Chapter 16 Calder
Calder
Being in over my head wasn’t the kind of thing I was used to.
From free-climbing rock walls and hiking twenty miles a day in the Wyoming mountains to night hunts with Cassius and my older siblings—practicing stealth, evasion, and hunting—there were very few scenarios I’d admit to being unprepared for.
But kissing Lara Crane was one of them.
I’d made the right decision last night. As soon as I’d heard Ben’s approach, our choices were limited, and every other option had the lowest probability of success.
So I’d kissed her. Fuck, had I kissed her.
And fuck me, had that kiss rewrote my DNA and destroyed me from the inside out.
Not since childhood had a decision based on trained instinct still managed to feel so wrong.
Now my survival instincts screamed to pull away.
To retreat. Like I’d been caught in a trap—a carefully concealed snare I hadn’t seen coming.
I needed to create distance before there was no escape.
Before I revealed not only my weakness for wanting her but also risked the kind of devastation Cassius had barely survived.
Lara stopped beside me at the edge of the tree-rimmed clearing.
“Ready?” I grunted.
“Yeah,” she said, but I heard the quickening of her breath and the hesitation in her voice, and felt the slight tremble of her body next to mine.
I reached back and took her hand, feeling the familiar jolt to my senses.
I didn’t have to hold her, but I needed to.
Lingering rage over Ben’s intrusion—his borderline assault and the pure panic he’d caused—had mangled all my better judgment.
Mine and hers, apparently, as her fingers tightened in mine.
I led us into the clearing, following the direction Sarah and her partner had taken.
“Welcome, my dear wild ones.” Maxwell stretched her arms wide. “Welcome to the gathering place where we will all come together this morning for our first group exercise.”
Lara slowed as soon as we had a clear view of the space and the people in it. We both knew Rachel wasn’t here, but it didn’t stop Lara from scanning every person for her sister. But that was hope. The smallest light in the most impossible darkness.
“This way.” I pulled Lara close to me, guiding her to an open spot and murmured, “She’s not here. Stay focused.”
The words might as well have been a gun to her head; her attention slammed forward, and she immediately engaged with every couple we passed.
“Please, if every couple could take a seat on one of the blankets I’ve placed down.” Maxwell roamed the center of the arrangement like the guiding sun to her captive galaxy. “Matthew will be coming around with matcha-smoothie shots for anyone who would like one.”
Not a chance.
I let Lara sit first, giving the stoic guard a firm no when he paused with a small tray of tiny recyclable cups of that same damn welcome smoothie.
Once he moved on, I lowered to my knees behind Lara and carefully examined the other dozen couples, all of them younger; I’d say roughly their late twenties to late thirties.
All with expressions varying from eager to bored to irritated.
“Welcome,” Maxwell said again, with an edge in her voice.
Something must have happened at the Garden last night with Adam and it was affecting her. Yesterday’s mask of pure calm was now striated with strain.
“Congratulations to all of you for making it through the introductory portion of Wilderness Within. As we’ve talked about in your private sessions, the part of you we’re trying to reach—to activate—is the wild core.
And the wild core can’t be coaxed or lured out.
It must be driven.” She moved slowly around the circle as she spoke, meeting every pair of eyes.
“I used to offer traditional couples’ therapy many, many years ago.
It was the kind of therapy that clawed for inches of relief over months and months, sometimes years, of treatment.
It wasn’t until I came here, until I felt the powerful connection of ourselves to nature, that I realized there was a better way.
Not because it was faster, but because it was more honest.”
There was a sound—a snort—that suspiciously came from the corner opposite Lara and me, where Trent and Sarah sat.
“When moisture evaporates and collects in the clouds, Mother Nature doesn’t portion out raindrops a few at a time to make it more palatable for the land to absorb.
No, she drenches the earth. She releases everything she has, and the earth takes it.
It adapts. Absorbs. And in the same way, that is what we must do with our emotions and with those of our partner or partners.
We must unleash the totality of our wild core, and our partner must adapt to those urges. ”
I disagreed. There was no adapting to the way I wanted Lara. No adapting to the urge to kiss her. To touch her. No adapting to the urge to strip her in the woods and take everything I could like I needed her to survive.
“So today we take another step in that process with our first session on intimacy.”
Lara went as stiff as a statue, and if she’d turned to look, she would’ve seen that I’d done the same. Some parts of me stiffer than others.
Maxwell continued her revolution, stopping to look directly at us. “Now, if everyone could turn so you are facing your partner.”
Lara scooted around on the blanket, her eyes colliding with mine, two verdant pools with uncertainty skimming their surface and something more fervent rippling underneath. Something that caused her pulse to trample along the smooth column of her neck.
She was too close again.
Every breath buried temptation into the depths of my lungs and metabolized my rigid restraint into raw need.
My jaw clamped together, my teeth interlocking to absorb the strain. Dammit. I needed to control the way I wanted her.
“Good. Now, ladies, I want you to move onto your partner’s lap, straddling them in whatever way is most comfortable for you.”
Straddle—fuck.
My thoughts echoed in Lara’s eyes. She stared at me like a deer in headlights, and I like a buck in a hunter’s sights; we both knew one more move might be our end.
But what choice did we have? Get up and leave?
Even if we faked some kind of scene or emergency, it would only keep us away from the chance to find the answers we needed.
I glanced at Maxwell, making sure her focus was elsewhere—and it was, on Sarah and Trent—before turning to Lara and mouthing Your call.
A breeze swept between us, catching some of her hair in its fingers and threading it across her neck.
And then her chin lowered. An acquiescence to our unfortunate circumstance.
“You were the one who signed us up for this,” I grunted, thinking it would ease the tension woven into the air. It didn’t.
Her eyes snapped to mine, the glitter of determination cutting through the uncertainty as she put her hand on my shoulder.
“Is that your way of telling me you can’t handle it?” she taunted right back, but her words dissolved into a wholly different meaning when she swung her leg over mine and settled squarely in my lap.
On my thighs.
Against my cock.
The thin material of our pants wouldn’t have been a problem for couples who were real couples. Feeling the heat of her core directly on me wouldn’t have been a problem if we were real. Nor would knowing she could feel the growing length of my cock pressing—pulsing against her.
We weren’t real, but this, though . . . this heat. Ache. Lust. Only a fool would claim this was all part of our deception.
Her weight settled, and the pressure—the heat on my dick—was incredible and so fucking dangerous, considering I’d been too close to this woman for the last four days to have any time to relieve it. Without warning, a low rumbling sound grated from my chest.
“Sorry,” Lara whispered, and then did the worst thing possible: She started to shift from side to side, seeming to think she’d hurt me.
Not realizing her solution was salt in the wound.
She wiggled slightly front. A little back. A rocking that was pure torture. I would’ve rather spent fifty days and nights in the winter wilderness or faced a raging bison or a pack of wolves . . . I would’ve suffered any violent extreme of Mother Nature rather than the erotic temptation of her.
“Stop,” I growled and gripped her hips, forcing her still.
“I—” She swallowed. “I’m sorry. I thought I was hurting you.”
You were. You are.
“I’m fine. Just stop . . . moving,” I ordered between clipped breaths, unable to steady my galloping pulse.
“Okay.”
Fuck, she was warm—and soft. Her bare skin felt like silk under my fingertips where they’d trespassed under the edge of her top when I grabbed her. Touching her fed my hunger. Cannibalized my restraint. I wanted to rip off her clothes and mark every forbidden inch.
“We’ll start the way every storm does: with the brewing.” Maxwell’s voice cut through the fog of lust. “Look into each other’s eyes. Deeply. Let yourself see and be seen, as though you are opening the very door to your soul.”
I dragged my eyes to Lara’s, sinking into the sweet trap of her gaze, deeper into the same molten mire that had consumed what was supposed to have been a purely practical kiss.
“Now, feel the breath. Your inhale is their exhale. Their exhale, your inhale,” Maxwell intoned with a hypnotic resonance. “Feel the exchange from the depths of your lungs—from the depths of your wild core. Your energy colliding with theirs. Transforming. Mating.”
Lara shifted and my dick jerked. Her sharp inhale tore the breath from my chest, and her exhale—it didn’t just settle back in my lungs, it settled her more fully on me.
The heat of her pussy nestled my thick, raging cock, and all I could think was that this wasn’t a mating of energy, but its swift and deadly combustion.