He throws his arm out again and I move fast—swing my leg over him and lower myself onto his torso, my knees finding the floor on either side of him, my weight settling across his chest. I catch his wrists and pin them. My bare thighs press against the hot skin of his sides and I feel the fever heat of him everywhere we touch.
"Elias." I lean down, my damp hair falling forward around us like a curtain, my voice low and steady even though my heart is slamming. "Elias, wake up. You're safe. You're in your cabin. Wake up."
His breathing changes. The choppy ragged rhythm stutters, catches, slows.
Then those green eyes open.
They find mine in the feeble beam of the phone light, disoriented for just a second before they sharpen. His chest rises and falls under me. The cabin is silent around us—just the low tick of the cooling stove and the sound of both of us breathing.
"Princess." His voice is gravel and sleep and something raw underneath it. "What are you doing on top of me?"
His hands, released from my grip, find my thighs. Large and warm and spanning almost the entire width of my bare legs.
Oh.
Oh.
It hits me all at once—where I am, what I'm wearing, what I'mnotwearing, the fact that my core is spread open against the hot bare skin of his abdomen with nothing between us. His sweat-damp skin against the most sensitive part of me. His scent filling every breath I take. His sleep-rough, gravel-heavy words do something catastrophic to my body.
The panic that drove me to climb over him in the dark dissolves. Heat floods me, fast and overwhelming, and I feel myself grow slick against him. I actually leak against his skin and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Heat climbs my cheeks so fast I feel dizzy with it.
"You were thrashing in your sleep," I manage, my voice embarrassingly unsteady. "Crying out. I couldn't bear to leave you like that."
In one fluid motion, he jackknifes into a sitting position and somehow, with me still in his lap, reaches past me and clicks on the night lamp. Warm amber light floods the room. I feel the shift of every muscle in his torso beneath me as he does it, the coiled, controlled power of him, and my breath simply leaves my body.
And then I feel it.
Hard and thick and unmistakable against my buttocks as he settles me in his lap. That’s his… shaft.Hard and aroused, for me.
My mouth goes dry. My thighs tighten instinctively against his hips and I watch his jaw clench in response. A vein dances at his temple.
His eyes come to my face.
And the heat in them dies, replaced by something else entirely. Something hard and furious and directed entirely at himself as his gaze tracks down to my jaw where the bruise from his arm is already darkening.
"You found a two-hundred-pound man—an ex-military extraction expert, a man who weighs three times what you do—thrashing around in a nightmare and you touched him." His voice is low and controlled and absolutely lethal. "What the hell is wrong with you? I could have seriously hurt you."
"Elias—"
"Jesus, Iris." The sound he makes is broken. Completely broken, cracked right down the middle. His hand comes up slowly, and with a gentleness that makes my chest cave in, cups my jaw. His thumb grazes the bruise with the lightest possible touch. "I hurt you. Already." Wetness shines in his green eyes, making my heart clench. “This is what I do. Destroy beautiful things.”
I place my hand over his on my jaw, the warmth of his skin steadying me. "No, you didn't hurt me. It was an accident that happened out of my choice to wake you. My choices are important to me, mountain man. Even if they may not seem right to you.”
Something shifts in his eyes. The anguish seeps away slowly, like fog burning off in morning light, leaving something breathtaking in its place. Wonder. Raw and unguarded and completely unintentional. His thumb moves across my jaw in a slow, careful arc. "Let me take care of this and I'll put you back to bed."
Gruff. Matter of fact. But I hear the hunger living just below the iron restraint, thrumming and coiled and waiting.
I shake my head. "If you want to make up for this," I say, tightening my fingers over his, "there's something you could do for me."
His brows knit. "What?"
I move down an inch in his lap. Only an inch. It's enough.
The thick, hard length of him presses against my core—my empty, bare, damp core—and the contact sends a bolt ofpleasure so sharp that the moan escapes before I can catch it. I hear the rough edge of his own, feel it vibrate through his chest against my palms.
The hardwood floor is unforgiving at my knees. A dull ache I barely register because every other nerve ending has rerouted itself to the place where I'm pressed against him. His abdomen is a furnace against my soft belly, the salt-sweat scent of him thick.
