“Your fault for teasing me.”
His laugh was more vibration than sound. He knelt and yanked her pants and underwear low enough to bare her, and then, holy hell, his mouth was on her. Warm tongue, cold beard. The contrast made her jerk and slap at the back of his head, but he just wrapped his arms under her thighs and… yeah. That was perfection. She got off on power, but nothing leveled her like a man on his knees with his face buried between her legs. His tongue was deadly, but it was the way he groaned, low and hungry, that undid her.
She came in seconds. Embarrassing, spectacular, full-body shudders that made her want to black out. He stayed through it, mouth never let go, not even when she said his name, not even when she shook all over and tried to shove him away. He stayed until her legs gave out and her vision turned white, and then he caught her before she could collapse to the asphalt.
He pressed his face to her hipbone, breathing hard, and she realized her fingers were buried in his hair.
She caught her breath and dragged his head up by the back of his neck, more demanding than she meant, and kissed him. It tasted like her and him together, and she moaned into hismouth. His beard scraped her chin, and she wanted to bite him, so she did.
“Inside,” she whispered, though she wasn’t entirely sure if she was telling him to get inside her or take her inside first.
Bear got the door open with her still wrapped around him, his shoulder catching the frame hard enough that the whole wall shuddered. The back room was dark and smelled like neoprene and wet dog, and she didn’t care about any of it because his hand was already working under her shirt, his palm covering her breasts.
He walked her backward in the dark, and the backs of her thighs hit the edge of the cot. She sat hard and pulled him down by the front of his shirt and kissed him until she had to come up for air. He yanked off his shirt. His chest and stomach were slabs of dense, coiled muscle, the skin warm and prickly with hair, and she ran her palms up the whole of it like she had to memorize it. He made a sound against her neck, and she dug her fingers into his sides.
Atlas stepped through the open doorway behind them and froze.
Greta registered the silence before anything else. Atlas was a dog who moved constantly—nose snuffling, tags clacking, nails clicking. The sudden quiet was wrong. She lifted her head.
He stood in the threshold between the back room and the front shop, body rigid, head forward, his posture radiating alarm.
She was off the cot before Bear could react. She grabbed the Maglite from the gear rack beside the door — muscle memory, she’d hung it in the same spot for five years — and clicked it on. “Stay here.”
“Like hell.” Bear was beside her, shirt still half-tangled, pants still undone, and she didn’t have the time or the desire to argue.
She pushed through the doorway into the front shop.
The beam swept the room and landed on devastation.
Every drawer in the back counter had been yanked open and emptied onto the floor. The filing cabinet was on its side, folders scattered, maps she’d spent years marking ripped from the wall and crumpled. The glass display case — SAR vests and specialist gear — had been smashed open with something heavy. Her trip-planning binders were scattered across the sales floor like someone had picked them up and flung them one by one. The register drawer hung open and emptied, though she kept less than forty dollars in it.
This wasn’t a robbery.
Thieves grabbed and ran. Whoever did this had been looking for something specific, and they’d moved through the shop systematically, angrily, leaving no surface unturned.
Atlas pressed his nose to the floor and moved in a slow arc, tracking something. She let him work and moved the flashlight to the far wall.
Her trip-scheduling whiteboard — the big one, where she chalked out guide dates and client names and weather forecasts — had been wiped clean. In its place, two words had been spray-painted in thick red letters, block capitals, each one the height of her torso:
STOP LOOKING.
She read them. Then read them again. Her brain kept trying to reassign them, to make them mean something less than they meant, and kept failing.
Bear came up beside her and stopped.
The shop was quiet except for Atlas’s breathing and the distant bark of King outside, who had apparently not registered any of this as an emergency.
Bear’s jaw worked like he was chewing glass as he took in the room — the tipped cabinet, the scattered maps — and then his gaze returned to the wall and stayed there.
STOP LOOKING.
She should be scared. She waited for the fear to come. What she got instead was something colder and harder, settling in her chest like iron dropped into still water.
STOP LOOKING.
No.
No, she abso-fucking-lutely would not.
