Page 20 of Faultline

I'm tired of nothing else.

I walk to the table instead. I stop beside his chair, close enough that my hip nearly touches his shoulder. I look at him the way I did that first time, across a street and through a pane of glass that isn't between us anymore. Directly. Without flinching. Without giving him anything except the truth of what I want. It's written in the flush across my chest, in the shallow pull of my breathing, in the fact that I'm standing here in his kitchen and we both know what that means.

"The break-in scared me more than I told Rhys," I say. "I don't scare easily. And I don't do things I can't explain to myself in the morning."

His hand comes up. His fingers close around my wrist, and the grip is firm enough that I can feel his pulse against mine, or maybe that's my own heartbeat filling the space where my composure used to be. He draws my wrist toward him slowly, deliberately, and presses his thumb to the point where the tendons meet the heel of my palm.

"Then don't explain it," he says.

He stands. The chair scrapes back and then he's in front of me, all of him, the height and the breadth and the heat that rolls off his body like a physical force. His hand is still on my wrist. His other hand finds my hip, and the touch sends a pulse through my abdomen that empties my lungs.

"Tell me to stop," he says. His voice is barely audible, rough at the edges, the quiet stripped down to something raw. "Tell me right now, because in about ten seconds I'm not going to be able to."

"Don't stop."

His mouth finds mine and the kiss isn't gentle. It's the kiss of a man who's been holding something back for days and has just stopped trying. His hand slides from my wrist to the back of my neck, and his fingers thread into my hair and grip, not enough to hurt, enough that I feel the controlled strength in every tendon and the clear instruction underneath it: stay.

His other hand pulls my hip flush against him and I can feel exactly how much he's been holding back, hard against my stomach, thick and undeniable. The sound that comes out of me doesn't belong to the woman I was an hour ago.

He walks me backward until my shoulders meet the wall beside the woodstove. His thigh presses between mine, and the pressure against my center sends a jolt through me that makes my fingers dig into his shoulders. He breaks the kiss long enough to pull my thermal over my head. The air hits my skin and I shiver, but his hands are already there, his palms rough and hot against my ribs, sliding up. The calluses drag across my skin, pulling a gasp out of me I don't bother hiding.

"I'm on an IUD," I say, because one of us has to say it. He's currently dragging his mouth down the column of my throat, and it's dismantling my ability to form sentences. "Clean. No one else in longer than I care to admit."

"Same." His voice vibrates at my collarbone. He pulls back just enough to look at me, his hands framing my ribcage, his thumbs tracing slow circles against the undersides of my breasts. His eyes are dark and focused and stripped of every ounce of the restraint he wore at the Ridgeline.

"I need you to be sure," he says.

His thumbs have gone still against my skin. The circles stopped. For the first time since he gripped my wrist, his hands aren't moving, and the stillness tells me everything his voice won't. This isn't casual for him either.

"I'm sure."

The last of his restraint burns out. His hands slide under my thighs, and he lifts me like I weigh nothing. My legs go around his waist on instinct, my body responding to his grip before my brain catches up. He carries me down the hall, past the guest room, to his.

The bed is made with military corners. He lays me across it and follows me down, his weight settling over me, and the press of him pins me somewhere I didn't expect to want to be. I thought this would feel reckless. It feels real, and that's worse, because reckless I can walk away from.

I'm bare beneath him and his gaze is moving over me like a man memorizing terrain he intends to claim.

He pulls his thermal over his head. The firelight from the hall catches the ridges of muscle across his chest and stomach, the thick slabs of his shoulders. The kind of body that was built by labor and hasn't forgotten a single day of it.

"Look at me," he says.

I do. His hand traces from my collarbone to my navel in one long line, and my stomach contracts under his touch. His palm flattens against my hip and pushes down, holding me against the mattress while his mouth follows the path his hand carved.

The hollow of my throat. The swell of my breast. My nipple, which he takes between his lips and works until my back tries to arch and his hand keeps me pinned. The opposite side, the same thorough attention, until I'm shaking and gripping the blanket and the noises coming out of me are ones I've never made before.

His mouth moves lower. His hands push my thighs apart and hold them open, and the vulnerability of it should make me balk but instead it empties me of every thought that isn't the heat of his breath on my inner thigh.

When his mouth finds me, my head drops back and my hips try to lift. His forearm pins them flat. He works me with his tongue in long, measured strokes that build the pressure in layers until my thighs are trembling against his hands and I've stopped trying to keep quiet.

He pulls back before I crest. The loss of his mouth wrenches a noise out of me that's closer to a protest than anything I've produced in my adult life. The look he gives me from between my thighs belongs to a man who knows exactly what he's doing and enjoys the control more than he'll ever admit.

He rises over me, removes the rest of his clothes before settling his weight on me, and takes my wrists in one hand above my head. The grip is firm. The message is clear. His other hand guides himself to me, and the blunt pressure steals every thought I have left.

"Liam." His name comes out wrecked.

"I know." He pushes inside me in one unbroken stroke that stretches me wide and keeps going until I feel him everywhere. My vision whites at the edges. My fingers curl into fists above my head where his hand holds them.

Liam is thick enough that the fullness borders on too much, pleasure blurring into an intensity that leaves no room for anything else. He holds there, buried, letting me feel every inch of him while his forehead drops against mine and the control costs him every muscle in his body.