He huffed a quiet laugh against her shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “Figured that out about five minutes ago.”
He pulled her back into him, every solid inch of unmistakable intent along her backside. Heat flared low in her belly, sharp and sweet. Her body answered before her brain caught up, arching the smallest fraction into his touch.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmured, lips ghosting over the place where her neck met her shoulder. “I will.”
She should’ve. They were snowed in. Shot at. Exhausted. They had no idea what waited for them when the storm broke.
But his hand was warm on her stomach and his mouth was softat the shell of her ear, and for the first time in a very long time, she didn’t feel like she had to carry every worst-case scenario by herself.
“If I wanted you to stop,” she said quietly, “you’d already know.”
He stilled for a heartbeat, breath catching against her skin.
“Copy that,” he said, even softer.
The kisses changed after that—no wild rush, no frantic edge. Just his mouth trailing a slow path from the nape of her neck to her shoulder, unhurried, thorough, like he was memorizing the shape of her in the dark. His hand slid higher under her shirt, splaying wide over her ribs, pulling her deeper against him. His thumb skimmed her shoulder and hesitated, just briefly, over the place she never talked about.
He just drew her closer.
She let her eyes close and felt instead: the rasp of his stubble against the curve of her neck, the low sound he made when she pushed back into him, the way his fingers tightened at her waist like he was bracing himself against the urge to rush.
“Been thinking about this,” he admitted into her skin, voice barely more than a whisper. “Longer than I should’ve.”
“Same,” she said before she could talk herself out of it.
If it shocked him, he didn’t show it. He just held her tighter, dipped his head, and kissed a line down her shoulder that made her hand clutch at the quilt.
After that, the details blurred—the slow slide of his palm, the shift of his hips, her soft, helpless sound when he found exactly the right way to fit his body to hers. No frantic tearing of clothes this time, no graceless scramble. Just two people who had already crossed that line, choosing to take their time with it.
He stayed behind her, arm banded around her middle, every movement careful, controlled, like he understood that this—this quiet, this willingness to be gentle—was more dangerous to her than anything they’d done against that mattress the night before.
When it was over, he stayed where he was, chest to her back,heat still pouring off him against the curve of her neck. His hand didn’t move from her stomach.
“In case there was any doubt,” he said finally, voice rough and honest in the dark, “this wasn’t a panic move.”
She swallowed, throat tight.
“What was it, then?”
He pressed a slow kiss just below her ear.
“Me finally stopping being an idiot,” he said. “We get off this mountain, I’m done pretending I don’t want you.”
A pause.
“I’m done pretending I can.”
Her heart did something reckless and painful in her chest.
“That a promise, Wilson?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It is.”
She didn’t say it out loud, but the answer settled in her bones all the same.
Me too. She hadn’t told him she was afraid of what daylight would do to that promise.
She hadn’t told him she wanted to test it anyway.
