Page 50 of Sherwood
I pressed my lips to her ear. “I’m fucking you against a wall when I should be dragging you back to the NSA. Is that dramatic enough for you?”
“Make me come, and then we’ll see,” she dared, but it was an empty dare, and she knew it. She was closer than I was, judging by her moans and the shivering, writhing state of her, and it only took a few more hard thrusts for her to grunt out my name and then seize around my erection.
I swore, fucking her even rougher, savoring each and every cry of hers, each and every flutter around my cock, and then with more profanity tumbling from my mouth, I came, flooding her with my orgasm and shuddering in the sweet, wet relief of it all. The relief of having her as mine once more—even if it was only for a few desperate minutes against a wall.
Even if it was only for as much time as it took to come to our senses.
We separated slowly, reluctantly, as if neither of us wanted the spell to end. I flinched as I pulled free of her pussy and the cool air of the room hit wet skin, and I was half tempted to shove back inside and stay there until I was fully hard and ready to fuck again for real. It wouldn’t take more than a minute.
Lox did that to me. Made me insatiable.
She turned, buttoning up her pants, and I did the same as she spoke in a low voice, “Thank you.”
“For fucking you?”
She looked away. “Stop it.”
“Thenyoustop it. I’m the one who’s been missing you—hurting for you—wishing I could find a way to stop loving a woman who couldn’t give a single shit about me.”
She looked incredulous. “Is that really what you think? That I don’t care about you? Rafe, Ilove you, and God knows why, because you are everything I shouldn’t want to love.”
My hands froze on my belt.
“You love me?” I asked. The words came out as query and accusation both—hopeful and bitter.
Lox stepped back toward me, her expression fierce. “I never stopped, Rafe, just like I never stopped loving Marian.”
“I never stopped either,” I said. “But I think you already know that. Don’t you?”
Her teeth scraped over her lower lip as she held my stare. And then she nodded. Once. “I think I do.”
And somehow this was more intimate than what we’d just done against the wall. More urgent, more naked and vulnerable even than sex.
“I love you,” I said. “I love you so much that it scares me, because sometimes I think that I don’t believe in anything more than I believe in you. Because…because sometimes I think if I had to live through the night you left all over again, I would come with you rather than spend a single moment apart ever again.”
She swallowed.
“There it is,” I said, giving a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. “I hadn’t even admitted it to myself until now. But it’s true. I can’t bear to lose you again, Lox. I thought it was the only way last time; I told myself I had no other choice. But I’m done with any choices that aren’tyou.”
A tear caught on her eyelashes, and she blinked it away, her mouth trembling. “I want—I always wanted you by my side. When I first met you, I knew that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life fighting with you, trying to tear you open the way you tore at me, and leaving that behind hurt more than almost anything else.” She drew in a quavering breath. “If you want to see what we’ve found out about Ys, then I can do better than tell you. I can show you. But not here.”
“Lox, we can’t leave. There’s a perimeter around the house—”
She looked at me like I was being intentionally thick. “This is Sherwood, Rafe.MySherwood, and I know it better than anyone. I can get us out without being seen. The question is will you come with me? Come all the way with me?”
My hand found her waist, her hair. She pressed her body against mine, her lean curves flush to my frame, and I remembered how it felt in that bed at The Knot, her and me and Marian, tangled together, Marian’s surrender like a shared banquet between us.
“Are you asking me to leave my job behind? My life?”
“You don’t have a life,” she said, and I gave her a dry smile, because she knew me too well. Even my apartment in D.C. was little better than a hotel room, where I kept my clothes and books, and little else. There wasn’t time or energy for domesticity with my job, and I was home so rarely that I didn’t even keep anything but baking soda in the fridge. It would only take a call to a donation center and a cancelled lease to erase Rafe de Lacy’s “home”.
“Fine. But my country? I’ll be a traitor too.”
Her gaze was steady, even with the tears still wetting her eyelashes. “If we do this right, we save the world from Ys. Which means that if we do this right, we might be heroes.”
“I’m not a hero, Lox.”
I knew what I was. I knew what I’d done and what I was capable of doing. There was a reason that half the work I’d done over the years was classified, and that the other half hadn’t ever been committed to writing in the first place.
