Still Waters (Greenstone Security 1)

Except it wasn’t Rosie.

I found that out when I dried my face and lifted my head to make eye contact with Keltan.

Or the man resembling Keltan. His face was blank. Still devoid. Still robot-like ever since that first gunshot had triggered something in him.

Something I wondered might have to do with the battles he’d left behind a year before that hadn’t left him.

I turned. “Keltan,” I began.

He crossed the distance between us in an instant. His hands tangled into my hair with a brutal intensity that bordered on pain as he yanked my mouth inches from his.

“Don’t say a fuckin’ word,” he hissed. “No more words. No. I need to feel you. Need to fuckin’ drown in you.”

And then he did. Or, more aptly, I drowned in him the moment his mouth fastened over mine, and he kissed all sense of reality and logic from me.

More importantly, he kissed every demon that had lurked to the surface with the events of the afternoon.

And then he banished them to depths of my mind that I didn’t even know existed when he lifted me so my dress rode up to my hips and my ass settled on the cool porcelain of the sink.

He never lost contact with my mouth as one of his hands left my hair and yanked my dress up further before ripping the small lace panties I was wearing.

Ripping. One-handed.

His fingers entered the soaking flesh that was all his the moment his mouth fastened on mine. One year before. Outside a coffee shop.

They brought about the quickest, and so not fake, orgasm I’d ever had. In a year. Or a lifetime.

It was still rolling through me as his fingers left me and he surged into me.

His mouth left mine, and he rested his forehead on mine, one hand clutching the back of my neck roughly, the other biting into my hip, keeping me in place while he brutally pounded into me with such force I idly worried about the sink collapsing with the motion.

I worried about that for less than a second.

“Open your fuckin’ eyes,” he commanded on a thick growl.

I immediately complied. And drowned in his solid black irises, more wild and feral than I’d ever seen them.

It was right there. At the surface. His chaos. His demons. And he was showing it all to me.

My own demons couldn’t help but come to the surface too, to make his acquaintance while he owned every inch of my body, thrusting into me in exquisite brutality.

We stayed like that, my legs wrapped around his hips, as he continued to ravage me. As the storm inside me both stilled and came to a wild crescendo at the same time.

“Snow,” he rasped. It was in between a growl and a plead. And it was all I needed to break apart in his arms, milking his release from him as he let out a hiss of breath and yanked our mouths together.

The only sound in the bathroom afterwards was heavy breathing and the roar of the storm he’d created between the two of us.

The one I was happy to stay in.

For it was much better than what waited outside that door.

Or inside my mind.

But all good things came to an end.

In fact, everything came to an end.

That was the bad news.

And the good news.

He pulled back from where his head was buried in my neck to meet my eyes for a beat.

My frazzled mind registered all and nothing of what was going on inside them. But it recognized it. The false stillness that had replaced the chaos of before. That flat gaze.

Then he broke eye contact in order to pull out of me, and the loss of him signaled something that accompanied that look in his eyes.

The water of the tap beside me echoed through the small bathroom.

He didn’t lift his head as he tucked himself back into his jeans and then cleaned himself from me.

The gesture was somehow final.

When he was done, he grasped my hips lightly and lifted me, releasing me the second my heeled feet and weak knees held me upright.

After, of course, pulling my dress down in a very orderly and detached manner. The brush of the fabric against my bare and tender skin had me sucking in an audible breath.

Keltan’s eyes snapped up, meeting mine with a swirling dark desire before they shuttered.

I couldn’t look away, couldn’t break it. Even though that stare hurt in ways I couldn’t comprehend.

We stayed like that for moments. Lifetimes.

Then his hand moved to grasp the back of my head, yanking my mouth to his for a brutal closemouthed kiss.

Then he let me go.

And walked out the door.

And I stood there in the quiet. In the storm. Wondering how the fuck I would endure this one.

Three Weeks Later

Strange how in a year nothing could change.