Page 64 of Crossfire Creek Vengeance

“Don’t be,” she said. “Just, don’t.”

He kissed her again, and she didn’t break this time. Instead, she knotted her hands in his shirt and pulled him back to her. Another kiss. Way more heat. So much of it that Deacon thought it could burn him to the core. He let his hands nestle at her hips, thumbs searching for the familiar dip over her bones.

“You don’t…” she started.

His lips parted her sentence. “I do,” he said.

She shook her head just enough to break the line of the kiss, but not the line of their bodies. “You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”

Deacon grinned into the hush of the house. Oh, he knew all right because he was feeling the same damn thing.

Her hands left his shirt and cupped his cheeks, gentle as they’d never had to be before. She searched his face, the way someone searches a piece of paper they think might hold a secret.

He was sure there were still secrets between them, but the heat sure as hell wasn’t one of them. Deacon kissed her again. And again until the heat turned to raw, familiar urgency. Until he knew he either had to stop or haul her off to bed.

He went with option two.

Since he wasn’t in any shape to do any hauling, Deacon just kept kissing her while he started the slow, mindless walk toward his bedroom. Jessa didn’t put up any roadblocks. Just the opposite, she kept up her part of the kisses as well.

At the doorway, she finally tore her mouth from his, pressing her forehead to his chin, a quiet detour. Deacon paused. Her breath gusted against his neck, uneven and real, and for a second, he braced himself for a rush of second thoughts, confessions, any sign of her skittishness. Instead, Jessa slid her hands down to his butt, anchored herself, and nudged him backward with a nudge so subtle he almost missed it.

They crossed the threshold like that, faces close, feet uncoordinated, mouths already seeking their next collision. The room was dim, sheets tangled, the bed itself an afterthought in a space meant for sleeping solo. But tonight it was all a collision course.

Jessa kicked the door with the back of her foot, and it creaked in protest before thudding shut.

The darkness swallowed them, or maybe it just gave them cover, permission to fumble. This was no choreographed striptease, no sultry lowering to the mattress. Just a greedy tangle of limbs, denim scraping against skin, the pop and drag of buttons and zippers, and the way she laughed when he tried and failed to get her shirt over her head in one smooth move. He muttered an apology, snagged on her hair, but she only closed her eyes and shivered as if the apology was the best part.

They finally got naked. No easy feat what with all their clothes and gear. But it was worth it to feel her bare against his skin.

She smelled exactly the way he remembered, something electric, something real. Her skin was still flushed, blushing high on her cheekbones and throat. He pressed his mouth to that heat, following it with his mouth, then hands, then more mouth. Jessa laughed again, but this time it was a thinner, more desperate sound, like the laugh was trying to outpace her own heartbeat.

Deacon got them moving again to the bed, and he eased her back on the mattress. And quickly remembered that certain positions were going to pay hell with his injury. Jessa understood that, too, because she shifted positions with her on top of him.

It was perfect. She was perfect. And Deacon just let himself surrender to the heat. To her.

Until he got hit with a shred of common sense.

“Condom,” he managed to say, and he reached into the nightstand drawer and took one out.

Jessa popped it from his palm, holding it between two fingers like a dare. Wordless, she tore the wrapper and just rolled it on with a deliberate slowness that made his pulse skip offbeat.

She braced herself, palms to his chest, hair a curtain around their faces. Deacon, for a blink, didn’t recognize the woman above him. This version of Jessa was direct, intent. Owning her desire like it was a birthright.

A bead of sweat caught at her collarbone. He wanted to lick it off, taste the salt, but she was already lowering herself onto him.

He buried a groan in her shoulder, the pain in his side a fizzing afterthought compared to the bright surge of everything else. She moved with a purpose.

The rhythm was rough, then tender, then rough again, and he just tried to keep pace. Tried not to make this end too soon. But any amount of time would be too soon when it came to Jessa.

They found a groove, and this time he let her set it. She steadied herself on his thighs and moved in a way that was bright and wild, no holding back. And he could have sworn that, in that dark room, every time he blinked he saw her grinning, saw her not just wanting him but enjoying herself in a way he’d never seen her. This was a new version of Jessa, somehow rolled back, distilled, made urgent and sharper by everything they’d survived since.

He lost his thoughts for a minute or an hour. There was a moan, and he didn’t even know whose voice it was. Jessa’s hair stuck to the sweat on his neck, and her hands scrambled for something to grip. He gave her his own hands—fumbled, caught her palm, squeezed it. She shuddered, a quake that rolled through her, and Deacon felt it echo, an aftershock deep in his gut.

They fell hard at the same time, finishing this together.

She slumped down onto his chest, still breathing as if she’d sprinted a marathon. Her body was boneless, and Deacon craned his neck to kiss her temple. Jessa didn’t move, didn’t even open her eyes, but her cheek twitched into a lazy smile.

It would have been easy—so easy—to make a joke, to kill the moment before it got oxygen. He almost did. Instead, he just lay there, Jessa’s heart thrumming slow against his, sweat cooling between them, and decided to remember every second.