Page 51 of Faultline

His hands stay on the wheel. The knuckles are scraped raw from the shovel. The burn on his forearm is angry, red, and will need cleaning.

He stares through the windshield at the cabin he almost lost, and whatever is holding him together is different from the focused calm of the fire. Quieter. Heavier.

"Give me your arm," I say.

"It's fine."

"It's blistered and you haven't looked at it once because you think ignoring an injury makes it a tactical decision instead of stubbornness." I reach for his forearm. He pulls it away. "Liam."

"They came to my land, Tosh." His voice is flat. Scraped down to the frame beneath it. "They burned my equipment. My staging area. They would have taken the cabin and every tree between it and the ridge if the drainage hadn't slowed them down long enough for me to cut the break."

"And you cut it. And the cabin's standing. And you're sitting here bleeding on your steering wheel instead of letting me look at a burn that's going to get infected if you keep treating it like it doesn't exist." I lean across the cab and take his forearm before he can pull away again. His muscles lock under my grip, but he doesn't move. "You're the most stubborn man I've ever met, and I've met men whose stubbornness got people killed."

"Mine didn't."

"No. Yours saved a cabin." My thumb traces the skin above the blistered edge, and his breath catches at the contact. "You scared the hell out of me."

"I almost didn't make it out of the culvert," he says. Flat. Reporting. "The fire jumped the brush line faster than I calculated. I had maybe ten seconds of margin."

Ten seconds. The difference between the man sitting beside me and a casualty report.

"Look at me," I say.

He turns his head. His eyes are dark, and the control he wears like a second skin is still in place but the structure behind it is shaking. I can see it in the fine tremor at his jaw, the way his pulse beats hard at his throat.

His hand comes off the wheel and closes around the back of my neck. Not gently. His fingers dig into the nape and pull me across the console toward him in one motion. My hands land flat on his chest to brace myself. He's furnace-hot through the flannel, his heartbeat hammering against my palm. His hold on my neck tightens until his mouth is close enough to mine that I can feel the heat coming off his skin.

He takes my mouth with his, and there's nothing measured about it. No control. No calibration. His teeth catch my lower lip hard enough to sting, and the sound I make disappears into the kiss.

His free hand finds my hip and drags me the rest of the way across the cab until I'm straddling his lap, my knees wedged between him and the seat back, every inch of him pressed against me through the thin layers between us. He's already hard. The contact is explicit and deliberate, and his hips roll upward once, forcing himself against me with a weight that sends heat flooding through my pelvis.

I want the bruises his fingers are pressing into my hip. I want the proof that he's here and solid and alive beneath me.

His mouth breaks from mine. "Inside."

He opens the driver's door and lifts me out of the cab with my legs locked around him, and the cold air hits my flushed skin like a slap. He carries me up the porch steps with his mouth on my throat and his hands under my thighs. The door gives way under his shoulder. He doesn't have a free hand and doesn't care.

The hallway stops us and we both get out of boots anyway we can.. Then his weight pins me against rough timber with a force that drives the air from my lungs, and the contrast between the chill at my back and him burning at my front strips every thought from my head except where his hands are going next.

He catches the hem of my thermal top and pulls it over my head in one rough motion, leaving me bare from the waist up. The air on my skin lasts exactly as long as it takes him to press his chest against mine.

His flannel is coarse against my breasts. His mouth moves down my throat to the collarbone he marked days ago, and he bites down on the same spot, harder. The pain blooms into warmth that pools low in my belly and drops between my thighs.

His hands close over my breasts, rough, calloused palms against skin that registers every ridge of his fingers like a blueprint. His thumbs drag across both peaks, and the sensation is sharp enough to make my spine arch and push into his grip. He takes the reaction and uses it, rolling and pressing until the air leaves my lungs in shallow pulls and my hips are grinding forward against his, searching for friction he hasn't given me permission to find.

"Stay still." Low. Certain.

His hands leave my breasts and lock my hips flat. The denial of contact makes my whole body clench.

Then his fingers hook into the waistband of my thermals. He drags them and my panties down together, rough enough that I have to lift my hips, and shoves them past my knees. I kick free of them while he opens his jeans, the button giving beneath his thumb before he pushes the denim down and out of the way.

His cock is thick and hard against my inner thigh, and the heat of it makes the muscles in my legs shake.

Then his fingers slide between us. They find my clit first, swollen and slick, and the sound he makes against my throat at what he finds is low enough to vibrate through my sternum.

Two fingers push inside me without warning. My head drops back against the wall and my mouth opens on a cry I don't authorize.

He works me with slow, deep strokes, his thumb circling my clit with a force that's precise and merciless. The wood is cool against my bare shoulders. He's burning against my front. The contrast collapses every rational thought into a single bright point of sensation centered on his hand.