"Come here," I whisper.
He comes.
His mouth finds my neck first. The hollow beneath my ear. He kisses me there, open-mouthed, and his stubble scrapes against my skin, and the sensation is so sharp and so good that my head falls back and a moan spills out of me that I don't muffle. His hands cup my breasts, both of them, and the rough drag of his calloused palms against my nipples makes my entire body go taut.
"Rhett." His name comes out broken. Breathless.
"I've got you," he murmurs against my throat. "I've got you, sweetheart."
The word undoes me. Sweetheart. Said rough and low with his mouth on my skin, and I realize I'm crying and I don't care. I pull at his flannel and he lets me push it off his shoulders, and I see the tattoos up close for the first time. Dark ink covers his left arm, climbing his shoulder, trailing up to his neck. Underneath them, scars. Some thin and surgical. Some rougher. The map of what happened to him written on his skin in a language I can read.
I press my mouth to the worst one. A raised, jagged line on his shoulder where something tore through muscle and healed wrong. He goes still under my lips.
"Bianca—"
"Shh." I kiss the next one. A puckered circle on his ribs that I know without asking is a bullet wound. I press my lips to it and hold them there, and I feel his chest heave under my mouth.
He lets me. This man, who won't let anyone close enough to see the damage, who has spent four years behind a wall so thick that even the people who love him can't get through. He stands in the amber light of his cabin and lets me put my mouth on his scars, and when I look up at him, his eyes are wet.
His chest is broad and hard and covered in more ink, more scars, and I put my hands flat against his skin and feel his heart slamming under my palms.
"Lie down with me," I say.
We lower ourselves onto the bed together. Carefully, because his leg makes careful necessary, and I don't rush him. He settles on his back and pulls me over him, and I straddle his hips, and the feeling of him between my thighs, hard and pressing up through the layers between us, makes my breath stutter.
He watches me. Both hands on my hips, fingers pressing into the flesh, and the look on his face is so open, so unguarded, that I feel like I'm seeing someone no one else has seen in years.
"You're beautiful," he says. Raw. No decoration.
"Rhett—"
"You are." His hands slide up my sides. Over my ribs. Back to my breasts, thumbing my nipples until I'm rocking against him involuntarily, chasing the friction. "Every part of you. Don't argue with me."
I don't argue.
I lean down and kiss him, and we work the rest of our clothes off between us, tangled and graceless and laughing once when my scrub pants catch on my ankle, and the laughter cracks the last wall open. Because this isn't a performance. This is real and messy, and his bad leg keeps him from moving the way he wants,and I have to help him shift his weight, and none of it is smooth, and all of it is perfect.
When we're bare, he rolls me under him, taking his weight on his right side, his left leg braced. He's above me and I can feel the full length of his body against mine, skin to skin, and the heat of him is staggering.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him.
His hand slides between us. Down my stomach. Between my thighs. When his fingers find me, I'm so wet that the sound his touch makes in the quiet cabin is obscene, and my cheeks flush and his eyes go black.
"Christ," he breathes. "You're soaked."
"I've been—" I gasp as his fingers circle my clit, slow and firm and devastatingly precise. "I've been thinking about this. About you. For weeks."
His jaw tightens. His fingers slide lower, two pressing inside me, and the stretch of his thick, calloused fingers makes my back arch and my hands grip his shoulders.
"Tell me," he says against my mouth. "Tell me what you thought about."
"Your hands." I'm panting. His fingers curl inside me and the heel of his palm grinds against my clit, and the pleasure is so sharp I can barely form words. "Your hands on me. Your voice. The way you—oh—"
He swallows the sound with a kiss. Deep and consuming, and his fingers don't stop, working me with that focused patience, reading my body like he reads the grain of wood before he splits it. Learning what makes me gasp. What makes me shake. What makes my thighs clamp around his hand and my voice break on his name.
I'm close. He can feel it. He pulls his fingers out, and I make a sound of protest that he catches with his mouth.
