it carefully over the strap on his left shoulder. His torso was thinner than it should have been, the muscles visible but diminished, his ribs showing beneath pale skin.
I unfastened his pants and shoved them down. He stepped free, and when my hand closed around his hard length, his breath caught.
The room had a wooden chair in the corner. Straight-backed, sturdy, the kind of thing West lodge furnished its spare rooms with. I pushed him toward it, and he sat as much because his legs gave out as because I directed him.
I turned around. Settled into his lap with my back to his chest. Reached down between us and guided him inside me.
The stretch made both of us groan. I lowered myself onto him inch by inch, controlling the angle and the depth.
Everett’s good hand rested loosely on my hip, feeling me move.
His strapped left arm stayed pinned to his chest, and I liked that.
I liked that he couldn’t hold me with both hands, that he sat beneath me and took what I gave.
I rode him at an easy pace while I adjusted and found the angle that took him deepest, building heat low in my belly. Then I went harder, palms braced on his thighs as I drove myself down onto him until the chair creaked against the floor.
“Fuck,” Everett breathed against the back of my neck, and his hips jerked upward to meet me.
His hand slid from my hip to the front of my body, fingers finding my clit.
He stroked in time with my rhythm, wet from where we were joined, and his mouth found the scarred side of my neck.
He kissed the scar tissue there, then bit the ridge where it met the tendon, and between his teeth and his fingers I was gone.
I came with a broken sound that I buried against my own forearm, clenching around him so hard he cursed into my shoulder. The orgasm rolled through me in waves, long and pulling, and Everett held his fingers against me through every one of them without stopping.
Still shaking, I lifted off him and turned.
He looked undone. Flushed, breathing in shallow bursts, his blue eyes so dark they looked black. His cock was slick and hard and twitching against his stomach. I straddled his lap facing him, and when I took him inside me again, he went slack against the chair with a ragged groan.
I rode him face to face. His hand gripped my hip now, hard enough that I’d find the marks in the morning. My arms went around his neck, careful of the strapped shoulder, and I pressed my forehead to his and watched his eyes.
“Look at me,” I said.
He looked. At my face. At the scar. At the woman he’d thrown away.
His hand moved from my hip to my neck, where Shane’s permanent mark sat dark and healed. His palm settled over it, warm and still.
His mouth went to the left side of my throat. The scar. He pressed his lips against the raised tissue, and I felt him breathing hard, and his hips drove up into me with a force that had nothing polished about it.
My wound under his mouth. Another man’s mark under his palm. He held both and took nothing from either.
I tightened around him and moved faster, grinding down, taking what I wanted. Though the bond was faint on my side, it carried what was in him. The relief. The hunger. The grief that hadn’t gone anywhere. The desperate, helpless gratitude that I was here at all, after everything he’d done.
“Liza,” he said against my scar, and the word fractured in his throat.
He came inside me with his face pressed to the scarred side of my neck and his hand still covering Shane’s mark.
His whole body shook with the orgasm and the release of something he’d been holding since the night he’d chosen wrong.
I held him through it, my fingers in his hair, my thighs locked around his waist, and I stayed.
? ? ?
The cot was too narrow for two people, but we made it work.
Everett lay on his back with his arm around me, and I pressed against his side with my head on his chest. His heartbeat was even beneath my ear. With my skin against his, the sickness had retreated completely, and the open bond held between us.
He didn’t say anything about tomorrow. He held me and breathed.
His familiar pain and fury had gone quiet in the bond. In their place came fear and gratitude.
Shane’s mark pulsed against my neck, warm and certain. Dominic’s fated bond hummed beneath my ribs. Everett’s damaged bond, my first, ran open and raw between us while he slept beneath me.
Three bonds, none of them simple.
I closed my eyes and drifted to sleep against him.
When I woke, gray light was pressing through the window. Everett slept with his hand still curved around my shoulder. His face was slack and young in the early dawn, the sharpness of the sickness softened by a full night beside me.
I eased out from under his arm. Dressed in the cold room without making a sound. Pulled my hair back, laced my boots, checked that my patrol radio was where I’d left it by the door.
He didn’t wake.
I looked at him once more. His clothes lay where I’d stripped them off him, and the lamp was dark. His chest rose and fell with the even breath of a man whose body had finally stopped fighting itself, at least for a few hours.
I’d taken what I wanted. Both Everett’s scent and Dominic’s went with me.
I opened the door, stepped into the corridor, and pulled it shut behind me.