His turn to babble, to run his hands all over her. “I’m not hurt. I’m fine, now that I know you are.”
He loved her, he loved her. That much was clear and real and eternal. He bent over her, and her hands came up, fingers exploring his face, before she put her cheek to his and said words he never thought he’d hear. “I’m in love with you. Completely, joyfully, endlessly.”
His knees gave out and they went down in the sand. “Say it again.”
She kissed his cheekbone and whispered it into his skin. Kissed his forehead and repeated it. Kisses landed all along his jaw and he wrapped his arms around her to hold onto the miracle of it and breathe the terror that had consumed him out.
“I’m fucking in love with you, Aurora Rae. It’s the only real thing in my life.”
They would’ve kissed then. They were one misplaced hand, one desire-filled sigh away from tearing each other’s clothes off. But this wasn’t the right place for that memory and he wasn’t fit to put his rank mouth on her.
A hand in her hair, he brought their foreheads together. “I need you.” His voice was broken as if he’d been shouting for hours and Rory’s warmth was thawing him. “I need to be with you, inside you, have all the ways of you, but not here. It’s not safe and I’m a fucking mess.”
She kissed his lips anyway, a soft, quick, close-mouthed brush, a promise that made him gasp. Glorious, maddening. His body, beaten and abused, shouldn’t be so ready to take, to give, but he no longer had the discipline to hold back. He shifted his hips, let her feel him.
She put her teeth to his neck and shuddered. It was another promise.
He was less steady on his feet than either of them liked, but the cab of the truck was warm and she had a blanket, and had brought food and water. The smell of fried drumsticks made him feel ill, he’d have to take it easy. “You raided the kitchen.” She had coffee in a thermos and half a fruitcake. “What day is it? How long was I out here?”
“Eight, nine hours.”
He rubbed his eyes. His hand shook. It felt like he’d been gone a week, a lifetime. “I thought they were coming back to finish me off.”
The basket of food was between them on the seat and then it wasn’t, Rory’s arms were around him and he clung to the safety of her.
“I was so scared I wouldn’t find you.”
How did she even know where to come looking?
She slipped out of his arms and took the wheel. “I know a place we can rest.”
He must’ve passed out then, in the warmth, with a full belly and his thirst slaked. When he woke it was light and she’d pulled the pickup into a small tumbledown barn alongside an old cabin.
“No one has been here for a while judging by the dust and the spiders,” she said. “We should be safe here for a few hours. If they come searching for you, they won’t come this way. You couldn’t have found this place in the dark or walked this far in the state you were in.”
He reached for her hand. “Call Tres now. We’re done here.” Eight hours to wait for an extraction. Would he have survived eight hours in the sun as dehydrated as he was and then the time it took to search for him? “How did you find me?”
She told him about Beth, the information she picked up from the men when they returned. She’d saved his life. And he would lay his down for hers. Would’ve done it from the time they were kids without understanding why.
He told her about Mike’s information. She told him about finding the money all hooked up to transport. Abundance wasn’t broke. It wasn’t a crime to store money outside of a bank, but it sure looked like Orrin planned to bank a profit while he starved his town. Didn’t matter what his intention was, how many military grade weapons he had stashed away, with attempted murder alone, they had enough to get investigators and counselors in here.
Tres answered their call with, “Underworld Undertakers. You slay ’em, we bake ’em. No DNA left unburned. How can I help you?”
By getting them the hell out of here. He’d have access to an airport Starbucks in the next twelve to twenty-four hours but until the FBI were at the front gates, all he needed was Rory. If he could manage to stay awake, he’d hold on to her until the good guys arrived.
Inside, the cabin was surprisingly neat and tidy, there was running water, a clawfoot bath, and a handmade quilt folded in a cedar chest to lay on the saggy mattress of an old brass bed. It was a long way from a Grand Master, but it looked like heaven.
Rory unloaded the pickup and he ditched his filthy shirt, washed the blood off his face, peeled the remains of his socks away from the gashes on his feet and heated water for the bath. She made up the bed with linen smelling of the cedar. He didn’t want to be far from her and he felt less shaky than earlier. He stood in the doorway and watched her. Let himself look at her in a way he’d always avoided, his eyes dwelling on her booty as she bent to tuck in a sheet.
She was real. She’d come for him. She said she loved him.
He was barely conscious of the decision to move but there he was, a hand to her ass, smoothing up her back as she straightened, pulling her against him, and cupping her breast, arousal soaring when she sighed and melted against him.
“Did I tell you I’m fatally in love with you, Aurora Rae Archer?”
“You told me. Did I tell you I’m outrageously, endlessly in love with you?”
“You might’ve mentioned it, but I’m not sure my head’s on straight. I’ve had a rough night.” He rubbed his thumb across her raised nipple and her head dropped back on his chest. “We don’t need to take this anywhere. Maybe this is not the moment.” He wasn’t in great shape and this was hardly the right time.
“You should rest.”
Sensible advice except she sounded so disappointed and it might wreck him worse than another beating to walk this back.
She turned in his arms, hands to his chest. There were emotions in her eyes he had no trouble reading: lust, impatience, an annoyed flicker of resignation. “I want to be with you so badly it’s the only thing I can focus on,” she said.
He ran a finger over her lips and she caught it between her teeth. “In all that bounty you unpacked, you wouldn’t have included a toothbrush?” He’d give a lot for a razor, to get this scruff off his face. When he kissed her, he wanted nothing but skin between them.
She’d raided his cabin and brought almost everything he needed, including fresh clothing. If he hadn’t already been hopelessly in love with her, that would’ve done it.
He shaved and took a bath, soaking with a cold pack over his eyes. Felt almost himself, certainly smelled better. The injuries were all superficial. He had a black eye and a cut brow, one hip was purple, and he was covered in red scrapes and bumps, his feet uncomfortable to stand on, with a lingering headache, but the wound he’d carried his whole life, the lie in the meat of his heart, was all cleaned away.
Rory was waiting for him in the bedroom. He was the lit fuse on a firecracker when she smiled. They both knew what that smile, what that old brass bed meant. They moved at the same time, crashing into each other, neither of them careful, too long, too guarded with each other.
He was naked, she had too many layers on. This time her hands weren’t looking for damage, they were owning him. Her lips weren’t simply claiming territory, they were branding him. Everywhere she touched he bruised in a new way, as if his skin had never carried sensation, his senses never ignited.
“I should make you sleep,” she said, pulling away to ditch her pants.
He crowded her, hands interfering with her attempt to undress, making her brush against him as she hopped from foot to foot, taking charge of getting her out of her shirt and bra. The need to sleep was a shadow at the back of his brain, but the need to be with her was the reason he was still alive.
He breathed out sharply when that recognition caught. He’d come close to death out there before he came to. Only the need to get back to her keeping him grounded in what remained of his consciousness not blown out by drug-induced i
llusions that felt perfectly real.
“What was that?” she said, hands pressed to his chest.
“You.” She’d saved him even before she’d come after him. He took her face in his hands, traced her lips with his nose, with his mouth, swallowing her breath and savoring this first full kiss of his new life.
She made it everything. Sun and rain, earth and sky, fire and water, justice and equality. A powerful surge of unstoppable desire that made him back her onto the bed. He didn’t let go of her mouth, he didn’t quit stroking her body, bringing her heat to his own, each contact a sharp pleasure, impossibly addictive after a lifetime of abstinence.
She tasted like the fruitcake she’d had with thermos coffee and the toothpaste he’d needed to clean the stench from his mouth. She tasted like the present was hope and the future was endless graspable opportunity. She moved on him like her need was savage and her appetite insatiable and he was squeezed between the strong need to fuck hard and the want to make this first time a perfect memory.
“Tell me what you need,” he said, against her mouth.
“Your lips, your hands. I need to feel you inside me. I need to know we’re alive.”
Braced over her, the thud of her heart sounding on his chest, the kiss deep and pure, he opened her with his fingers.
She wrenched her mouth away to groan. “I don’t know if I can take you teasing me.”
The way her hips were moving, chasing his fingers, he was a beat too slow taking his hand away. She laughed, the last notes of it hitching into a squeal because he’d found what he was looking for. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He nipped her neck. “Glad I could persuade you to my way of thinking.”
“You knew you’d win.” She jerked her hips up to meet the pressure from his hand.
Not true at all, but he was willing to go with the pretense for the sake of watching her start to come apart. He made chaos of her. A twitching, writhing, sighing, happy mess, with her head thrown back and her spine arched, her body shuddering as he brought her close and then swapped his fingers for his mouth.
“Oh God,” she said, “I’ll kill you if you stop doing that.”
He laughed into her and then kept licking, nudging, sucking, kneading her ass and letting her breath, her muscle tension, be his map to her pleasure. She came with her hand tight in his hair, half curled off the bed, her eyes slammed shut and face flushed. It was the most wondrous thing, but when she collapsed back on the bed, held her arms out and said, “More,” he stopped breathing.
He wanted giving her more to be the rest of his life and he’d never thought she’d want that too.
He kissed up her body, her inside thigh, the flat trapeze of her abdomen. He got a giggle out of her when he swirled his tongue around her belly button before continuing his journey up her body, the underside of her ribcage, the rise of her luscious breast. All the delicious silken warmth of her.
He tried to move slowly, to spin this first time out as long as both of them could stand it. Like driving through a fence, it was a poor fucking choice of tactic because her body was endless fascination, her reactions to his touch unbearably hot and he was over-primed, tempered only by amazement that he had the honor of her murmurs of delight.
The sound she made when he licked across her nipple and then fastened on ricocheted along his spine, an electric pinball wired to light him up, almost enough to make him come.
“God, Zeke, too much, not enough. Please.”
His sentiment exactly.
Crawling up her body, he braced over her, pressed his rigid cock against her entrance. They both gasped and locked eyes. “Ready?” He needed to hear it from her, otherwise this could all be a hallucination.
She opened her knees further and smiled. “For everything.”
He straightened his arms and edged his hips forward. Every muscle shuddered as she tilted her pelvis and he pushed all the way into the silken wetness of her and held still.
“Can you hear my heart?” She had to be able to. It was a wild drum solo, thudding in his chest, filling his ears. He didn’t recognize his own voice, lust drunk on her.
She gripped his arms. “I hear the sound of us.”
He withdrew, almost all the way, eased inside again, watched her eyes slam shut and her mouth drop open. Did it again. Again, until she was arching up to him, panting, and he wasn’t thinking, only feeling. Her ankles crossed over his ass, her nails in his forearm, the heat of her thighs, her velvet insides, the electric buzz at the base of his spine, his balls tightening, his muscles shuddering, heat and pleasure, something beyond satisfaction and halfway to sacred.
Release came too quickly, too brilliantly. Rory’s tremulous gasp, her back arched, head tipped back. White light flashing behind his closed eyes. His orgasm out of rhythm, loud and furious enough to make him believe in nude angels.
At least the one beneath him anyway.
He slumped against her, his head clear, his body drifting on a cloud of ease. They came back to themselves, limbs tangled, hands caressing. Kisses like captured starlight.
She smoothed his hair back from his face, the gesture tender, her expression soft, a love dart straight to his throat, making it close up. As right as this was there was still something illusory about it, but he was too destroyed to think it through.
“I love you,” she said, pulling the quilt up over them. “I’m going to want to do that again. A lot. I feel like we have some catching up to do.” She flattened her hand over his eyes, blacking out the room. “You need to sleep.”
He was halfway there already. He tucked her closer. Aches he hadn’t factored for were taking their revenge and the headache was back. Much as he didn’t want to, he was going to have to let go of consciousness. This time he was safe, not drugged, not stumbling around dying piece by piece. “Stay with me.”
He fell asleep to her fingers stroking across his scalp.
He woke alone to the sound of sobbing.
Rory was in the kitchen, standing by the window, her back to him, her beautiful body lit by filtered sunlight and wracked by sobs. The sound was devastating. He’d heard her cry like this, as if her life was being ripped apart, only twice before. At fourteen when her father died and when Cal ended their relationship.
He didn’t want to intrude. She’d hate him having found her like this. He couldn’t leave her. “Aurora Rae, what do you need?”
She gripped the kitchen counter, keeping her back to him, her whole body shaking. “It was too much.”
Had he hurt her and not known it? Intolerable.
“All of this is so much harder than I thought it would be. Cal tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. I was so naive.”
He had to hold on to the doorjamb to stay upright. He could only just make out what she was saying through her tears, but in every heave of her shoulders there was regret.
“I thought I’d never find you out there. I thought I’d made a mistake not calling it in sooner. We were supposed to stick together. What if you died and it was my fault? I’m not—oh God. I’m not made for this. It’s too much.”
It was little relief to know this wasn’t something he’d done unthinking during sex. Just everything this was. He went to her, put his hand to her arm. A careful touch, like old platonic Rory and Zeke, when he wanted to hold her, carry her back to bed and keep her there. “How can I help?”
She didn’t turn. She didn’t lean into his hand. She didn’t want him here. “I need. I need. A little time.”
She’d said that to him when her heart was breaking once before. And then she’d run from him. He backed off. Went back to the bedroom and lay on the bed staring at spiderwebs in the rafters, pretending the new fear in his gut was a delusion and the cold fringing his heart wasn’t painful.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rory hadn’t meant to wake Zeke. He needed to sleep long and deep. The effects of his night of terror were etched into his face and carved all over his fearsomely mortal body.
She’d fought against feeling suffocated by his closeness as long as she could and then when she was sure he wouldn’t stir, wouldn’t miss her, she’d left the bedroom. Barely made it to the kitchen before the tears started and simply would not stop.
He might’ve died. She might not have found him in time.
This was why Cal hadn’t wanted them to do this job. The unknowns. But Zeke had kept at him about it and she’d been swept up in his enthusiasm for it and the opportunity it gave her to prove herself and start fresh.
But she wasn’t made for violence, knocking out people’s teeth and planning search and rescue missions. She’d genuinely thought about taking a hostage and when she hadn’t done that and gotten lost out there, she berated herself for not doing it. Kidnapping under gunpoint for God’s sake. That was insane. She knew how to bring a man down, how to handle weapons, but she’d never done more than break a few fingers outside of training. Her life’s work had been more glamour and graft than grit. Destruction by way of ego and false entitlement, not firearms and bodily harm. Not life and death.
It was all too much.
And Zeke was everything.
Right when she’d recognized that, she’d almost lost him.
She didn’t want him to have to deal with her meltdown, but she’d woken him anyway and then he’d gone and been so sensitive, giving her the space she needed to put herself back together.
All she wanted to do was crawl into his arms, hold him tight and sob some more because anxious and overwhelmed didn’t begin to cover how she felt, but that was extraordinarily selfish, and not something he needed. She’d been too inconsiderate of him in the past to continue being that way now.
“Be a goddamn professional,” she whispered, rummaging in her pack for the arnica gel and then almost sobbing again at the exquisite irony of the fact that she intended to get back into bed with her partner and kiss him till they both forgot how close this call had been.
She washed her face at the sink, letting the cool water take the sting from her eyelids, and then put a long T-shirt on and padded back to the bedroom. He lay in the middle of the saggy old mattress and he wasn’t asleep.
The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game Book 3) Page 23