Finn laughs. "Darcy Gable, you harlot. I love it. Come here."
He pulls me down and kisses me, long and unhurried, the condom box digging into my ribs between us. By the time I've torn into the cardboard, the question of whether he needs more recovery time after the shower has already answered itself against my hip. I roll the condom onto him myself while his hands fist in the quilt and his stomach hollows.
Then I swing my leg over him and sink down.
The stretch of him steals my breath, my focus, everything. I take him all the way in and go still, seated deep, full of him, both of us breathing like we're back on the trailhead climb. His hands come up but they don't go to my hips. They find my hands. His fingers lace through mine and hold on, and something in my chest turns over, because that grip isn't want. It's the other thing. The part we're not saying.
I ride him the way I'd ride him if we had years with each other.
Slow. Deep. My weight in our joined hands, the drag and press of his cock inside me on every roll of my hips, the ache blooming low in my belly and spreading everywhere. He watches me move on him, and I let him look at everything, because there is nothing left in me tonight being managed.
"I think about you all day," I tell him, still moving, because it's true and because I can say this one. "Every day. It's a problem."
"Same. Every day," he echoes, and his voice is barely holding together. "Since the auction. Before."
God, I do love him. That's not news to me anymore. But with him this deep inside me and his fingers wrapped hard around mine, it stops being a fact I carry around and becomes a thing that wants out. I don't let it out. I can't. If I start saying true things tonight, then I'll have to be ready to hear the truths I'm not sure I can take.
That sooner or later, he'll be leaving. That whatever we've built these past weeks will be over.
So I say how I feel with my body instead. I say it with every slow roll of my hips, but the slow doesn't last, because it can't. He pulls our joined hands to his chest and sits up into me, wraps me in, chest to chest, my legs going around him, his arms a band across my back, and the new angle drives him so deep my vision whites at the edges. We move like that, grinding, mouths together in a kiss that doesn't end, breathing each other, his hands splayed wide on my back holding me against him like distance is the enemy.
"Darcy," he says into my mouth. Just that.
The heat winds tight, low, intense, everything in me narrowing to where we're joined and the pressure building there. When it breaks, it breaks through both of us at once. I come apart around him with my cry swallowed up by his kiss, and he follows me in the same breath, arms crushing me closer, his groan raw against my lips, both of us shaking through it and wound so tight around each other that nothing else fits.
We come down slow, foreheads together, his heart hammering against my breasts.
Eventually he takes care of the necessities and comes back, and we end up under my quilt in the dark, my ear over his heart, his hand moving in my damp hair, the whole apartment quiet around us.
He hasn't said he's leaving. I haven't asked him not to. His boots are lying next to mine in my entryway and his shirt is on my bathroom floor, and neither of us has said one single word about any of it. But it's there, an undercurrent running beneath everything good between us.
Somewhere out past the sound of his heart slowing under my ear, there's the decision we can both feel coming.
Tonight I choose to live in the version of us where none of that decision is true yet.
CHAPTER 31
FINN
The gravel on the estate driveway is still dark with early morning dew when I pull in. I park the Jeep next to my Ferrari and sit there for a minute doing nothing at all, which is new for me.
I drove here from Darcy's with all four windows down. No music. Just the town going by at barely seven in the morning, the bakery lights on, the bay flat and silver at the end of the side streets, and me grinning at none of it in particular. Four hours of sleep and I wouldn't trade back one of them.
I don't have a plan for what comes next. What I have is a decision that showed up sometime in the night, already whole. I don't want to leave Mattichogue. Not on Merritt's schedule, anyway.
I'll extend my stay here. I'll run my company from the guesthouse with two bars of signal if that's what it takes. I'll fly out when I have to, and if their investors need a man standing on that mountain year-round, I'll find them a man, or a structure, or a miracle.
Because I want to stay. That's the whole decision. I want to stay here, right where I am, and I have never wanted that at any other time in my life.
Because of Darcy.
The details of how I can make all of this work are unsolved. Right now, I'm just a man sitting in the quiet of the morning with every next step unwritten, feeling better than I can remember feeling. I get out of the Jeep.
My phone rings before I reach the crush pad. I glance at the display and heave out a breath.
Merritt's lead partner doesn't waste Mondays on small talk. "Finn. Good news doesn't wait for Tuesday, so here it is."
The syndicate closed Friday. Oversubscribed. The hospitality money came in heavier than they modeled, and it didn't come in for the land. It came in for me, he says, for the Bardot Adventures brand, for the whole program—both parcels, phase one funded through the lodge, phase two term sheets already drafted. He says a number with a B in it and doesn't slow down for it.
