“Coop.” My name came out strangled.
I’d looked up at her, holding her gaze as I pressed a kiss to the crease where her thigh met her hip. “Tell me what you want.”
“You know what I want.”
I did. But I wanted to hear her say it. Wanted to give her back the control that had been stripped from her during those days at the compound.
“Tell me.”
“Your mouth.” Her hips lifted, seeking contact I wasn’t quite giving her. “Please. I need your mouth on me.”
I gave her what she wanted. Buried my face between her thighs and used my tongue and fingers until she came apart, her hand fisted in my hair and my name echoing off the walls. Then I flipped her onto her stomach, pulled her hips up, and took her from behind, hard enough to make the headboard slam against the wall.
She’d explored my scars too. The shrapnel damage on my ribs that she’d only glimpsed before. The fresh wounds from the hunt, still scabbing over. She’d traced each one with herfingertips, her lips, her tongue, cataloging the damage with the same attention to detail she brought to her photography.
“You’ve been hurt so many times,” she’d whispered against the bullet graze on my shoulder.
“Comes with the job.”
“I hate it.” She’d pressed her mouth to the scar, then moved lower, trailing kisses down my chest, my stomach, following the line of hair below my navel. “I hate that people have hurt you.”
When she’d taken my cock in her mouth, I’d stopped being capable of coherent thought. Her tongue traced the length of me before she closed her lips around the head, and I gripped the headboard behind me. She took her time, learning what made my breath catch, what made my hips jerk. When she took me deeper, her hand working the base of my cock in rhythm with her mouth, I had to force myself not to thrust.
“Mia.” Her name came out wrecked. “If you don’t stop, I’m going to?—”
She didn’t stop.
If anything, she doubled down, sucking harder, sliding her free hand up my thigh to cup my balls and roll them between her fingers. I watched her through half-closed eyes—her blonde hair spilling across my stomach, her cheeks hollowed, her obvious pleasure in undoing me completely. When I came, she swallowed everything, working me through the aftershocks until I pulled her up my body because I physically couldn’t take any more.
She sprawled across my chest afterward, both of us breathing hard, her fingers tracing lazy patterns on my skin. The afternoon light had gone golden through the window, and I realized we’d lost track of time completely. Hours had passed. Maybe half a day.
“Tell me more about Garnet Bend,” she murmured against my chest.
So I did. The coffee shop called Deja Brew, where everyone knew my order. The way the mountains looked at sunrise. How the Warrior Security guys were the closest thing to family I’d had since the Corps.
But it wasn’t all light topics and easy memories. On the second night, her head on my chest and her fingers tracing the shrapnel scars on my ribs, I asked the question that had been burning in my throat since I’d carried her out of Travis’s compound. Hell, maybe since the moment I’d seen her in that barn.
“I keep thinking about what happens next,” I admitted. “Now that the dust is settling. Now that we’re not trying to just survive.”
She shifted, propping her chin on my chest to look at me. “What do you mean?”
“I guess, I mean…” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “What do you want, Kitten? With us. If there even is anuslong-term.”
I couldn’t blame her if there wasn’t. Maybe she wanted to get back to her life as soon as possible.
She was quiet for a long time, her fingers still moving absently across my skin.
“I don’t necessarily want to go back to Billings. I never really felt like that was home.”
I could feel hope pushing at my chest. “What about here in Garnet Bend? I know you haven’t been here long, and believe it or not, there’s more to it than just my house.” My laugh sounded awkward even to my own ears. “But would that be something you’d consider?”
She pushed up on one elbow, looking down at me. “Is that an option?”
“I want it to be. But if you’re going to stay, I don’t want it to be because we survived something terrible together. I want it tobe because I earned it.” I stared into her eyes. “I want to woo you. Dinners and flowers. Show you how sorry I am for leaving you before.”
She laughed—bright and unexpected. “Woo me? Who says that anymore?”
“I do.”
