I believed him. Not the way I'd believed Tyler, with hope and need filling in the gaps. I believed him because his body was between me and the door and his eyes hadn't left mine.
His thumb moved. Traced my cheekbone, the line of my face, the edge of my hairline. Slow. The hands that had pinned my hips to the mattress hours ago were touching me like I was worth being careful with, and the contrast between last night and this morning made my throat ache.
He kissed me. Soft, his mouth barely open, his hand still on my face. I kissed him back and the slowness of it was its own kind of heat, different from last night, deeper, the kind that spreads instead of detonating. His tongue found mine and I sighed against his mouth and his hand slid from my face to myneck to my shoulder and down my arm, tracing the shape of me with his fingertips.
He rolled me onto my back and settled over me, his weight on his forearms, his body warm and heavy above mine. He looked down at me and I looked up at him and there was nowhere to hide. Last night we'd been tangled, urgent, too fast to see each other clearly. This was face to face with the morning light on both of us and every expression visible.
His mouth moved down my neck. My collarbone. The space between my breasts. He kissed across my stomach, slow, unhurried, his hands shaping my waist, my hips. He was learning me. I could feel it in his pauses, his mouth returning to the skin above my hip bone when my breath caught, his attention registering every response and storing it without rushing past a single one. He was paying attention to me with a focus that felt like being studied, and the care in it, the patience, was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done to my body.
He came back up my body. Kissed my mouth. Settled between my legs and I opened for him, my knees falling apart, my hands on his shoulders.
He pushed into me slowly. So slowly I registered every inch, the stretch of him, the fullness, my body adjusting, welcoming, pulling him deeper. He held there, fully inside me, and looked at my face. His arms were shaking with the effort of keeping still and his eyes were on mine and He was waiting. Letting me feel him. Letting this be different from everything that had come before.
I put my hand on his face. He turned into it and pressed his mouth against my palm and then he moved.
Slow. Long strokes that drew almost all the way out before sinking back in, each one precise, each one deep. Every ridge of him, every shift of angle, his body fitting against mine with a precision that stole my breath. He kept his eyes on me and I keptmine on him and the intimacy of it was almost too much, the rawness of being seen this completely while someone was inside me.
He said my name. Quiet, against my mouth, and it sounded different from him than it had from anyone else.
"Melissa."
I pulled him closer. Wrapped my arms around his back, felt the muscles moving under my hands as he rocked into me. The pace stayed slow, the rhythm unhurried, and the pleasure built in long waves instead of the sharp spikes of last night. He brushed his lips across my temple, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, and every touch was tender in a way that made my eyes sting.
He shifted his hips. The angle changed. I gasped. He held it, repeating the same slow stroke at the same depth, and the consistency was maddening and perfect. The tension gathered inside me, tightening with every thrust, and he must have felt it because he didn't change a thing. Same pace. Same angle. Same relentless, devastating attention.
I came slowly. It rolled through me instead of crashing, starting deep and radiating outward, my body tightening around him in waves. I kept my eyes on his because I wanted him to see it, wanted him to know what his care had done, and the look on his face while he watched me fall apart was something I was going to carry with me for the rest of my life. Like he couldn’t believe he was allowed to be here.
He followed me over a few strokes later, his eyes closing for the first time, his whole body shuddering, a low sound pressed against my neck. I held him through it, my hands in his hair, my legs around his waist, and he came inside me with a gentleness that matched everything else about this morning.
We lay there tangled together, breathing, the morning light moving across the bed. His head was on my chest and my fingerswere in his hair and neither of us spoke because there was nothing to say that the last twenty minutes hadn't already said.
The compound was different today.
The gate was manned like normal but brothers I hadn't seen carrying weapons were carrying them openly, holsters visible under jackets, a rifle leaning against the workshop door. The easy rhythm of the last four days was gone, replaced by something tight and operational.
Rook had been working through the night. I could see it in the papers spread across the lodge table, the laptop open, the coffee mugs lined up in a row. Whatever he'd found had weight. The low conversations between brothers had a different tone now, clipped, focused, the conversations of men making plans they expected to execute.
From the porch, my coffee going cold, I watched the compound shift, and what was building in me wasn’t fear.
It was the feeling of being the reason.
I'd been the problem in every room since Tyler. He'd made me the problem and the trafficking operation made me the problem when I ran. And now the compound was locked down, the shop closed, brothers armed and grim, because I'd brought a tracker through their gates and the men who'd tagged me with it knew exactly where I was.
If I left, the trouble followed me. The compound went back to normal. The brothers went back to their lives, their shop and their bar. The simplest solution to every problem I'd caused since I ran was the one where I wasn't here.
I was in the room packing the bag before I'd even made a conscious decision to do it. The same canvas duffel, the sameclothes, the lining ripped open where Razor had torn out the tracker. I was folding a shirt when the door opened behind me.
“Melissa, what are you doing?”
My hands stopped momentarily, before I carried on.
He was in the doorway, looking at the bag on the bed, looking at me. I couldn't turn around because if I turned around I'd see his face and whatever was on it would break me and I needed to hold it together long enough to explain.
"I'm the reason this is happening." My voice held and I hated it. "I brought them here. The tracker, the men in the bar, all of it. Every brother out there with a gun on his hip is carrying it because of me. And the longer I stay, the worse it gets."
He walked to the bed. Picked up the bag. Set it aside and took my hands.
I looked at him.