Then I start to move.
Two fingers finding the swollen center of her, circling. She pulls in a sharp breath. Her hips roll forward. I slide through the slick heat of her while my thumb works her clit and she gripsmy hair and presses her forehead to my temple. The sounds she makes are quiet and desperate and completely unguarded.
She starts moving against my hand. Tentative at first. Then less so, the rhythm taking over.
"That's it." I whisper directly into her ear. "Ride my hand. Get what you need."
Her hips find the pace. I watch her face. Eyes closed, lips parted, cheeks flushed in the cold air, the cedar rough and solid at her back. She is here entirely. Nothing withheld. She is chasing what her body wants and I am giving it to her.
I feel her getting close in the tightening of her thighs against my hand, in the shift of her breathing, in the tension pulling through her from shoulders to hips.
I pinch her clit between two fingers. At the same moment I roll her nipple hard between thumb and forefinger.
She breaks.
Her whole body seizes and releases, the sound muffled against my jaw as she presses into me. I feel every pulse of it against my fingers, the orgasm moving through her in long slow waves, her grip on my hair loosening and tightening and loosening again. I turn my face into her hair and breathe through my nose because the feel of her coming apart in my arms is almost too much. But not enough. I want more of it.
She goes soft against me. Still held against the cedar. Her forehead drops to my shoulder and her hand rests open in my hair.
The wind moves across the ridge. Cold and steady and indifferent to everything that just happened on it.
The valley sits below us, enormous and unchanged.
I pull her jacket back up around her shoulders. She lets me, eyes still closed, breathing settling.
Then she opens her eyes and looks at me.
Her face is quiet in a way it was not before.
I keep her where she is. My hands at her waist. The cedar at her back and the valley behind her and the cold light moving across everything below us.
She looks at me and I look at her and I know, with the kind of clarity that does not need to explain itself, that I am not done with her. Not close.
And by the way she is still looking at me, her legs still wrapped around my waist, her body still warm against mine, neither is she.
17
MAYA
I feel every nerve ending I own firing at once, my whole body still pulsing from what just happened, my thighs trembling against Reid's hips where he still has me pinned to the cedar.
That was the most powerful thing I have ever felt in my life.
My mind is still rattled by it, trying to reassemble itself. But my body isn't interested in waiting. I can feel him between my legs, still hard, the length of him pressed directly against my sex through the layers between us. The contact is specific and unavoidable and my hips move toward it on instinct. Wanting more.
The groan Reid makes starts deep in his chest. His beard drags against my neck as he drops his mouth to it, and his voice comes out rough against my skin.
"Careful." Half breath, half sound. "Hold still for me. One more move and I lose it."
This man. This enormous, contained, controlled man who carries steadiness in his bones. He is shaking with the effort of holding himself together and it is because of me.
I move my hips again.
Slow. Deliberate. A roll of my pelvis that drags me against the full length of him, and I watch his face while I do it.
The wind comes across the ridge. Cold and clean, carrying pine and wet earth. The valley sits enormous and patient below us. Reid is looking and I watch his control cracking at every edge, everything underneath it pressing hard against the surface.
He pulls back creating distance between us. His eyes find mine directly and I can see it, the specific torture of a man deciding whether to hold the line or let it go. The muscle at his jaw ticks once.
