She leaned out and stroked his injured leg as he sat, his thigh muscle still rock hard and solid. “When I look at this injury, I do feel sadness. Sadness that you suffered and even illogical fear because while you are safe beside me, warm and alive, I can’t believe you lived after a freaking parachute malfunction dropped you into a fire. The idea has given me a couple of nightmares.”
“Me too.” He buried his face in her hair and inhaled deeply. “But when I sleep beside you, hold you close, and smell the wildflower scent in your hair, I’m taken to a world where there is no smoke, no fire. I’m safe.”
“You’ll always be safe here, in my arms, next to me.” She tried to ignore the shiver shooting down her spine. The one that worried he was attached. That she was too attached. Wilder was beginning to dismantle his walls, open up, and believe the world might hold something good for him after all. What if she was the one to snatch that newfound hope away?
Her test results still hadn’t come in.
She wanted him to keep walking toward the light, not be pulled back into the darkness of a bad diagnosis. He was a good man. If the worst was true, he’d want to stick by her, he’d try and do the right thing even if it came at the cost of his own future.
She couldn’t ask him to give up his life for sacrifice or suffering. Determination bloomed through her. No, she would never ask for that, but she could hold him until the sun rose and the earth spun to a new day.
He pressed his length against her and they adjusted their bodies until they found the perfect fit, their ribs rising and falling in synchronicity, fingers laced, foreheads touching. He wasn’t physically inside her and yet he was still imbedded deeply.
She knew that the fact she was willing to let him go was proof that this feeling filling up her insides, however illogical, was real.
“I’m falling in love with you,” she murmured.
He squeezed her hand. “Good, because I’ve been on my ass about you since the night you walked into my house during the worst storm in half a decade and started arguing.”
“That’s all it took?”
“That and this pretty backside.” He slid one of his hands down to squeeze the top of her rump.
“Stop, I’m serious,” she said with a giggle.
“I can’t say it was love at first sight, Trouble. More like love at first challenge.”
She leaned down, pressed her lips to his neck, sucked softly as he let out a soundless moan—his ribs swelled, but no sound escaped.
I love you. I love you. I love you. She branded the words into every nip and suck of his skin. This wasn’t a love that had been battle tested, polished by years and shared experience. It was new, jagged on the edges, and had the potential to slice through her like a ninja throwing star.
But this wasn’t affection or mere attraction. It was a recognition of his intense fragility beneath the intimidating attitude. It was the fact that his innate cockiness also carried a recognition of his own fallibility. He was a mess of contradictions, but stripped to his core, he was the kind of guy who could have gone bad, made rotten choices, and in some ways she wouldn’t have blamed him. No kid should be expected to suffer what he did. Instead, he dug in, through sheer stubbornness, and if all of his choices weren’t perfect, that only rendered him more human.
He pulled her head back, bracing her face between his hands.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’. Need to taste you.” He tugged her close, his lips parting hers, his tongue pressing inside with hard, thick thrusts, rough and needy, holding just enough recklessness to make her respond to the challenge.
The moment she whispered her assent, he released a soft grunt as if in relief, as if she really meant it, as if he was finally home and that’s what she wanted to be for him. But not yet.
God.
Why couldn’t anything be simple for five seconds?
“Quinn?” He said her name as a question, sensing the change in her.
She ignored him and went in for another kiss. Soon it would be day. Who knew what news the sun might bring? Best savor the connection here in the darkness.
“No.” He held her back even as his cock pressed into her thigh, long, hard, and insistent.
“It’s nothing. I’m being stupid.”
“You’re a lot of things, Trouble, but stupid isn’t one. What’s going on?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m scared.”
“Of me?” He pulled back an inch. “Because I’d never hurt you—”
“Not you.” She wiggled closer, closing the gap. “Never you. I’m scared of being the one to hurt you.”
“How?”
“I am going to find out my test results soon,” she said softly. “Maybe even today. And what if it turns out I carry the gene and that sometime in the distant, but not-too-far-off future, I’m going to get sick? I can’t ask you to sign on for that. We only just met and as much as this here—me and you—is amazing, important, life changing even, I want you to start living. Have the best chance at happiness, every good thing.”
He passed his fingers over her lips, in a smooth, strong, and unmistakably stop-talking gesture. “You’re tired so I’m going to chalk it up to that.”
“Chalk what up?’
“Acting crazy.”
She yanked away his hand. “Crazy? I’m being practical. I’m trying to help you—”
“Do you trust me?” he asked evenly.
“What?”
“Do. You. Trust. Me?”
“Of course.”
“Then trust me to decide what I can handle.” He stroked her hair back from her forehead. “Trust me to know what I can or can’t bear.” He shoved his arms under her arms, grabbing her back and rolling her on top of him, grazing his fingers across the dimples bracketing the base of her spine. This time his kiss held a savoring quality, breathing her in. His scruff rasped her cheek as he slid inside her, gently, carefully, inch by inch.
“You like me here?”
“Yes,” she whimpered helplessly. “Yes, so much. But—”
“Anything could happen, Trouble. Any second of any day. You could get that test result tomorrow and find out everything is fine, then be struck by a bolt of lightning or trampled by a moose in Montana.”
She took him deeper, faster. “A moose in Montana?”
“I’m taking you to Montana someday, Trouble. Need you naked, wet, and wanting under all the Big Sky.”
Her hips rose and rolled. “God, this feels good.”
“And it feels good to feel good, doesn’t it? All I care about right now is me and you. How you’re moving on me, how I’m moving in you. The rest is details.”
“Details?”
He reached back, grabbing the headboard, driving his hips up. “Look what we do together.” A pale light began to seep in. The first hint of morning after a long sleepless night. “Eyes down. I want you watching me, seeing what we’re doing to each other.”
She looked, and couldn’t stop staring. She’d never watched anything more fascinating than their bodies joining. She wanted to laugh and cry and didn’t know why.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I don’t know what waits ahead. But I want to find out the next chapter while standing beside you.”
Everything dissolved into slow, drawn-out friction. They took their time as if the day couldn’t scare them, as if the past and future didn’t matter, drawing out their pleasure until they trembled, quaking as if they were joining on a fault line. Pressure rose within her and she knew that once it gave way, she would never be who she’d been. Nothing made sense and why did it have to?
What if there were no mistakes, only events that serve as stepping-stones to a never-imagined place?
What if there were no mistakes and her entire life had been leading to this moment?
Every mistake had brought her here, to Wilder, to this dawn in his bed, two hearts beating to the same strong rhythm.
THEY WERE HAVING breakfast, looking over the “1001 Books to Read before You Die” list. “You’re going to have to let me make some additions to this,” Quinn said, sighing as Wilder worked his hand over her sole. He insisted on giving her a foot rub while she drank her coffee and far be it from her to tell him no. It was eleven and she wasn’t sure when she’d ever slept in so late. Soon there would be calls to insurance companies, her property management company, and her mother. A visit to Dad. A call from the hospital. But not now. Not yet.