Icome back to myself in pieces, on a drop cloth on the floor of the finished front room in the house Logan Walker is building, the last of the gold coming low through the windows, with the quietest man in Huckleberry Hollow pressing a kiss to the inside of my thigh like he's thanking me for letting him.
My whole body is humming. Wrung out and lit up at once and still not satisfied, a low restless heat sitting under everything that one climax didn't touch, because apparently nothing about my body follows the old rules anymore.
It's been like this for days. Worse every hour. I'm not thinking about what that means. I'm here, on this floor, in the last of the light, and I have decided not to think about anything else.
He lifts his head. His hair's a disaster where I put my hands in it, and his mouth is slick with me, and he's looking up the length of my body with an expression I have never once seen on him in five years of watching him not let himself want things.
He looks undone. Reverent and dazed and a little bit destroyed.
I did that. Careful Logan, who moves the olives and builds the coasters and says goodnight like a shopkeeper. I took him apart with nothing but the permission to, which is the most powerful I have ever felt about anything, and I would like it noted for the record.
And some deep, greedy, newly-awake part of me looks at him kneeling there between my knees, still hard, still holding himself so politely off me, giving and giving and asking for nothing, and thinks one clear greedy thought.Not good enough.
“Come here,” I say.
He comes. He always comes when I ask, up the length of me slow, gentle even now, and I get my hands in his shirt and haul, and roll us, and it startles a sound out of him, half a laugh, all surprise, as he lets me put him on his back on the drop cloth.
“Josie.”
“My turn.” I sit up, straddling his thighs, and reach for the hem of his shirt. “You've made a whole personality out of not asking for things. I'm about to ruin your entire system.”
A flicker crosses his face. Not quite fear. Closer to the look of a man who has never once in his life been on the receiving end and doesn't know the choreography.
“You don't have to,” he says. Quiet. “This was for you.”
And that, right there, is the whole problem with Logan Walker in a single sentence. This was for me. Everything is for me, for everybody, all the time, the man who carries the town on his hip and never once lets anybody carry him.
“I know I don't have to,” I say, and I get his shirt up and off, and put my palms flat on his chest, over the hard fast slam of his heart. “That's not why I'm doing it.”
He's got a carpenter's chest under that flannel. Nobody warns you about that with the quiet ones. All that hauling lumber. I take a moment to appreciate it, openly, unhurried, andwatch him go red under my hands the way he went red the day he handed me that walnut coaster and pretended it was nothing.
“You're staring,” he says.
“I'm cataloguing. Hold still.” I press a kiss to his sternum, then lower, tracking down. “This is a research project and you're the only subject. Very rigorous. Peer-reviewed.”
“Josie.”
“Say my name like that again, it's excellent for morale.”
I lean down and kiss him. Taste myself on him, which lights something molten and unhinged in me, and while he's still reeling from it I work my way down.
His jaw. His throat. The broad warm plane of his chest, the flat of my tongue over him, and he's breathing like he's run somewhere, both hands fisted at his sides against the drop cloth like he's afraid to touch me, like touching me might use up a ration he didn't earn.
“Hands,” I say against his stomach. “On me. Now.”
He puts his hands in my hair. Careful.
“Harder than that, Logan.”
He tightens his grip, and the groan that comes out of him when I get his belt open is the least careful sound I have ever heard him make.
I get his jeans open, and he lifts his hips to help me shove them down, and then he's bare under me and he is?—
Okay. He's a lot. Naturally he is. Everything about this man is quietly, absurdly well-made, so completely Logan Walker that I almost laugh in the middle of everything.
I wrap my hand around him and he makes a sound like it hurts, like the good kind hurts, his head dropping back against the floor, the long line of his throat working.
I stroke him slow. Learning him the way he learned me, watching his face for what pulls each sound out of him, becausetwo can absolutely play at filing things away, and I intend to keep a very thorough file.
