“You’re mine now. Only mine.”
I started a rhythm that was raw and aggressive, my body slamming into hers with every ounce of the hunger I’d been suppressing. I wasn’t a good man, and I wasn’t a gentle one. I was a man who had finally found the only thing in the world that felt like peace, and I was going to destroy us both to keep it.
She met me stroke for stroke, her sass replaced by a desperate need. I watched the way my hands looked against her soft skin, the contrast of my scars against her perfection. I reached down, my thumb finding her again, working her as I drove into her, and she went off like a bomb.
The sound she made—that high, broken cry—was the final straw. I buried my face in her neck, my teeth marking her skin again and let go. I emptied myself into her, my body shaking with the force of it, until there was nothing left but the sound of our breathing and the silence of the mountain outside.
I didn’t pull away. I stayed heavy on top of her, my face hidden in her hair, finally feeling the quiet I’d been looking for since I’d come home.
CHAPTER SIX
Keely
I sat up in bed, the sheets sliding down my skin as last night came flooding back to me. For the first time in years, the crushing pressure to be productive—to study, to work, to worry—wasn’t the first thing I felt.
Instead, I felt the emptiness where Griffin should have been.
I looked up and found him standing in the doorway. Dark blue sweatpants hanging low on his hips, his chest bare, the morning light cutting along the ridge of his shoulder and catching every scar. There were more than I’d registered last night. A long rope of pale tissue down his left side. A puckered star below his collarbone. A burn mark, faded to silver, across his ribs. Years of surviving etched into his skin and I wanted to put my mouth on every single one.
He was watching me the way he watched everything—still, thorough, like he had all the time in the world.
He looked different in the morning light. Not softer exactly—Griffin was never going to be soft. But something in the set of his jaw had loosened. The permanent brace he carried, like he was always waiting for something to go wrong, was still there. Just quieter. I noticed it the way you notice when a sound you’ve gotten used to finally stops.
“Good,” he said. “You’re awake.”
He’d said it like he’d been watching me, waiting for me to wake up. I could tell by the set of his shoulders—that particular stillness that was so much a part of him.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Now I am.”
He crossed the room without asking, reached down, and lifted me. I laughed. I was done being shy about it. Mentally making excuses of why he shouldn’t carry me. Griffin was a big man and could do this. Pick me up with ease. I wrapped my arms around his neck and felt the solid heat of him against my bare skin—the wall of his chest, the flex of his arms under my thighs. I was twenty-three years old and I had never once in my life let anyone carry me somewhere. I hadn’t known it would feel like this.
The bathroom was warm. The large tub was already filled, steam drifting off the surface, a thick layer of bubbles moving across the water. He’d done this before he woke me. He’d run the bath, tested the temperature no doubt, because that was Griffin, and placed a folded towel against the back of the tub for my head. Taking care of me. I looked at that folded towel and felt something shift in my chest that I wasn’t expecting.
He lowered me into the water slowly, his hands steady at my waist, his eyes on my face the whole time. The heat hit my skin in a wave—a deep, penetrating warmth that worked into the soreness, my muscles unknotting inch by inch. I couldn’t quite hold back the sound that escaped me. The feeling wasn’t as good as it had been when he’d been inside me last night, but it was good.
He knelt beside the tub. He wasn’t looking at me the way men usually looked at me—like they were assessing, comparing. He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me last night when I’d been pressed against his door and he’d said mine like it was afact he was finally saying out loud. As if there wasn’t a single inch of me he wanted to skip.
“A mountain man who runs bubble baths,” I said. “Is that in the survival manual?”
“Section four,” he said. “Taking care of what’s yours.”
He reached for a pitcher on the side of the tub and used it to wet my hair. “Lean back, baby.”
I closed my eyes as the warm water washed over me. Next, he grabbed a bottle of shampoo and poured some into his palm and rubbed it between his hands before sliding his fingers into my hair.
I knew from last night that his hands were enormous. Calloused, scarred, and built for entirely different work than this. He washed my hair like he’d done it a thousand times before. His fingertips pressed into my scalp in slow, firm circles. He worked from the roots out, thorough and unhurried, and I sat there with my eyes closed and my hands resting on my knees and let him.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let someone do something for me without arguing first.
He rinsed away the suds slowly. The warm water tracked down my neck, across my collarbones, and I felt his thumb follow it—just once, a slow deliberate drag along the line of my throat that had nothing to do with washing my hair and everything to do with him reminding both of us who I belonged to now.
Then he picked up the cloth.
He was slow about that too—unhurried, methodical, the rough texture of the cloth moving across my skin in long strokes that were half practical and half something else entirely. Down each arm, his free hand following behind the cloth, palm flat against my wet skin. He turned my wrist over and pressed his lips to the inside where my pulse was jumping.
I watched his face. His jaw was set, his eyes dark and focused. He looked like a man exercising very deliberate control and finding it costly.
