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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kelsey came awake suddenly, into her dark bedroom. Though the setting was perfectly familiar, the adrenaline fading from her blood told her she’d been startled awake. Something was wrong.
Lifting her head from her pillow, focusing on her senses to try to determine what was there that shouldn’t be, she looked around the room, and her heart stopped. Drawn on the canvas of a streetlight shining through her closed drapes: a silhouette. Sitting on her bed.
It took one more second for her to wake fully enough to relax. It was Dex. Just Dex. Sitting on the side of her bed, where he’d been sleeping, because she’d invited him.
In the next second, she understood that there might still be something to worry about. In his posture—slumped, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands—there was still something to worry about.
“Dex?”
The dark form of his silhouette twitched at the sound of his name, but he didn’t acknowledge her.
Kelsey scooted over to sit behind him. She could just barely make out the ink across the top of his back: the word BULLS in Gothic lettering, each letter as tall as her hand, and wider. She stroked one hand across that word, out to his right shoulder, and felt the rough skin of a scar. A rounded, ragged ridge like a tiny crater. The exit wound of a bullet. Its mate sat on the front of his shoulder, with another, much larger scar—a bullet that had entered but not left on its own.
Kelsey’s medical expertise was dramatically different from a human doctor’s expertise, but it shared some fundamental similarities. For example, by the shape and grouping of those three scars, she could make an informed conjecture that he’d been wearing body armor when he’d been shot; the bullets had entered right at the edge of that protection. Also, the bullet that had not gone through, assuming—as she did—that it had been fired in the same barrage, the same incident, as the through-and-through, had then clearly been stopped by something in his body.
Stopped by his shoulder. And, no doubt, shattered his clavicle or humerus. Or both.
That was a thing people who’d never been shot, or seen someone shot, or treated a gunshot wound, people whose experience with such things was limited to fiction, didn’t realize: a bullet that didn’t go straight through, assuming it hadn’t been fired from such great distance that simple physics stopped it, usually didincredibledamage inside the body. It wasn’t a matter of simply digging in the entrance hole and plucking out a slug, and then whipping in a couple sutures. A bullet with enough momentum to go straight through could also wreak fatal havoc. But a bullet that didn’t was often a pinball, ricocheting off bone and tearing through tissue, possibly fragmenting to do even more damage.
The matched craters on either side of Dex’s shoulder showed a bullet that had gone through soft tissue. Painful, certainly. But relatively uncomplicated and easily healed. The long, ragged scar along the shoulder joint, from the top down into the meat of his armpit, that had laid him up for a while.
With her hands on his back, she rose up a bit and kissed the exit scar. His only reaction was a deep sigh that made his back swell and recede. She felt the flex of muscle beneath her palms, her lips.
“Dex,” she said again, and this time, finally, he lifted his head.
He looked over his shoulder. “Hey. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Are you okay?”
Another sigh. This one blew out in a rush. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
Kelsey wanted to ask for details, but she knew him well enough to guess that he’d prefer not to share them. If this thing between them were to grow and flourish, they’d need to share such things with each other, but it didn’t need to happen right away, or all at once.
Right now, the reason he’d been sitting there, like that, didn’t matter. He was distressed, obviously. Whatever the cause, Kelsey knew how to help. The same thing that helped everyone: calm and comfort. Acceptance and love.
So she didn’t ask him anything. She simply wrapped her arms around his broad, strong shoulders and rested her chin atop one. After a moment, his hands came up and hooked over her hands.
When she kissed his shoulder again, his head tipped to hers and rested there. After another quiet moment, he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. He skimmed his palm, like fine-grain sandpaper, along her arm, slowly, all the way to her shoulder, her back, into her hair.
Then he turned, still bounded by her embrace, and his mouth was there, on her cheek, finding her mouth.
The kiss was deep and intense at once. Dex clamped her tightly in his arms and laid her back, stretching out on top of her, between her legs, while his mouth possessed hers completely. His beard rasped over her cheeks and chin. His grunts and groans filled her mouth.
He was hard, and hot, and big, and strong, pressing her body into the mattress. One hand skimmed coarsely down her side, over her hip, clutched her thigh and pulled it around him.
His every move was so intense, sointent, all Kelsey could do was hold on, find her breath, feel his heat, his ardor.
And then, in a forceful rush, with an agonized grunt, he was inside her, as deep as she could take him. And god, he felt sogood. This was different from the first time. Then, he’d been gentle and careful, focused wholly on her pleasure, checking in with her to make sure of it, and that had been wonderful—the best sexual experience of her life.
Now, though, there was desperation in him, something he needed, and that was wonderful, too. That he could need her so much, that she might give him what he needed—there was a powerful pleasure in that. And oh, the way he held her, like he’d die if she slipped away from him.
His hips flexed and rocked as he drove himself into her again and again, still kissing her, still clamping her to him. Each thrust went so deep it made a wispy throb of pain through her pleasure, but that only intensified the pleasure—and when she hooked her other leg around his hip, crossed both her legs around him and shifted the position of their joining, that aching pleasure exploded.
He felt it, too. A long, ragged groan ripped from his chest and the pace of his thrusts doubled, then tripled, until Kelsey lost all sense of anything but him, them, this. She tore her mouth from his and cried out as stars exploded, tiny novas behind her eyelids, in her blood, her muscles, everywhere.
Dex’s head dropped to the pillow beside her head as he drove into her again, again, again, drawing her climax out to madness before he finally came in a massive spasm of shuddering tension and release.
