Page 92 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I get his belt this time. He lets me. I push everything off his hips and he's heavy and hot in my hand, and I watch his whole face come undone at the firs. Forehead dropping to mine. A sound punching out of him that I want tattooed somewhere.

I push at his shoulder until he rolls, and I slide down and take him in my mouth, and Owen Peterson, who runs into burning buildings, makes a sound like a dying man and grabs the headboard.

"Nellie. Darlin'. God." His hand cradles the back of my head, not guiding, holding. Like I'm precious. "You're gonna finish this fight before it starts."

I take my time anyway. Learn the weight of him, the taste, the exact rhythm that makes his thighs go rigid and his breathing turn ragged. When his hips start to move helplessly, when he groans my name like a warning, I let him go and crawl up his body slow, letting him feel every inch of me on the way.

"Then come here," I whisper against his mouth.

He rolls us. Settles into the cradle of my hips, braced on his forearms, and lines himself up, and stops. Looks at me. Really looks.

"Last chance to run, Greer."

Two days ago I did. Forty miles was as far as I got.

"Not going anywhere," I whisper, and wrap my legs around him and pull.

When he sinks into me, we both go still. All the way still. Stretched, and full, and held, and home, and neither of us breathing. He's shaking with the effort of not moving. I feel him pulse inside me and clench around him on purpose, and he swears into my hair, and I laugh, and the laugh turns into a moan when he draws back and rolls home the first time. Deep. Unhurried. Devastating.

His thumb wipes my cheek and comes away wet. Neither of us says a word about it.

"I'm here," he says.

"I know."

"I'm staying."

"I know, Owen."

He moves. Slow and deep, no hurry in him anywhere, grinding against me at the bottom of every stroke until sparks scatter up my spine. It's nothing like the hallway four weeks ago. That was want. This is worship. He murmurs against my mouth while he rocks into me. Pieces of sentences. Beautiful. Missed you. Never again. I answer with my heels at the small of his back and my nails mapping every muscle I get to keep.

The headboard knocks the wall. We laugh into each other's mouths and don't slow down.

He shifts higher, changes the angle, and the new drag of him pulls a sound out of me I've never made in my life. He does it again. Again. Reading me like a monitor, adjusting to every gasp, relentless and patient at once.

"Look at me," he says, when I get close, when the coil in me winds tight and I start to turn my face into the pillow the way I always have with everyone, hiding the last of me. "Nellie. Look at me."

I look at him.

I let him see the whole way down.

I break with his name on my lips and my nails in his shoulders, clenching around him in waves, and it pulls him right over the edge behind me. He buries himself deep and comes with a groan against my throat, hips jerking, saying my name like it's the only word he's got left, and then we're a tangle of shaking limbs and damp skin and his heart hammering against mine like it's trying to get in.

He doesn't roll away. He gathers me. Tucks my head under his chin, drags the blanket over us, presses his lips to my hair and keeps them there while our pulses come down together.

"Marry me," he mumbles into my hair.

"You already asked."

"Practicing. For Willowbend."

I laugh, and I feel him smile against my scalp, and something in my chest unlocks that's been bolted shut since I was seven years old and packing my own suitcase.

He slides down the bed and puts his mouth against the flat of my stomach.

"Hey, little one." His voice cracks clean in half. "I'm your dad."

I press my hand into his hair. He turns his cheek against my skin and stays there, one arm wrapped over my hips, holding both of us at once.