AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The rhythm of Jonah’s breathing was deep and even. Within a minute of me tugging the covers up over us, he’d fallen asleep. He had to be exhausted after a week out in the backcountry fighting a wildfire.
Meanwhile, thoughts were pinging in my mind. With all that I had just allowed to happen with Jonah, my brain chased worries in circles. I had wanted him, wanted what I felt with him, and had grabbed it with both hands. Even now, in the quiet darkness with him beside me and Honey curled up on her new favorite bed nearby, I got hot all over just thinking about it.
I didn’t expect Jonah. I also didn’t expect how I felt with him. In all honesty, I was accustomed to being let down when it came to sex. Chemistry didn’t mean much of anything, or so I thought. Until Jonah. With us, it felt like one flame leaping into the next, the fire burning hotter and hotter.
My mind spun to the scars on his side and the shocking cause. There were school shootings in the news so often that it was easy to feel inured to them. Having grown up in Alaska with parents who hunted alongside the basic risks of living on the edge of the wilderness, I’d been around guns my entire life and knew how to handle them. One was kept tucked on a shelf in the closet right by the door. It had been there as long as I could remember because one year we had problems with a black bear who had her cubs nearby. My father taught me how to use it in case I needed to scare her off.
But school shootings? My very being recoiled at the thought of it. My heart felt cracked to realize Jonah had survived one.
I had so many questions. Yet I knew from the look on his face when I’d noticed his scars that it wasn’t my place to ask. I curled onto my side, studying his profile. The moonlight fell through the window, casting the angles of his face in a silvery relief. I wanted to trace my fingertips along his cheekbone and lightly draw over his sensual mouth. But he needed to sleep, and I wanted that for him.
“Jonah,” I breathed.
Steam billowed around us as the water rained down in the shower.
“Yes?” he drawled.
His palm slid down to tease over my nipple, slippery from the soap he’d just rubbed all over me.
“Your knee,” I protested weakly.
I’d gotten a good look at his knee this morning. It was barely swollen. He told me it ached, but that was it.
“My knee is fine,” he murmured as his palm slid over the curve of my belly and dipped between my thighs.
I gasped when he sank two fingers inside me.
Jonah was blowing all of my low expectations about sex to smithereens. After I’d taken Honey for her morning walk and fed her breakfast, he caught me by the hand and tugged me into the shower.
I cried out, arching back as he pumped his fingers skillfully in and out of me. In another moment, he turned, seating himself on the corner shelf in the shower. It was a nice shower with two rainfall showerheads above and additional ones mounted on the walls. There was a bench just outside of the fall of the water on one side. He sat down, stretching his leg out. His arousal jutted up, and my body clenched in response.
“See, I’m sitting down,” he teased as he pulled me to him. He’d thought ahead and reached for the condom on the shelf nearby, opening it and rolling it on swiftly.
I couldn’t help it. Ineededhim inside me. I craved the feeling of him filling me. When I knelt over him and sank down, my body trembled as my release raced through me. He was as primed as I was, thrusting into me with several deep surges before I felt the press of his fingers on my hip. With one arm wrapped around my waist, I felt the heat of his release spurting inside me.
When I opened my eyes, my heart felt jolted by the shock of intimacy. He gave me a lingering kiss and then helped me up. The rest of our shower was entirely practical.
Jonah was solicitous, handing me a towel after we got out. I worried when I saw the subtle hitch in his gait as he walked out of the bathroom a few minutes later.
I made omelets with smoked salmon and cream cheese. After we finished eating, his phone rang, and I turned away, busying myself with cleaning up.
“Everything okay?” I asked when he set his phone on the table a moment later.
He looked up. “That was the hospital. Gram’s okay. They plan to discharge her later this afternoon after running a few more tests.”
“Do you want me to give her a ride?”
ChapterTwenty
Jonah
“What kind of tests?” I asked Dennis.
“They originally said they’d discharge her this morning, but they want to run some kind of test on her heart.”
My own heart twisted with worry. I had intellectually accepted my grandmother’s choice not to go through another round of treatment for her cancer.
Yet my mind’s rational acceptance didn’t erase the emotional pain. Grief was waiting in the wings.
