He took the backroads up into the mountains, the air getting cooler, the pines thicker, until the road ended at a lookout point above the valley. He stopped and shut the engine off.
Silence. Below us, the valley was spread out in the last of the daylight, green and gold, Forsaken a handful of lights inthe distance. The mountains ringed everything, the snow on the peaks catching the last light.
I got off the bike. My legs were shaking, adrenaline and something else, and I stood at the edge of the lookout and breathed with my eyes closed.
“You okay?” he asked, behind me.
“Yeah.” My voice sounded different up here. Lighter. Like the altitude had stripped something away. “That was... I’ve never felt anything like that.”
He came to stand beside me. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the cooling air, the size of him next to me, a presence that should have felt threatening given everything I’d been through and didn’t. It just felt solid. Real. A man doing what he said he’d do, taking me to a view I’d never seen and letting me breathe and live a little.
“Buck didn’t like me doing new things,” I said.
It came out the way things do when you’ve been holding them for years and they find their own way to the surface. Quiet. Flat. The voice you use when you’ve said something to yourself so many times the edges have worn smooth.
Duke didn’t move. Didn’t turn to look at me. He stood beside me, his eyes on the valley, and he waited.
“He liked things predictable. He liked knowing where I was, what I was doing, who I was talking to. He liked routines. If I wanted to try something, go somewhere, see someone, it went through him first. He’d say yes sometimes. Usually with conditions. Usually with a conversation afterwards about whether it had been worth it, whether I’d enjoyed it as much as I thought I would, whether I really needed to do it again.”
I was talking to the mountains. To the sky. To the open air that had no walls and no doors and no one in it who was keeping score.
“It didn’t feel controlling at first. It felt like he cared. Like he was looking out for me, like he knew better. And then one day I realized I hadn’t made a decision without checking with him in two years, and I couldn’t remember when that had started. It was like boiling water. You don’t feel the temperature change until you’re already cooked.”
I stopped. Swallowed. The air was cold against my face and the truth was cold against my chest, and I’d said more to this man in thirty seconds than I’d said to anyone in six years.
“You don’t have to tell me anything else,” he said. His voice was low, steady, the voice of a man who was being very careful. “You don’t owe me the whole story. You don’t owe me any of it.”
“I know.”
“But I’m here. And I’m listening. Whenever you want.”
The simplicity of it undid me. No questions. No advice. No fixing. Just a man standing beside me in the cold, telling me he’d listen when I was ready and meaning it all the way down.
I kissed him.
I didn’t plan it. There was no decision, no calculation, no weighing up of costs. I turned toward him, put my hands on his jaw, pulled his mouth down to mine, and kissed him.
For one second he was still. Every muscle in his body held, rigid, a man caught between what he wanted and what he thought he should do. I felt the tension in his jaw under my palms, the held breath, the restraint.
Then his hands found my waist.
Both of them, wide, heavy, his fingers spreading across my hips, pulling me into him. He kissed me back and the heat of it went through me so hard my knees buckled. His mouth was firm, hungry, certain, a man who’d been thinking about this and knew exactly how he wanted it. He kissed me the way he did everything. Thoroughly. With his whole body behind it.
I grabbed the front of his cut and pulled him closer and the sound he made against my mouth was low and rough and it vibrated through my chest. His hands tightened on my hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh there, gripping me, holding me against him. The pressure of his grip was perfect. Demanding. A man who wanted to hold on to me and wasn’t pretending otherwise.
My back found the bike. He’d walked me into it, or I’d walked myself into it, I couldn’t tell, but the seat was against the backs of my thighs and he was pressed against the front of me and I was pinned between cold metal and hot skin and I didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth. His chest was hard against my breasts, the leather of his cut rough through my shirt, and I arched into him and felt his breath stutter against my mouth.
He kissed my jaw. Where the bone met the soft skin below my ear, and my head fell back and the sound I made was embarrassing, involuntary, and I didn’t care. His mouth moved down my neck, his stubble scraping against my skin, his lips finding the place where my pulse was hammering. He stayed there. Kissing me there, his tongue hot against my throat, his hands still gripping my hips, his thumbs stroking slow circles just above the waistband of my jeans.
“Duke.” His name in my mouth, breathless, wrecked. I sounded like a woman I didn’t recognize. I was suddenly a woman who wanted things and a woman who reached for them.
He came back to my mouth. Kissed me deeper, his tongue sliding against mine, slow, deliberate. The length of him pressed against my stomach, hard, unmistakable, and the knowledge of what I was doing to him sent a bolt of heat through me so intense I whimpered against his mouth. I rolled my hips against him, instinctive, chasing the pressure, and the groan that tore out of him was guttural, animal, the sound of a man losing a fight with himself.
His hand slid up from my hip. Over my waist, my ribs, the underside of my breast. He cupped me through my shirt, his palm warm, his fingers shaping around me, his thumb grazing my nipple through the fabric, and my whole body jerked into his hand. The sensation was so sharp, so good, that I gasped, my fingers digging into his shoulders, pressing myself harder into his palm because I wanted more, wanted his hands everywhere, wanted his mouth where his thumb was, I wanted the rest of this, the whole of it, right here on this mountain with the sky turning purple and his body heavy against mine.
But he pulled back.
The effort of it was visible. Every line of his body tight, his breathing ragged, his hand still on my breast, his face inches from mine. I could see what it was costing him. The want in his face, raw, unconcealed, a man looking at me like I was the only thing in the world and fighting himself not to take what I was offering.