Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
"Ride it. Use me. I want to see you take what you woke me up for."
She finds a rhythm, messy and hungry, dark curls in her face, mouth open. I sit up so I can wrap an arm around her waist and get my mouth on her throat. This close I can feel every tremor. This close the fear has nowhere to hide. I hold her tighter because of it.
"I've never wanted anyone this way," I tell her against her skin, because the dark will take the truth if I don't spend it. "Never. You hear me? I could walk away from a mission at dawn and forget all of it. I can't walk away from you. The thought of them taking you off this mountain puts a fear in me I didn't know I owned. Nothing has ever scared me. Nothing. You do. Losing you does."
She fists my hair and kisses me, hard, and I taste salt that might be hers or mine. "Then don't lose me. Stay in me. Come in me."
"Yes."
I roll her back down because I need the leverage and I need her eyes. I hook her knee over my elbow and drive into her until the only sound left is skin and her broken yes and the storm worrying the eaves. The orgasm starts in my spine and wrecks its way out. I bury myself to the hilt and spill into her with a groan I don't try to swallow, hips jerking, her name the only clean thing in my mouth.
I keep moving through it until there's nothing left to give. Then I collapse onto my forearms so I don't crush her, still inside, still shaking.
Her hands roam my back, slow now. I kiss her temple. I kiss the damp edge of her hair. I stay put. Pulling out is leaving.
"You good?" I ask.
"I'm wrecked. In the excellent way. You?"
"I'm yours." It comes out raw. I let it. "That's the check."
She traces the scar on my rib with one finger. I ease out of her when she winces, gentle, and I hate the empty air the second it hits my cock. I get the cloth. I clean her. I clean myself. I pull the blanket up and tuck her into my chest with her thigh thrown over mine.
My heart won't slow. I stare at the dark beams and count her breaths. I used to count exits. She's here. Warm. Slick with me. Alive. The van is still out there. The yard is still waiting under snow. Helix still has her files. All of that’s tomorrow's problem.
Tonight the problem is the size of what I just said out loud, and the fact that I meant every word, and the fact that I would burn Yard 4 to the ground before I let this bed go cold.
I kiss her hair and rest my mouth there.
"Sleep," I tell her. "I've got you. I've got the door. When the white lets up, we finish this. Until then you don't leave this room without me knowing."
"Bossy," she murmurs, already halfway under.
"Terrified," I admit to the dark, too quiet for her to file.
I hold her through the next hour of storm. My body cools. My pulse refuses. I’ve finally found the one thing on this mountain that can actually scare me. She's asleep on my chest with my come still in her and my name still in her mouth.
14
Oakley
First light is a thin gray blade under the curtain. I wake already reaching for him and find flannel and a bare throat and the heavy arm that pinned me through the last of the storm.
His eyes are open. "Spur's passable," he says. "I checked an hour ago. We go now."
No speech about last night. No decree about the words he said in the dark. He kisses my mouth once, brief and claiming, and then we're dressing in the cold. The bed happened. I feel him with every step into my jeans.
The truck takes the white ruts on a groan. Snow is piled in the ditches and chewed down the center by his earlier pass. The world looks rinsed and empty. My camera bag sits at my feet with a hole where the drive used to live. I keep my hand on it anyway.
"You stay in the truck until I give the all clear," he says. I've heard this speech before.
"I heard you in the mill. I heard you in the dark. I also heard Helix walk through a locked building and steal my life's work. I'm not sitting pretty while you walk into the pin your father wrote on my photograph."
"Oakley."
"Colt." I watch his profile. Sleep and sex and fear have all left marks. "I'll stay behind you. I won't chase a file into a dark corner. That's as good as you're getting."