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.