It takes minutes—hours—yearsto come down from the high, and he holds her through all of it. When he extracts himself from within, she feels the loss acutely, missing it and instantly wanting it back. He crosses his arms over her body, and she can feel him still hard against her—rigid and hot and insistent. She rubs her ass over the tent in his briefs, and he groans, tightening the cage of his arms around her.
“I want to bury myself in you,” Crew says, and he moves a hand to her hip to pull her backward into him.
Grace wants that, too—desperately—but she can’t speak. Allthat falls out of her mouth in reply is an incoherent moan. Crew moves his other hand to her jaw, gripping her gently and turning her face to his. His eyes are wild and blown black with desire, his lips parted and pink and begging to be kissed. She cranes her neck to do just that, and their lips brush together lightly—the beginning of something neither of them will be able to come back from—when a sound shatters the haze of their shared Eden.
A whistle.
A jaunty tune falling from Forty’s lips as he breaks through the trees surrounding the pond with a towel around his waist, completely oblivious to what he’s just walked in on.
When he spots them tangled together and panting, the whistle abruptly stops. He freezes, takes about five seconds to realize what he’s interrupted, and then turns right back around and walks away.
Crew and Grace are suspended, both silent and unmoving as they watch his hasty retreat. Once he’s out of sight, they look at each other, grimacing.
“Great,” Grace says.
“Yeah,” Crew sighs. “We’re never going to hear the end of that.”
Chapter 15
Storm clouds roll in the next morning, bruising the sky with billows of gray, purple, and green. Weather of such nature is a blessing and a curse; the temperature is ten degrees cooler, which makes the workday seem less daunting, but that they’ll have to trudge around in mud, and sleeping, eating, and working amid the downpour and soaked earth is less than desirable.
Grace, however, cares little for the incoming tempest. Neither excited nor dreading its consequences, she eats breakfast with a swarm of butterflies taking up residence in her belly. Once he’d rinsed the conditioner from her hair, Crew had walked with her back to camp after they’d been caught by Forty, smiling at her with an achingly soft look in his eyes that had nearly compromised her once more, nearly made her drag him right back to the pond to finish what they started. He didn’t shy away from her when they rejoined the group, and didn’t care about creating a berth between their arrivals to keep the others unaware. They’d gotten a few curious looks, but for the most part, no one seemed all that surprised that they’d been off somewhere alone.
For the rest of the evening, the not-quite-secret lingered between them, remembered through shared looks over dinnerand the campfire, when instead of picking up where they’d left off with Never Have I Ever, they sat around and sang old country songs while Pierce strummed away—poorly—at an acoustic guitar. Grace and Crew sat next to each other, and more than once, their hands had brushed, featherlight and intoxicating touches that carried the same charge as they had at the pond. But surrounded by people, they were only fleeting, teasing, temporary reminders of an incendiary moment that had ended too soon. They couldn’t explore each other any further, not with an audience of chuckleheads around, and so they’d gone off to their separate tents at the end of the night, but only after Crew had escorted Grace to hers with a hand at the small of her back. In his touch, there was gentle reassurance that he felt it, too. And in the sweet hint of a smile he’d given her before they’d parted, there was longing. There was desire and comfort and the promise of something Grace couldn’t quite put into words.
He sits across from her now with his own plate of bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast tacos, and though Caleb is animatedly telling a story about getting arrested on a decades-past Mexico spring break trip, Grace isn’t listening to a single word. She can’t concentrate on anything except Crew’s hands. Staring at them doing something even as mundane as holding a taco and a coffee thermos has her in a daze—in the throes of a heat-laced memory. Sharp and vivid across all of her senses. It doesn’t help that he keeps looking at her, glancing up from his breakfast every few moments and holding her eyes, like he’s replaying their tryst, too—watching the same conductive scene and remembering the way his hands felt as they learned her body. Learned exactly how to use them to make her keen.
Any doubt or residual fear she’d held for the possible blowbackof this development between them had been mostly assuaged the night before, but flashes of that alarmed, muffled voice still linger, even now, as she sits on the receiving end of Crew’s kind eyes. It’s dull and warped, as if speaking to her underwater, but it remains nonetheless, saying the cruelest of things. Things likeHe doesn’t want you for anything more than sex,andYou must be delusional if you think you’re good enough for him.And worst of all—loudest, clearest of all:He’ll never look at you again once he finds out what you did.
Grace compartmentalizes those errant voices as much as she can and goes about her morning—alongside the rest of the group, she battens down the campsite for the oncoming torrent, feeds and waters the horses, and tells Waylon they’ll go on their promised adventure once the storm passes as she tries to ply him with a particularly fat red apple, to no avail. Crew saddles Duke, which only makes Waylon more agitated. Why Duke gets to go on an adventure but Waylon doesn’t is a frustrating mystery to him.
“You could at least do it in private,” Grace murmurs out of the side of her mouth, just loud enough for Crew to hear from where he stands on the other side of Duke.
Crew huffs a laugh through his nose. “Someone needs to learn the value of patience,” he counters, giving Waylon a challenging look.
Waylon, uninterested in lessons, snuffles and turns his cheek like a bratty teenager.
“Grumpy,” Crew says to the horse, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Where are you all off to?” Grace asks, crouching down toscratch behind Boone’s ears. He’s panting, antsy, ready to bolt off with his dad to whatever end.
“Gonna scope out some of the more neglected zones,” he says, nodding in an all-encompassing way at their surroundings. “See if there’s anything we need to deal with while we’re staying out here.”
Grace nods. “More fences to fix,” she muses.
Crew’s smile blooms into more than just a corner tug. He stares down at her with something that looks frightfully like adoration—and the butterflies in her stomach begin to swarm. “Probably so.”
Grace sighs, feigning exhaustion at the future task. “At least the come-along works now.”
He’s quiet for a beat. Looking at her with those soft eyes, his expression so warm it makes her heart squeeze in her chest. “When I get back,” he eventually says, leaning into her space only slightly, “I want to take you somewhere.”
Craning her neck a little, Grace blinks up at him. “Somewhere,” she repeats quietly.
“Mm-hm,” Crew replies, and then he bends down even farther, closing the distance. His lips are at her cheek before she can take in another breath, and the inhale stutters in her chest at the contact. “After the storm passes.” He breathes into her skin.
She can’t stop her eyes from fluttering closed, especially when he presses the softest, faintest kiss to her temple. It’s the sweetest goodbye, the most lovelyI’ll see you later.
And then he’s off, trotting away atop Duke into the endless, darkening gray horizon, Boone biting at his heels.
