by Tarin Lex
He says the next words in reprimand. “Do. Not. Run.” His pointed tone makes my stomach tighten. But he isn’t admonishing me. He’s cautioning me.
Hale grabs me by one arm and tugs me ’round, pitching me right behind him. Gradually, he makes a low, guttural sound, all belly and throat. What on earth? I chance a look over his shoulder.
And that’s how I learn that Hale is actually not as big as a bear, because the real thing—the hulking sable-colored beast with the hump between his shoulders and the big, big muzzle and paws the size of my face—is nothing short of gargantuan.
The grizzly brute is just thirty, maybe forty feet away, rummaging through our packs at the edge of the mountain like it’s N-B-D. He doesn’t see us. Hale’s noises grow louder. Jesus. Fuck—the echo seems appropriate now. Is Hale trying to get us killed? He puffs out his already-formidable chest. He raises his arms. My heart flies to my throat and my larynx zips closed around it. Do not run, do not run… But every impulse is alight with the urge to scuttle the hell outta dodge.
I clutch Hale’s shirt instead. “I thought grizzly bears stayed farther north?”
The bear glances sidelong at Hale. Hale somehow inflates himself to look even bigger, effectively hiding me but still not half the size of Mr. Grizzly. Unamused and irritated, the bear’s fat upper lip ticks up in a scowl. I wonder if either of them can hear my heart thumping while Hale and a fucking grizzly bear compare dicks.
Then, Hale unleashes the hounds of hell on Mr. Grizzly, myself, and maybe all of the Wylder Bluffs, with the deepest vibrating roar I’ve heard released from a human person. The bear makes the finest D’oh! expression a bear can make, then skedaddles.
Kids, don’t try this at home.
Hale holds his position while my heart tap-dances double-time back to my chest.
He turns to me, saying, “There’s been increased activity,” and I tilt my head at him. “They may be migrating south,” he says. “I’ll need to call this in.” He takes my hand as if to lead us toward our packs.
My feet stay planted. I squeeze his hand and lurch him backward.
“It’s all right, beautiful. He’s gone.” Hale closes almost all of the distance remaining between us. And holy wow, I love the way he looks at me. Tenderly, and also like he’d like to rip me apart in every wicked, lurid way.
“You just…” I heave a sigh. “You scared off a grizzly bear.” You saved me, twice. At least twice.
He captures my gaze. “I promised you I’d keep you safe.”
He touches my chin.
My heart tips over.
My toes tingle.
My lips come alive.
“Kiss me, Hale.”
His mouth curls up in a smirk. Then, with great ceremony, Hale lowers his face to mine. Yes, yes! Electric tremors fracture my core and I wake up from all my afflictions.
“I will, darling,” Hale whispers.
Then he presses soft, soft lips…to my cheek.
He growls close to my ear, “Didn’t I already tell you I’d make you mine?”
Hale
We’re both quiet the rest of the way. I reckon Hope is still a bit shaken. I am too, to be quite honest. I had to almost force her to hydrate and fuel up. After some breath work, her condition improved. I continue watching her closely, though. I could kick myself for not noticing sooner. Altitude sickness is no joke.
We almost don’t make it to the campsite before it gets dark. Hope rests near the fire with more hot food and a gallon of water—doctor’s orders. She works through the breathing I taught her as I make camp, trying like hell not to brood over last night or the fact it’s our last night.
I shouldn’t think of the tent as our little refuge and home, but I do.
One more night.
The area here restricts pollution of any unnatural light, so on a clear night like tonight, hell even in overcast, the galaxy appears as a spectacle of form, of shadow and color and more dazzling stars than you can wrap your mind around.
Some people call it the heart of darkness. In truth it’s only bright because it’s dark. Tonight more than ever, the metaphor doesn’t escape me.
I know what it’s going to be now—the leather, I mean. It’s shaping itself into a gift. A simple thing, but perfect, I hope.
We move to the tent as the fire dies out. There’s an opening in the roof that we gaze through as the Milky Way’s primeval lightshow contrasts more and more fantastically. We lie side by side in comfortable silence. I finish the leather craft and tuck it aside. Hope remains transfixed to the sky.
I could lie here all night, awake and unmoving and right next to her.
“Nothing like the universe to make you feel small,” Hope marvels. “How many times have you stared at this view?”
“Dozens,” I tell her. “Maybe a hundred times or more.” I prop my hands behind my head. “It’s always here. Even when you’re not looking for it. And when you see it, it always has the same effect.”
Hope sighs deeply. Then suddenly she turns onto her side, facing me. “You have that effect on me too.”
“I make you feel small?”
“You make me feel safe, Hale. Like you’ll always be there. You are…constant.”
I reach toward her to finger her bangs across her brow. My soul is utterly delighted by her. Parts of me are very good—the parts that love my mother and daughter exceedingly.
Never, never have I loved a woman quite like this.
But there are three strikes against me. Hope has chosen to remain single for almost her entire adult life. She loathes our seven-year age gap, as if it would matter. She lives in fuckin’ Florida. Why would any of that ever change, least of all for me?
Well. Nothing like the universe to make you feel like everything down here on this little rock is fleeting, perhaps unimportant. So, might as well take every risk. Might as well say what’s on your mind.
“You’re right, babe. I will always be here,” I say, tracing my thumb across her jaw. “If you go back home tomorrow, I’ll always wish you’d stayed. I will always…” love you. Christ, how I want to tell her that. But even the stars can clip my tongue. “I have something for you.”
“Another gift?” Hope smiles. I gently pinch her chin.
“Indeed.”
Eight
Hope
With only the moon and stars as witness, Hale retrieves the most precious gift I could fathom in this moment. It’s a swatch of saddle-tan leather affixed to a carabiner at one end, a keyring at the other. There’s an engraving, and I know right away that the numbers are north and west coordinates.
“You like it?” he asks, wagging his eyebrows.
Hot tears spring to my eyes. “Wh-where?”
“Your bravest moment,” Hale says proudly. “Where you stepped out. I have the picture, but—”
“Oh. This is so much better. Hale, this means…so much to me.” I turn it over in my palm. It’s precious and thoughtful and beautiful. But there’s something else, just beneath the soft knot of leather attached to the keyring.
An engraving that marks three digits, ‘143’—if I were anyone else I might assume it’s an inconsequential marking, the 143rd keychain he’s ever made, or his unique artist’s signature. But numbers are my thing.
As sure as I know that 1 + 1 = 2, I know 143 = I. Love. You.
Some of the tears spill forth. The others, I hold at bay. “Hale,” I whisper, “you were wrong.”
His eyebrows are knitted as he grins, tilting his head at me in that sexy way that conjures every depraved thought I never knew I had in me. His dark eyes smolder and my body ignites.
“That wasn’t the bravest thing I’ve ever done,” I tell him. “This is.” And then I quickly lean into him and press my lips to his.
He stills for a moment as I proffer the kiss, then Hale reverses my forward assault, advancing with sudden insatiable hunger and greed, his mouth firm and unyielding. He searches me, seeks me out, until my lips part and his tongue dances wit
h my own. Warmth and lust rock through me. Every dirty thought I have manifests low and taut, concentrated within the tight bundle of nerves that pulses with searing desire and need.
It feels so primitive, almost uncivilized, how my face is nude and damp and salty with fresh tears and sweat, all of it mingling with his to form the most wonderful taste. The taste of him. The flavor of us.
This isn’t my kiss anymore, it’s his. Hale’s kiss is simultaneously violent and decadent. He turns me onto my back and mounts me on all fours, lowering almost all of his weight down on me. Yes, yes. I wrap my legs around his waist, squeezing him between my legs like a python, as I feel his python strain to rub against me. He could keep grinding me. He could keep claiming me this way and I could go off like a rocket, soon.
Instead he catches a breath and I use the moment to push him back a half an inch. I study his face. I breathe him in. I press my hands to his bearded cheeks.
“I love you too, Hale Kostas.”
He grins, knowingly. “That is the most beautiful thing you could say to me now.”
“Oh?” I sniff. “What about…fuck me, Hale Kostas.”
“Second-most beautiful,” he growls, hungrily. “C’mere you.”
Our lips seal again. He rocks against me, kneading his hips into mine. His cock is hard and thick, delighting my pussy even pressed against me through our layers of clothing.
More like torturing me.
Unceremoniously, we take off our clothes. Adrenaline imbues me with strength and resolve. I’ve had enough with the preliminaries. I’ve seen the man naked before. I’ve felt his touch enough to know it’s perfect, tasted him enough to know he tastes like coffee and fire and earth. Perfect.
“Your tattoos are almost as inspiring,” I tell him, admiring the broad inked, muscular canvas.
“You like them, eh?”
I trace each one I can find. “I love them.”
“I can’t take credit. My artist, Ren, is wicked good. Happens to also be my best friend.”
“You should thank him for me. I don’t know what it is…your tattoos, your beard. You’re such a turn-on, Hale.”
“I should thank him for myself, then.” Hale smirks. “I’m going to want you to meet everyone. Is that okay?”
“Okay.”
Enough chitchat.
Hale lavishes my body with silken lips and soft yet searing caresses. I cede to him, completely. I feel reposed. I feel like a goddess as Hale, in all of his aggression and power and brute, worships my form. His tongue alone is a thing of magic and reverence. He slides it up and down my girlhood, his wetness and mine coming together as it glides between my folds and rolls, deftly, over my pearl. Hot, so hot. I feel splintered by the sensation, and by his indulgence of me, and a pending climax that zings to my toes and rocks through my center.
I’ve taken care of myself the best I could. I know my body, my thoughts. Alone, I can come languidly, lazily, or hard and fast. But no toy, no fantasy comes close to the exquisite pleasure of Hale’s pillowed mouth, open and hot against my pussy. He indulges on me like a rich dessert. I lie supine in his little abode that smells like him, staring up through the hole in the tent to watch a hundred thousand million stars torch the sky.
When he comes back up to kiss me, I open my lips for him, and my legs, and my heart. I can taste my own earthy sap that’s flavored his beard, and I pull him closer to deepen the already-savage kiss. Passion blazes over my skin. I sort of like the taste of me. I like the taste of me to be all over him.
“I love you, gorgeous,” Hale says, rearing back just to waver his gaze a couple of inches over mine. Dark, dark gaze.
“Are you charming me?” I tease.
Hale chortles, low and deep. “No ma’am,” he groans. “I am ravishing you.”
He’s not lying. “More,” I plead. “Show me…you love me.”
Hale lifts one thick, black, pierced eyebrow, slowly, and my heart pounds desire against every pore in my body.
I’ve waited all this time for this moment. Yes, I wanted sex to be special, perfect. The setting, the circumstance, the man—I wanted to make love with someone I love. They said I was illusory, hopelessly romantic, an idealist. That was even before I became an actual living forty-year-old virgin…two years ago! I could have given in to Joe Schmo. I could have given up searching for, dreaming of, wanting an extraordinary love.
But some things in life are simply worth waiting for.
“I don’t have a condom.” Hale frowns. “I didn’t…anticipate…”
“I’m on the Pill,” I tell him. “And, I’m clean. I’ve never…um.”
“I know, babe. I’m clean too. I’ve been active, you know. But I am clean.”
“That’s good.” I smile. So I don’t get to be his first. Just maybe, I’ll get to be his last.
Hale presses a hand on my cheek. “I don’t ever intend to be with anyone else.” The baritone voice captures my attention, faith, and trust. I can believe. “I want you, only you, Hope. Forever.”
My heart leaps when he says it. “That’s what I want, too.”
He closes the space between our lips, and kisses me.
Hale Kostas makes me his at half past midnight under the galaxies and stars. He fingers me masterfully, until I’m warm and wet and ready. Fingers are soon replaced by a hard, heavy, pulsating cock, and my walls open and give way just enough to wrap around his sizable width. He presses into me, indolently at first. I whimper and plea for more. Hale grouses and then drives his cock inside of me with gradually more thrust, deeper, harder, hotter, towing me to the edge of surrender.
I turn into an animal. My walls clench hard around his cock. I dig my nails into his hips. I moan, softly, loudly, just however it comes out. I reach lower to grip his butt cheeks and pull him closer.
My orgasm nears a burning crescendo.
One thing about touching yourself—it doesn’t end with a man’s sweetened seed buried deep inside of your rose. A wilderness man. Kodiak Man. Hale fuckin’ Kostas. I’m so close already, when I feel the shudder of Hale’s release I squeeze his cock between my folds and let the sensations pitched to my clit release in a fiery deluge that floods my whole entire core.
He falls on top of me in one virile heap of satiated mountain man.
My heart beats against his chest. Or is that his heart?
Satisfied, pulverized, feeling as if I’m burnt to a crisp, I sigh and let my own weight fall from my limbs. My thoughts wander toward sleep.
Toward home… I’m thousands of miles away from the only home I’ve ever had.
No.
I’ve lived thousands of miles away from home this entire time.
Hale is my home, my heart, my refuge. He wanted to make me his. He did.
And now, Hale Kostas is mine.
Epilogue
Hale
First thing I do is show my city girl what a real party looks like: meat on the grill, pickup trucks with dirt on ’em parked outside, friendship, and beers on ice. She clicked immediately with our eclectic and somewhat newly formed group, as I reckoned she might. Hope is approachable and warm, intelligent and easy to talk to. Plus she’s not bad on the eyes.
Not bad at all.
We’ve hosted more of these little gatherings since she loved the first one so much. Maybe three or four more since she moved in with me two months ago. After heavy rains these last coupla weeks, the mud around our little cabin in the woods is thick and wet. That doesn’t stop the guys from parking their vehicles there—if anything I’d say we all get a kick out of getting a little mud on the tires.
My brother, Asher, came in his Jeep. He used to always ride the loud crotch-rocket, but sold it when it became impractical. Now, with a wife, baby girl, and another princess on the way, he’s on his way to a minivan.
Steele and his family arrived in the truck shortly after.
Ren, my best friend and the only man I trust to permanently mark my skin, is the single remaining bachelor among us, but at thirty
years old he’s in no rush to start a family. Hell, he’s in no rush for any kind of relationship. Then again none of us were. Ren’s tricked-out Ford has more than a little grime on the tires—it’s caked on from sitting there on the side of our house the last twenty-four hours. Lately he spends more time with us here. Guy seems lonely. I feel for him.
I man the grill until the steaks are a perfect medium-rare, and everyone plates their food. I head back inside the cabin, into the kitchen, where my love is prepping dessert. She smiles at me. She always loves these get-togethers, but something about that smile seems…different. It shines from her beautiful purple eyes. Hope is not a guarded woman, but I’d swear, it’s as if she knows something I don’t.
I stand behind her, circle my arms around her waist, and trail kisses up and down her neck and jaw. She giggles and wiggles. Fuckin’ adorable.
“Stop that,” she whimpers.
“You mean it?”
“No.” She turns her face to look at me and I capture her lips with mine.
When we come apart, content and breathless, she spins back around and lays her head on my chest. Standing in the kitchen we start to sway, looking out the window over the sink at everyone laughing, smiling, shoveling food into their mouths. With the door and windows open we can enjoy the elements. The oily fragrance of cedar, petrichor, and forthcoming rain. The early evening summer breeze. The mix of rock and country music playing outside.
It’s cozy, easy camaraderie.
“Can you believe she’s having another girl?” Hope says in a low voice, pointing her smile toward Asher’s wife.
“Crazy, huh?” I swing my gaze around the group—from my eighteen-year-old daughter, Khadija, who’s chatting quietly with Ren, to the two littles bounding all around, one-year-old Ambrosia and three-year-old Leia. Their twin moms, Elsa and Ari respectively, look just about ready to send them to bed and start on their wines. “All girls.” I chuckle.
“When is she due?”