Chapter Twenty-Two
Will loaded up his Jeep, Tori by his side drying off Sarge. He felt weird. Not because she seemed to want sex, and he wanted sex, and they had an hour with which to have the sex.
No, that wasn’t weird at all, but something about the way she’d looked at him so seriously left him . . . He didn’t have the words for the feeling that tempered whatever excitement beat inside of him.
Like an eerie feeling of something bad about to happen, but that was dumb, so he pushed it away. He focused on the way his T-shirt barely covered her ass as she bent over to finish cleaning off Sarge’s paws. He focused on the curve of her shoulders, and the slope of her calves.
He focused on Tori.
Whatever wasn’t quite right, they’d fix. Together. They were going to have what he’d been too stupid to try for years ago, he was sure of it, because they were both old enough and mature enough to try. To fix.
He was almost sure of it.
They got in the Jeep themselves. He drove, the car silent except for Sarge’s panting, but he didn’t take her home. Gracely was too far away, and if he wasn’t going to get her for a whole night to himself—yet—he was damn well going to have some time to take his time.
So much between them was about second chances, but this was a first, and that deserved some kind of reverence.
So he turned off before Mile High, before the road down to Gracely, and took the path to the cabin he and Brandon had built into the mountains and woods. He pushed the Jeep into Park and looked over at Tori.
She sat with a certain tenseness he didn’t know how to read. She’d made clear she wanted this, but he supposed wanting it might not offset nerves and Tori would never willfully admit or show nerves.
She frowned at the cabin. “Isn’t this . . . Brandon and Lilly’s place?”
“This is Bran and my place, that I so graciously stay scarce from to give the lovebirds room.”
“Couldn’t Lilly or Brandon come by? My house is empty and mine.”
“Brandon’s got an excursion and Lilly’s in town for a meeting. On the off chance either of them would leave their strict schedules to stop in, I’ll lock the door. Besides. Condoms.”
She didn’t smile. She didn’t move. She stared at the cabin, some strange expression on her face—a mix of pain and surprise.
“It looks just like . . . That dumb drawing you and Bran did when we signed our drunken pact. It looks just like it.”
“And inside, you will find said drunken pact, framed.”
She whipped her head to face him. “What?”
“Brandon would have preferred putting it at Mile High, but I wasn’t too keen on the idea at the time. I think it’s an idea worth revisiting though.” He reached over, squeezed her arm, but she didn’t react in any way.
“Come on.” He pushed out of the Jeep, pushing down whatever weird feeling was still dogging him. Because Sarge hopped out and followed him, and Tori did too. She didn’t lose that very nearly shell-shocked look about her, but she followed him up to the porch.
The dark wood of the cabin mirrored the dark wood of Mile High offices. Green roof and trim, gabled windows, and, thanks to Lilly’s influence, some bright pots of colorful flowers.
Picture perfect and a place he’d mostly been avoiding, but it was still his. Still partially his.
And all its existence—from Mile High to this cabin outside of Gracely, Colorado, was theirs. A joint idea, and now Tori was back in the middle of it exactly where she belonged.
He took her hand, because for the woman who’d asked him to take her home—with the express intent of something—she was moving awfully slow.
“Are you . . . Do you think Sarge would be okay inside? I don’t know how particular Lilly is and . . .” She looked back at Sarge, who was sniffing around the bottom of the porch as Will tugged Tori up the stairs of it.
“He’ll be fine. He stays inside at your house, doesn’t he?”
“Well, yeah, but I’m not Lilly. I . . .” She blinked, looking from the dog to Will, and then back again. She sucked in a breath and then let it out, and it was like she was centering herself, shaking herself off from a blow.
“You’re right. He’ll behave.”
Will dropped Tori’s hand to unlock the door and pushed it open. He waved Tori inside. “Entre.”
She took another deep breath, as if stepping inside his cabin required some feat of strength. It was a little irritating, a little deflating, that he couldn’t figure her out, but he had to believe he would. If he kept working at it, prying her open, prying himself open to her, they’d get where they needed to be.
Right now, he needed Tori in his bed.
They both stepped inside. Will whistled for Sarge, who reluctantly left his sniffing post outside. “Lay down, boy,” Will murmured, patting the rug by the big stone fireplace that dominated the living room.
The dog sniffed, turned a few times, then complied. When Will looked back at Tori, she was already walking past the living room and the kitchen and into the little hallway that led to the bathroom and bedrooms.
Whatever slowdown she’d had in the car was ramped back up to a focus on one thing—and thank goodness for that.
“Let me guess, this one’s yours,” she said, pointing at the bedroom at the far end of the hall.
“How did you figure that out without looking inside?” Will asked, coming up behind her.
“This one smells flowery just walking by,” she returned, gesturing toward Bran’s room. “Unless you’ve changed cologne and I haven’t noticed.” She walked to the end of the hall and nudged Will’s bedroom door open. She laughed a little. “Yeah, this one’s all yours.”
Will stepped in and around her. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, give me a minute.” He scooped the random debris off his bed. He’d forbidden Lilly from touching anything in his room, for fear she’d clean it and he wouldn’t be able to find anything, but he was surprised to find she’d listened.
He dumped the random clothes, hiking gear, and magazines in a pile onto the floor in a corner.
Tori rolled her eyes. “Some things really do never change.”
“And some things do. Which I’d say is a very good thing.”
Something in her expression changed at that, her eyebrows drawing together, that overly pensive line creasing her forehead. She looked down at her hands, opening one palm to reveal one of the rocks from the beach.
She shook her head and looked around the room before placing it on his dresser. “Don’t let me forget that.”
“Getting sentimental in your old age?” he teased, but she pulled her shirt off and tossed it onto the floor. The underwear she’d used as a swimsuit had dried, but that didn’t make it any less see-through.
She’d probably kill him if he offered to buy her some new underwear, but it was tempting. Tempting to want to take care of her, no matter how well she could take care of herself.
“We going to get this show on the road or what?” She shimmied out of her panties, unclipped her bra, and dropped them both on the floor. With a swing in her hips, she walked over to his bed and lay out on it.
He watched her, enjoying a very naked Tori, in his life, and in his bed. His. Whether she was ready to quite capitulate to that or not, she would.
“Don’t move,” he muttered, leaving the bedroom and crossing to the bathroom. He fumbled around in the cabinet under the sink until he found a box of condoms and tore one off.
When he returned to his room, he closed the door behind him and locked it for good measure. He placed the condom on the dresser, next to her rock, which she could avoid answering questions about, but was clearly sentimental.
“Lose the clothes, hotshot.”
“You always in this big of a hurry?” he asked, peeling his shirt off.
She looked up at the ceiling, her fingertips trailing over his sheets. Tori’s small, compact body, naked and perfect, on his sheets. In his bed.
His.
He lost the rest of his clothes and then slid onto the bed next to her. She smelled like sun and lake and he pressed his nose against her neck and inhaled. “Lucky for you, I think I’m in a hurry too.”
* * *
Sex had always been a purely physical act. A cute guy, the right mood, maybe a few well-placed compliments on their part, but it had never included much in the way of emotion.
Tori had never wanted it to. A girl let her emotions get in the way, and what happened? Nothing good.
But this was Will, and no amount of self-control could eradicate the fact her heart fluttered when his big, rough hands slid over her hip. It wasn’t just that little thrill of physical contact, of a person finding those centers of pleasure on her body.
It was Will, and it was more, and no matter how she tried to wall off her heart, it was deeply involved. Everywhere her body pressed to his, every delicate kiss he placed against her neck, jaw, cheek, every stroke of his hand over her body as if he could memorize each centimeter, her heart twined with it. Soaked it up. Grew too big in her chest.
His mouth whispered across her cheek, sank into her lips, and it was all too much. The physical, the emotional, both together was like a swamp—unbreathable, drowning, dangerous.
Because she couldn’t pretend in kissing him back that all those feelings weren’t still there. She loved him as deeply and desperately as she had when she’d confessed as much all those years ago.
She had to pull her mouth away from his to breathe, to think, to manage anything that wasn’t just soul-crushing pain.
Loved him. Still. Always. She’d convinced herself it had gone away, but of course it hadn’t. It had only ever been him.
“You okay?” he asked into her ear, holding her. Just . . . holding her.
For a heartbreaking second she wondered if that mattered, if things might be different. They were older and wiser, and he wanted . . .
Well, he wanted was the beginning and end of that. What she wanted would never fully matter, and she couldn’t contort herself to accept that kind of existence. She wouldn’t.
“I’m fine,” she managed, because she would find a way to be. She couldn’t protect her heart from Will, it had always belonged to him, but she could protect herself, period. She would have this, and then she would leave.
No matter how the thought cut her to ribbons. It was the right thing, the strong thing. The only choice.
“We can stop. There’s not really any hurry,” he murmured into her ear, holding her tight and close. Naked and warm.
Which was exactly why they did need to hurry. Her eyes were wide open, and she knew, with a painful certainty that made tears sting, this was it. She would have to leave after this.
But at least she’d have this. Leaving with something other than bitterness and blame. She’d have a memory, a good one, and it’d get her through.
So she pressed her mouth to his, wrapping her arms around his neck, pulling him closer. She reveled in the heat of his hard body, in the length of the erection pressed to her hip. This was hers.
This moment, which didn’t have to be tainted by the past, and didn’t have to be heavy with an impossible future. She would erase it all with this kiss. Everything before. Everything after. She would live in this joining, and pretend for this brief period of time that apart wasn’t all they could ever be.
She threaded her fingers through his hair, pressed her chest to his. She breathed him in, committing to memory the scrape of his teeth against her lip, the way his large hand encompassed her hip. She inhaled the smell of sun and lake and what she assumed was the laundry detergent used on the sheets and pillow.
Like this moment, like his hands on her naked body, the smell was a once-in-a-lifetime thing that wouldn’t be repeated, and it made the moment—all those things she’d never experience again.
She pressed against him and rolled until she was on top of him, straddling his legs, trailing her fingertips down his shoulders, his chest, his abs. He watched with heavy-lidded eyes, his irises somehow a greenish otherworldly gold.
She closed her fingers around the hot, hard length of him, and stroked. He sucked in a breath, but that languid watching never changed. He merely watched her hands.
And then her mouth. He groaned, and she grinned as she took him into her mouth. She wanted everything, and so she would take. The feelings. The taste of him. All of it. Hers.
“Pause,” he growled, pulling her up into a sitting position as he lifted himself into one. He reached around her head and tugged the band out of her hair and started weaving his fingers through the wet, straggly strands.
She tried to bat his hands away, but he only grinned and kept unwinding her braid until it was a damp mess around her shoulders. She scowled down at him.
“Now I look like a drowned rat.”
“No, you look like a drowned fairy.”
She rolled her eyes. “There is nothing remotely fairylike about me.” To prove it, she pushed him back and pinned his hands to the mattress, her wet mass of hair brushing his cheeks.
He flashed a grin, which if she’d been thinking straight instead of about the hard man between her legs, she might have recognized as a warning.
Before she even knew what he was up to, he flipped her underneath him, switching places down to his hands pinning her wrists to the mattress as hers had just done to him.
He looked down at her, eyes blazing, gaze raking over every part of her until her skin began to goose-bump.
“Tonight, I am spending the night with you, and damn I will take my sweet time, but right now, I have got to be inside you.” He reached for the condom he’d put on the dresser, and part of her wanted to protest, stop this.
It was irreversible, and going further meant it would be over, and he couldn’t come over later and spend the night. He couldn’t take his time. It couldn’t . . . happen.
He rolled the condom on himself then looked down at her. Something passed through his expression, maybe even concern, but she didn’t want that. Or rather she did want it, and couldn’t trust it. Not here. Not now.
Not ever.
He gathered her to his chest, encompassing everything, sliding slow and deep. Her name a rough exhale from his mouth. “God, I’ve needed you for so long,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to her jaw, to her mouth.
“Will.” Except there was nothing to say with it. Just his name, as he moved into her, with her. Slow and deliberate, adjusting his hold on her, the way he moved, to make her sigh, then moan. Until she was moving with him, chasing that end she needed, and trying to somehow circumvent the end she didn’t want.
But it was all crashing down on her, the emotions, the way he kissed her, the physical coil of desire binding so tight its only choice was to crash apart.
And that’s exactly what she did. The orgasm was familiar, but all that whirled with it was some new, different world. Not just the wave of physical release, but the need to hold on to Will desperately as he groaned his way to his own satisfaction.
Her chest was too tight, her heart too big and beating too hard. Everything inside her was too much and she wanted to sob against his shoulder.
Which she didn’t do only because he would press. He would wheedle all the emotions out of her until there was nothing left, and no armor to save herself.
She couldn’t let that happen again.