by Megan Crane
The longer he looked at her, the pinker her cheeks became.
And that didn’t help, because it reminded him of last night and that big king-sized bed where she’d laid him down, told him to lie back and think of England, and then had her way with him.
Twice.
And what he’d thought about had not been the least bit British.
“I must be missing something,” she said, her gaze a little flinty on his. “Because you greatly resemble a coworker of mine who stood before me at oh five hundred hours—naked, but who’s counting—and told me that anything of a personal nature that might have happened between us had to stay in California. Was that you, Jonas?”
“Your cabin,” he managed to grit out. “It’s very . . . pink.”
And she matched it more by the second as the color in her cheeks deepened.
“That was a trick question. I know it was you.”
“And . . . fluffy.”
“There’s a reason I’ve never let any of you in here,” she snapped at him, trying to pull herself up into an imposing stature there against the door, but she was pink in the face and covered in a cloud and soft. “I’m sure you have your own cabin done up to suit you, which I assume means a bed of nails, a selection of hair shirts, and a martyr’s pyre or two. With cold water and gruel as a treat.”
That was a little too close for comfort, but he couldn’t focus on that. Not now.
“Deep down, beneath the tough-as-nails Army Ranger, you’re . . . a pink-and-fluffy unicorn, Bethan.”
She vibrated away from the door. “Incorrect. I have always been a unicorn. That’s how I became an Army Ranger. Some people relax with whiskey. I prefer fluffy pillows and a calming color palette. You can go now.”
Jonas could see her reach for indignant, because that was probably easier.
Anything was probably easier. But since when did either one of them do anything the easy way? He moved toward her, and he saw her startle at that, because she probably thought he really was leaving.
But instead, he trapped her there against her own door, carefully flattening a palm on either side of her head.
“I graciously allowed you to have your way with me this morning,” he said, and if he stepped back and thought about this, he would stop. So he didn’t.
He could see her pulse beat hard and fast in the crook of her neck. The scent of her was in his head again, warm and addictive and encouraging him to do all kinds of things he probably shouldn’t. And the look on her face, naked and needy, almost did him in.
“I’m not sure that I would use the word gracious,” she countered, though her voice was soft.
“It’s unlikely that we’ll have that briefing before tomorrow morning.” He bent, then, and traced her pulse with his tongue, pleased when it made her break out in goose bumps. Everywhere. “That’s a long, long while.”
“All night,” she agreed.
“I don’t remember our first long night,” he said gruffly. “Not in any detail.”
“Jonas,” she whispered, her voice strangled. And he knew it was because he was rarely the one to bring up that first night at all.
“We’ve had a lot of missions since then,” he said. He lifted his head from the temptation of her neck. “And then last night, which was hardly a night at all. The reception didn’t end until two.”
“I thought we did okay.”
“Tonight,” he murmured, his mouth so close to hers, “I’m going to take my time.”
He could see the questions in her eyes. They were in him, too. But he didn’t have the answers, and he was tired of looking.
All he had was this. The breath between them. The night stretching out before them.
And a soft, pretty cabin dressed in pink.
He found her mouth and somehow kept himself from letting all the wild need in him out at once. Play the long game, dumbass, he ordered himself.
Jonas tasted her as if she were a delicacy. He took his time, learning her mouth.
He kissed her until she was trembling. Until he thought he might start shaking, too. And somehow, somewhere in there, they were both laughing. Breathless and beautiful, there against the door, with only that kiss between them.
“Are you trying to kill me?” she asked, her voice in a whisper.
“Not necessarily,” he said.
Then he got his hands on her. The pajamas she was wearing were so soft it made him shudder, but her skin was even better. And he couldn’t get enough of her, flushed and hot and his.
He knew better than to let that word take root, but he didn’t have it in him—not tonight—to fight it off.
This time, when he took her mouth, it was harder. Deeper. Wilder. He got a hand in her hair. He had the other one down the back of those distractingly soft bottoms, and she responded in kind. She surged into him, pressing herself against him so that all he could feel was the temptation of her breasts against the T-shirt he wore.
And she was as hungry as he was, finding her way beneath his T-shirt, her hands against his abdomen and then, better still, at the waistband of his trousers.
“No,” he told her, and found himself laughing again. Like a normal person—but he wasn’t going there, either. Not tonight. “We’re taking it slow.”
“I did not sign up for slow.”
“Tough,” he said against her mouth, like a different sort of kiss.
And then he bent down and picked her up, enjoying the weight of her in his arms. She was far more solid and dense than she looked, because she was made of lean muscle. And those sweet curves. He never wanted to put her down, especially because she looked at him that way, a little bit starry-eyed, like no one else had ever bothered to try to lift her.
Idiots.
He carried her over to the couch that waited across the room, deep and soft and unquestionably girlie in all the ways he would have sworn were part of that mask she’d worn in California. Something cracked in him at the notion that she was always both versions of herself—it was just a question of what she chose to show.
Jonas settled her on the couch and then knelt down before her, taking in every last detail about this woman who was his torment. His temptation. His treat. Her eyes were gleaming now, with the same lust and longing that flared so hot in him.
He’d messed up her hair so it was tousled, still begging for his hands. Those pajama bottoms were a little too low and falling off one hip, which matched the way her top drooped down her arm, showing him the better part of one breast.
Jonas thought he might explode.
She was the one thing on the planet that threatened his control, and here, with his hands on her body and that look on her face, was the only place that it didn’t bother him.
He smoothed his hands down the soft fabric that covered her thighs, then pulled it along with him, grinning when she greedily lifted her hips to help him along. Underneath, she was naked.
That went to his head like a bullet.
“Sometimes,” he told her, though he shouldn’t, “you’re so beautiful it distracts me. Out on a job.”
She blinked. And then, while he watched, a smile spread over her face. Until it seemed to him that even her freckles were glowing.
“Careful, Jonas,” she murmured. “All these hearts and flowers might go to my head.”
He didn’t answer her with words. Instead, he slid down to his knees at the side of the couch. He slid his hands beneath her, hauling her forward to the edge of the cushion, and then he buried his face between her legs.
Because he had to know if she tasted the way she looked.
A moment later, he knew. She was much, much sweeter.
Unimaginably hotter.
And he was a goner.
But if this was the way he was finally going to go, he was more than happy with it. He licked his way into her, deter
mined to drown.
It was almost easy to ignore the clamoring in his own body as Bethan softened and shook beneath his mouth, his hands. The noises she made, greedy and sweet, went straight to the place he was hardest and only spurred him on.
And only when he’d made her call out his name a few times did he move on, peeling off her soft cloud of a top so he could finally see all of her in the warm, buttery light.
“You, too,” she ordered him, though her eyes were glassy and her voice was rough.
He’d done that to her. And he liked that so much it made him ache even more.
Jonas stood, making short work of his T-shirt, trousers, and boots.
He was not a self-conscious man. He’d viewed himself as a weapon since the age of eighteen. A useful tool, nothing more, and before that—well, he’d been the same, but he hadn’t much liked the people who’d had their hand on his trigger.
It had been dark in their room last night in California, for the few, scant hours between the end of the reception and the cruel inevitability of the alarm that indicated it was time to head back to reality.
But it wasn’t dark now. And Bethan was staring at him, her mouth slightly ajar and her eyes wider by the moment.
It was enough to give him a complex.
“I have never understood,” she said softly.
She rose from the couch and swayed toward him, and then her fingertips were gently moving over the skin of his chest. And he couldn’t breathe.
His scars, he realized with another jarring beat of his heart.
She was touching his scars.
“What didn’t you understand?” he made himself ask.
“How a man so harsh and cold can be this beautiful,” she whispered. “Always too beautiful.”
And before he could take that on board, she bent. She pressed her lips to the top of the mess of scars that started near his shoulder and then splintered, mapping out a record of the explosion they had both survived. Then she began to follow those scars down.
Jonas wasn’t prepared for this.
The cool brush of her fingers was like a prayer and a penance in one, and it lit him up as if he’d been waiting his whole life for the bright kiss of sunshine only she could give him. He thought he could muscle through it somehow, but as she kept going, it dawned on him that she intended to leave her mark on every last one of his scars.
Particularly the ones she’d watched him get.
“Bethan . . .” he began.
But her name sounded like a song, a poem. Something lyrical and unlike him.
Because he wasn’t playing any character tonight. He wasn’t wearing a role, immersing himself in a part, doing what he had to do for some broader purpose.
He was here by choice. He was here as him.
And he might not know exactly who that was, but Bethan did.
She told him with every kiss, every brush of her hand. She smiled, her mouth against his skin as she followed his scars to his back, and she knew how to identify each and every mark she found in his flesh.
As if she were the one singing. A song of battles won and lost. Knives and guns, grenades and shrapnel, and explosions of all kinds.
When she made it all around him, in a big circle to his front again, he wondered if this was what it felt like to be reborn.
Made new in her eyes.
“Absolutely beautiful,” she whispered.
“Not compared to you,” he managed to say in return. “Nothing compares to you, Bethan. Nothing ever has.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Here’s hoping nothing ever will.”
It was hard to say who moved. It was her, or it was him, and somehow, she was in his arms again. His mouth was on hers, she was twining herself around him, and they were tumbling back down onto that couch that was like its own caress.
But this time, they were skin to skin. With all that light between them, so there was no hiding.
There were only the two of them, naked. Maskless.
And Jonas lost himself in the only place he’d ever been found.
He took it slow, making sure that he returned the favor she’d given him. He got his mouth on every last inch of her body.
And by the time he finally pulled her beneath him again, her breath sounded like sobs. She’d taken to cursing him, and he grinned at her, braced there above her.
“Patience, Bethan,” he told her. Piously.
He loved it when her green eyes blazed fire at him. And when she went so far as to call him a selection of ugly names.
“That’s remarkably impolite,” he chided her.
“Why don’t you go f—”
But he thrust in, deep.
She arched against him, the curse she’d been throwing at him shifting into a kind of scream.
And only when she finished shaking did he begin to move.
He still took it slow, but he didn’t take it easy on her.
Because this was Bethan, perfect in every way. Beautiful beyond imagining and every last part of her strong, capable, and gorgeous. She could amaze him with her hair down to capture the light, and she could take him and all his dark demands.
And he knew with every impossibly deep thrust, every time she met him and groaned out her pleasure, that this was real.
Raw.
Something like magic, changing them both by the second.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and held on tight.
Jonas lost his pace, his rhythm.
Then he burst into flame, consuming them both, until there was nothing but the glory of it. And her voice in his ear as they both hurtled straight on into the center of the sun, whispering his name.
He could normally track time to the second, but he lost any claim on it as they lay there, tangled up together in the warmth and brightness of this soft, sweet cabin of hers. He wanted to protest when she stirred, and had no idea how he managed to keep it to himself. Particularly when she sat up, then looked back over her shoulder at him, smiling at him in a way that made his heart hitch.
Another thing he refused to think about. Not now.
“Stay there,” she said as she got to her feet.
He obliged, watching her as she moved, swift and lovely, over to the side door of her cabin. She pulled on a long coat that hung on a peg there, stamped her feet into boiled wool boots beneath it, and grinned at him when all he did was stare.
“I have my own hot tub,” she said. “We never got to use the one in California, did we? I started the fire earlier, but let me check the water.”
She slipped out the door. Jonas rolled to his feet, then stood there, naked. All the pastels were getting to him, because he found it all . . . soothing.
Meanwhile, his heart was a problem behind his ribs. His head was spinning, like he was drunk again. When he was never drunk.
Only with her, something in him whispered.
She came back in, bringing a gust of cooler air with her, and only grinned at whatever expression he had on his face as she shrugged out of her coat and kicked off the boots.
He braced himself, because surely now would be the time for discussions he didn’t want to have. Surely she would demand . . . more vulnerability, if that were possible. Things he didn’t have in him. Places he couldn’t go.
But instead she came and took his hand, tugging him with her across the cabin and into her small kitchen.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, not even looking at him as she busied herself in her small refrigerator. “But I’m starving.” She paused as she assembled simple ingredients on her counter. “Does the mighty Jonas Crow admit hunger?”
“Occasionally,” he said, and found he was actually smiling back at her. “I’m starving, myself.”
The strangest part about it was that he actually was. He did whatever was required of him when he w
as playing a character, but here, back in Fool’s Cove, he usually adhered to a strict eating schedule that he used to maintain the ratios he preferred in his body’s lean mass.
None of which he could bring himself to care about while Bethan set about making sandwiches.
He recognized the bread as Caradine’s. It was the same bread she baked daily and used in her café.
“Oh yeah,” Bethan said, glancing up to see that he was looking at the loaf she was cutting hearty slices from. “Caradine sells bread. But you better believe she charges three times the going rate for it. Still.” And she sighed a little, a bit like the way she had when he’d been inside her. “Totally worth it.”
She finished making two sandwiches, not skimping on any of the ingredients. They were piled high with what looked like anything she happened to have in her refrigerator. A refrigerator she must have restocked at some point today, with what looked like items pilfered from the lodge.
She levered herself up and onto her counter, then sat there, cross-legged, to eat, which she did with the same greedy abandon she’d used on him. Jonas thought he should have felt out of place. Awkward and strange, standing there naked an inch or so away from her, but he didn’t.
It was hot in an entirely different way. There was no awkward conversation. There were only the two of them, clearly enjoying the hell out of the sandwiches she’d made them.
It was only when they were both done, and Bethan was licking her fingers with sheer relish, that he understood that this, too, was another intimacy.
Only with her. Always with her.
She led him over to the side door, and he had no idea why he was permitting her to tug him around like this, only that he didn’t have it in him to stop her. He didn’t want to stop her. Not tonight.
Outside, the air was cool but the wooden cistern she had out there, just large enough to hold the both of them, was steaming.
“How did I not know that you had this here?” he asked when they were both in the water and he’d gone with an urge he couldn’t identify and pulled her onto his lap with her back against his chest.