"You feel amazing," he breathed against my lips.
I kissed him instead of answering because there wasn't a word I trusted myself to say.
His hand slid from my hip to the small of my back, pulling me closer, and I felt the shift—that slow, deep tightening that was nothing like the sharp, cresting waves from earlier. This was softer. More like a tide coming in than a wave breaking.
"Calvin." Just my name. That's all.
"I know," I whispered back.
And I did. I felt it in him, the same thing building in me, and we stayed right there together, eyes open, foreheads pressed, breathing each other's air as it crested and rolled through us both in one long, shuddering wave.
His mouth found mine as he came, and I felt it everywhere—his groan against my lips, his arms pulling me tight, his whole body trembling against me like I was the thing keeping him tethered to the earth.
I turned my face into his throat and squeezed my eyes shut.
We lay tangled together while our breathing slowed. His hand moved in long, absent strokes up and down my spine.
After a while he slipped out of bed without a word. Came back with a warm washcloth and cleaned me up so gently I had to press my lips together and stare at the ceiling while he did it. Then he slid back in beside me, gathered me against his chest, and pressed a kiss to the top of my head.
"Sleep," he said.
Like it was simple.
Like I did much of that.
He was out within minutes.
I could tell by the way his breathing evened out, the arm around me going heavy. His heartbeat slowed under my palm, and I lay there listening to it like it was sending me a message I didn't know how to decode.
The apartment was quiet. The bar below had gone still. Outside, Larkspur did whatever small towns did at this hour—nothing, mostly. A distant dog barking. The occasional creak of the building settling around us.
My thighs still ached. My body was wrung out in the best possible way.
Yet my brain wouldn't shut the hell up.
I stared at the ceiling and let the intrusive thoughts come, because there wasn't any stopping them now. The jittery edge from earlier had crept back in soft and quiet, coiling into my chest like smoke through a cracked window.
A girl could get used to this.
There it was again. That thought. The dangerous one.
I'd been in this town six weeks. Six weeks, and the bartender already knew my drink order. I knew the name of Slim's horse and which porch boards on the main house creaked loud enough to irritateMr. Calloway. I knew that Brody took his coffee black until about noon and then switched to sweet tea, and that he hummed when he worked, always the same three songs on rotation, and that he kept exactly one photograph of his dad in his wallet, worn soft at the corners from handling.
His arm tightened around me in his sleep, some unconscious pull, and an ache shot through me. Warm and terrifying in equal measure.
I thought about what Sassy had said on the porch that first week.You don't strike me as someone who runs because she doesn't feel. You strike me as someone who runs because she feels too much.
Damn pixie.
I pressed my palm flat against Brody's chest. Felt his heartbeat. Slow. Sure. Steady as the man himself.
The problem wasn't that I didn't want this.
The problem was that I did. More than made any sense for six weeks in a town I'd never planned to stay in, with a man I'd never planned to know past one night.
But I also couldn't make my body move away from his.
So I lay there in the dark, too full of something I didn't have a name for, listening to him breathe, watching the ceiling, and doing the thing I did best.
