He swallowed hard and I knew I’d hit on a fear too deeply felt to even voice. Even the next one, which he did murmur, had him averting his eyes. “Looking back is a form of leaving.”
“Hunter.” I took his face in my palms, so gently you would have never known I’d thrown down only minutes before. “My mother is MIA, my sister’s dead, my ex has no idea who I am, and I can’t even revisit the last week of my life because I never lived it. If any of that is an issue between you and me, then, Hunt? I’m not the one looking back.”
“That’s not fair.” He drew back from my touch, though he didn’t let go. “Look, you’ve had time to think this through-”
I moved in again, eyes on his lips. “Just thought of it, actually.”
“And right now you might be confusing what you think you want-”
“I want you.”
His jaw clenched. “You have to give me time.”
“You’ve got thirty seconds.”
His eyes went wide.
I shrugged. “Thirty seconds and either these chaps come off or I walk away forever. Twenty, now.”
“You can’t expect me to make that sort of-”
“Fifteen. C’mon, Hunter. I’m keeping it simple.”
“Jo!”
“I told you. Don’t say my name like that.” I slid my gaze down his body, lids going heavy with what I saw. Damn, this man spoke to me. “What do you want?”
“What exactly do
I smiled, my gaze flipping back up on his, warming once there. “I want to know what you crave and need and desire in the next…” I looked at my bangled wrist. “Five seconds.”
“I want you to stop throwing me around!”
And he also wanted to take the words back as soon as they were out of his mouth, because we both froze in their wake. He meant physically, but the accompanying scent said it was his emotions that were battered. As did the way his brows furrowed, as if pained.
“Oh.” I drew back and swallowed hard, my amusement fleeing. What was I doing to this poor guy? I thought, eyes wildly searching his face. He was right to want time and space. He had a right to his feelings, and to take as much time as he needed to come around to them. I could wait for him to come to me…if he chose.
“Phew.” I ran a hand over my head as I turned away. “Okay.”
Thank God for the wall, because my back was against it so fast it was like the earth came unhinged from its axis. Hunter’s mouth brought everything swimming into its proper place again, and I thought, Yes. This is right. This is fate. This is mine.
He pulled back long enough to catch his breath. “I still had two seconds left.”
“Three cheers for time management.” I flipped on him again, not throwing him around this time, but rolling with him. We pushed each other in tandem, working together now, mouths and hands frantic, until I halted it with a leg snaking up his side. I wrapped it around the back of his left thigh as he pressed, then shuddered. I smiled. “So you
“Not so much.” He hooked his thumbs into the waistband, I lowered my leg and braced. Diana’s chaps ripped free, attached silver studs tinkling as they hit the floor. Hunter quirked a brow.
I rolled my eyes. “I know, they’re like wind chimes. I have no idea…”
How I was going to finish that sentence, I thought as his mouth recaptured mine. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he braced me with his core, hand fisted in my hair as he pushed me higher.
I winced as my lower back took most of the impact. “Ow.”
“What?” He pulled back, brows drawn.
I grabbed him again. “Nothing.”
A month ago we’d been tentative, uncertain, gentle and giving. This time we were ravenous in our demands, active and punishing. I didn’t feel bad about raking my fingers over his back as I stripped his shirt from him, because his knuckles dug into my hips as he tore off my briefs. So I bit his shoulder until he growled and redirected my mouth. He kissed me so long and hard my heartbeat actually slowed.
Flipping my hair to one side, he dove for my neck. I countered, angling for his, and we tussled until he created space enough to flip me, remaining behind this time. My protest stuttered off as he angled my palms on the wall, higher than I’d have chosen, exposing me more, before his hands pushed aside my leather halter, pinching as he again captured my neck with his mouth.
I arched back on a moan, arms spreading, and he wrapped one forearm around my chest, bracing me there. There was the slide of a zipper, and my breath quickened from expectation alone. Nothing happened. I held still. Still nothing. I bit my lip, whimpering some wordless plea, but there was only that one bracing arm around my core. Frustrated, I angled a look back. “Hunt-”
He plunged, a gorgeous, solid stroke that set off the first of my orgasms. I wasn’t even letting him take me, instead arching, reaching back with every sense to demand more, wanting friction and heat, his strength in return for mine. I wanted him to go on forever. I wanted…I wanted…I wanted…
He wanted too. Hands returning to my breasts, he hooked his thumbs beneath my arms, nipples captured beneath long, strong fingers. I continued to open to him, luxuriating in his demand, and when I thought I couldn’t open any further, I gave some more. I wanted to pull him into me. I wanted to disappear into him. I wanted the one person who knew me to find shelter inside of me so I could do the same.
And right when I felt I was giving and getting just that, the magic of the aureole whipped across us. It was like the cresting tide of a monsoon, and having experienced it twice before, we each braced for the flash of color and knowledge to soak our senses, we both cried out as our minds intertwined. The energy gathering like a cosmic disaster in the sky was nothing compared to what arrowed between us. Our individual minds and thoughts slipped past skin and bone so that Hunter’s memories took root in my head, he took ownership of mine, and the separately lived moments merged as one.
His worry as he’d realized I’d disappeared into the pipeline a week earlier was an ache in my chest, like a fist squeezing my heart. I felt it now just as he had then.
The pain that had assailed me in the crossing between worlds reached out like an ice cream scoop to hollow his middle, and I actually heard his breath stutter.
After that I had a vision of him hunched over papers in the map room attached to the warehouse, making connections, his determination fueling long hours. In return, the memory plucked from me was of staring down Harlan Tripp across a pile of poker chips, and of sweeping those chips into my bag. The bag, connecting memories, was next seen hanging around a pipe as I huddled, barely breathing, feet away from the Tulpa and Regan in the dark.
The linear connection broke then, and we were flung back in time where a slash of stark moonlight lit Hunter’s face as he spoke the words I’d last read in a Shadow manual.
I wanted to turn to him, to question that, but the pain of the rejection he’d just endured, because of me, ran through me like a guillotine. To escape it, I squeezed my eyes…
And recalled for us both Solange in silhouette, stars spinning around her.
Hunter and I gasped together as the power arching between us reached its apex then, a shuddering pause before the coaster of emotion thundered downhill, picking up speed as we found our bodies again, renewed our rhythm, regained the present, and came together as one. Hunter’s aura, a gold spinning behind my closed lids, burst through me like a rocket. My red aura was weak, but my emotion was concentrated, and it spun from my mouth on that final cry.
It took minutes for the world to right itself, our breaths interloping to tug us back, together, inhale by exhale. I pressed my cheek against the cool concrete wall, spotted a bull’s-eye across the distance of the shooting range, and still breathless, I smiled.
We dropped to the platform bed tucked in the crow’s nest after that…it was either that or fall over, but the rightness that had slid over me upon climax enveloped me again as I nestled in next to Hunter. I was sore from the give and take, the aggressiveness and the surprising desperation in our lovemaking. I was also feeling the effects of my fight in Midheaven, and the passage both there and back, but nestled into the crook of his left arm, staring up at
