Chapter 14 Lara #2
Realistically, I knew there wasn’t. I also knew we had to put everything back the way he’d found it, otherwise Dr. Julia might notice.
Yet none of those very real cautions stopped me from sliding the papers from Rachel’s file, folding them, and sticking them in the waistband of my scrubs at my back.
Within minutes, Calder had led us back out of the RV.
He moved swiftly with me to the edge of the trees, stopping suddenly, listening, and then facing me.
“Hold the back of my shirt and stay silent,” he murmured and waited for me to follow his instruction.
I gripped the fabric, feeling the heat of his body ebb like a tide to my fingertips. And then he guided us into the trees.
At first, I wondered how he knew where to go. How he could see. How he could move in almost complete silence. But the answer to all those questions was the same: He’d grown up a Stone. This was what his upbringing had prepared him for.
Just like this was what Rachel’s upbringing . . . our upbringing . . . had caused: her lack of caution in caustic relationships and my overabundance of it, practically resigning myself to celibacy.
But what had she found here? What happened after she’d gone through therapy with Dr. Julia? What was EC?
Questions marched like an army of anxious ants through my mind, providing a distraction so dizzying, I hadn’t been worried about getting caught sneaking around the campsite until Calder halted suddenly and I went crashing into him.
He left arm snaked back and held me close behind him. Something wasn’t right.
Calder looked over his shoulder and mouthed, Ben.
My breath caught, air pinching the center of my chest as I heard what he did. The footsteps and the low whistle of what I now considered his theme song.
Heartbeats hurtled into my veins. We were near the bathrooms; the white structure was maybe a dozen or so feet away. If we could just get there, we would have an excuse, a reason to be out of our tents. But even a few feet was a few too far.
Ben’s flashlight zigzagged like a bullet of light around us. He wasn’t guarding—he was hunting.
Slowly, Calder shifted us a single step to the right, putting us between two tall pine trees, their low branches destroyed, probably by bears.
The light chewed closer and the whistling stopped. Everything stopped. And then the footsteps propelled in our direction.
He’d heard us.
Calder spun around, his body completely shielding me against the tree at my back.
I tried to focus on the smooth metronome of Calder’s breathing. In and out. Warm and slow. Rise and fall. But Ben’s footsteps got louder. Closer. Fear drilled into my bones, incessant and terrifying.
He was going to find us.
I felt the panic start to seep in. The paralysis. The response triggered by my trauma.
“Lara.”
My gaze snapped up, finding Calder’s in the dark and holding on to it for dear life.
“Do you trust me?” The question was hardly more than a wisp of air against my nose, over my cheeks, along the shell of my ear.
Calder drew his face closer, the friction of his short beard warming the side of my cheek, waiting for my answer.
Trust him? I didn’t have much of a choice. I’d asked for his help. I’d maneuvered us here. I’d gone out searching in the middle of the night when this was the exact reason why he’d decided to go alone.
I didn’t have much of a choice in trusting him.
But neither did I need one.
“Yes,” I answered, terror coiling from my toes all the way to my throat as Ben’s footsteps sounded right on top of us.
What would he do? Would we get kicked out? What if he realized we’d just broken into the doctor’s RV? What if he found her notes—
Calder took my jaw in his hands.
Air burrowed into my lungs. Hot and electric. And then there was nothing else—not the forest, nor the fear, nor the past, nor the future. Only the tachycardiac tension spiraling at hundreds of pulses a minute between us.
“Trust me,” he rasped, and I realized just how little space there was between my mouth and his . . . right before there was none.
The touch of his lips was like three hundred volts to my stagnant heart.
I would know. I’d delivered the life-saving shock countless times in the ER. Yet I hadn’t recognized any signs of my almost-demise until he was kissing me.
I hadn’t recognized the way his hands padded the sides of my face, grounding me for what was coming.
I hadn’t recognized the urgent tremble of his voice needing me to trust him and stand clear of his plan.
And I hadn’t recognized the beat of blaring silence that warned of impending electricity before his mouth delivered the life-saving shock.
I hadn’t recognized how dead I was until Calder’s kiss brought me back to life.
I wished it was pure electricity that jolted my lips to part. Just like I wished it was pure panic that made my heart beat against its seams or adrenaline that infused my cells with heat. But it was none of those things that sent my senses into uncontrolled abandon—only his kiss. Only him.
I was kissing Calder Stone. My sister’s ex-boyfriend. In the middle of the Wyoming wilderness. And there was nothing I wanted more.
Meanwhile, his mouth was firm with purpose, restraint holding his lips tight and his body tense. “Trust me.” His words held him back—his promise not to take anything more than absolutely required, and I should’ve accepted that, but I couldn’t.
From the moment I saw him again after twelve years, a steady IV of ache had been dripping into my blood. Intoxicating me. Addicting me. Even though I knew the warning signs—understood the side effects—I wanted more anyway.
More of something I couldn’t control. More of this thing that promised to control me. Maybe it was my wild core . . . or maybe it was simply wild.
I slid my tongue along the seam of his lips, pleading for him to set it free, and instantly it altered him.
The hand that was cuffed over my jaw and neck tightened.
The firmness of his mouth hardened into ferocity, deceit turned into desperation.
His chest rumbled against mine, the sound of a tree splitting in two, and then his mouth opened and his tongue delved for mine, and a kiss that had started as only a cover story became a tangled web neither of us could escape.
From protective to possessive, he plundered my mouth with a dangerous kind of control.
Licking to the very depths, marking every corner.
Like an unmarked wilderness, Calder mapped every inch of my lips and teeth and tongue as though it were a treasure he’d long searched for.
A treasure he’d never thought he would find.
Hold. Taste. A holy grail that was now his for the taking.
He angled my head, allowing his tongue deeper, every stroke like a spray of gasoline over the fire in my bones.