"If you keep doing that," he says, "I'm going to take you. Right here."
I hold his gaze.
"I want you to."
The growl that comes out of him is low and certain and then his mouth is on mine, hard and consuming, and I feel the exact moment his restraint breaks in the way his hands tighten and the kiss stops being careful and becomes something else entirely. He lowers my legs to the ground. My feet find the snow. He keeps kissing me while his hands go to his jacket, shrugging it off in one motion.
I watch him reach inside. His hands move along the interior, finding something at the back panel, unzipping a seam I hadn't noticed. A few quick adjustments and then he is shaking the jacket out and laying it flat across the snow, and I understand. The back panel has opened into something wide and insulated, spread across the white ground, like a blanket.
He straightens. Looks at me.
"Come here, sweetheart."
He takes my hand and helps me down. I lie back and the snow compresses beneath the insulation, cold through the layers at my back, and then Reid is above me, lowering himself over me,bracing his forearms on either side of my face. His weight settles against me, not all of it, just enough to feel real and solid and entirely him.
He reaches down and moves a strand of hair from my face. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
Then he kisses me. Slow. Patient. Like we have all the time there is and he intends to use every second of it.
We start to move against each other and I notice, distantly, that I am not cold. His body radiates heat through every layer still between us. Everywhere we touch I am warm. Everywhere he hasn't touched yet I want him to.
He sits back on his knees and pulls his thermal over his head in one gesture.
I forget what I was thinking.
His chest is broad and deep, heavy muscle, dark hair across the pectorals narrowing as it tracks down the center of his stomach. A scar along his ribs. Another near his hip. The body of a man who has done hard things in hard places and carries the evidence without comment. I reach up and put both hands flat against his chest.
The warmth of him under my palms. The give of muscle over bone. The dark hair softer against my fingers than I expected.
He watches me touch him. Doesn't move. Lets me have it.
We undress each other slowly. His hands on my layers, mine on his. The cold air finds my skin each time something comes off and then his hands find it faster, and warmer, and the cold stops mattering.
Then he starts to move down my body.
His mouth at my throat. My collarbone. The curve of my breast, his tongue circling my nipple before he moves on, and I am already trembling by the time he reaches my stomach. His hand slides under me, cupping my hips, lifting me toward his mouth. His other hand travels up my side and finds my breast,fingers closing on my nipple with a pressure that pulls a sound of pleasure out of me. And then his mouth finds the center of me.
His tongue moves in slow, deliberate strokes, learning me, and every pass sends sensation spiking up through my core and into my chest. He works me unhurried, thorough and completely focused. His fingers at my nipple tighten when his tongue circles, loosen when he flattens it against me in a long slow drag, and the coordination of it, the precision of it, the fact that he is paying that quality of attention to every signal my body gives him, undoes me faster than anything has in my life.
I push my hands into his hair.
He makes a sound against me that I feel everywhere.
The tension builds in waves, each one higher, each one tightening through my thighs and up through my belly, and I am pulling at his hair and moving against his mouth and I cannot stop either thing.
I come apart. Long and rolling, my whole body lifting off the jacket, his hands the only thing keeping me anchored to the ground.
The aftermath settles slowly. My chest heaving. My hands still in his hair.
Reid lifts his head.
His beard is wet. His eyes are dark and completely steady and he is looking at me with an expression that tightens my stomach all over again.
He moves up my body settling his hips between my thighs and I feel him there, thick and heavy, the blunt head of him pressing against my entrance, and I pull in a slow breath.
He braces above me. Looks at my face.
"I'm clean," he says. "It's been a long while."
