Page 29

Her hands come up. They land on my forearms, small and callused from a summer of pretending to know one end of a hammer from the other, and they do not push.

They pull.

"Don't you dare sleep in that truck," she whispers.

I lift her.

She weighs nothing. She weighs everything. Her legs wrap my hips on instinct and a laugh punches out of her, startled, delighted, and I catch her mouth with mine to swallow the sound of it.

She tastes like the terrible convenience-store coffee she nurses all day and under that like something warmer, and her fingers dig into my shoulders as if she means to climb me. I turn us. Three steps across raw plywood to the air mattress shoved in the corner under a work tarp, and I lower her onto it with a care my roaring blood does not explain.

"You're being gentle," she breathes.

"For now."

The overall straps go first. I thumb them off her shoulders one at a time, slow, and the denim folds down to her waist. A thin cotton tank underneath, worn soft, and I trace the line of it with one blunt finger while she arches up into the touch and makes a small, wrecked sound.

"Oggan." My name breaks in the middle when she says it.

"I've got you." I strip the tank up and off. My hands span her ribs entirely, thumb to thumb across the small of her back, and the sheer difference in our size makes her shiver, makes her thighs clench around nothing. "Every inch. I'm going to learn every inch of you tonight."

I mean it as a promise. It comes out as a vow.

I kiss the hollow of her throat. The soft rise of her breast, where my mouth closes warm and slow and she gasps and grips my hair. Lower, where her belly jumps under my lips, and she fists the tarp and cries my name a second time. The overalls and everything beneath them go down her legs and off, and I settle between her knees on the groaning mattress, and I take in the whole of her by the swinging light.

"You're staring," she manages.

"I've wanted to since the day you blocked my truck with your whole tiny body." I drag one finger up the inside of her thigh, unhurried, and she trembles apart under it. "Foolish woman. I could have driven right over you."

"You'd never."

"No." I lower my mouth to her, tasting, learning the rhythm that undoes her. "I'd never."

Her hips lift for me. I anchor a forearm across them, gentle, holding her steady while I work her open with lips and tongue, and the whole of her goes tight as a drawn wire. Sounds spill out of her that she would die before letting a microphone catch. My name. A curse. My name again, torn ragged. Her heel drags a line of heat up my spine and her fingers tighten in my hair to the edge of pain, and I let her use me, let her ride the pressure of my mouth, until the wire snaps clean.

She comes apart against my tongue with my name on her lips and both hands knotted in what remains of my hair, hips chasing, breath sawing, and I pin her hips still with a spread of my palm and take my time until she is shaking and boneless and swearing at the exposed rafters.

Then I rise over her.

She reaches up. Her fingertips find the ridge of an old scar across my collarbone and trace it like it matters. "This one?"

"Beam dropped. Twenty-two and stupid."

"And this?" Her thumb on my jaw.

"Bar fight. Also stupid." I catch her wrist and kiss the pulse there. "Ask me tomorrow. I'll tell you all of them, every scar, however long it takes."

"Promise?"

"Orc's word."

I take her slow. So slow that a growl builds in my throat and stays there, because she is small and warm and gazing up at me like I am something worth having, and I will not rush a single second of being wanted by Jilly Dulane. She wraps around me. She meets me. When she urges me faster with her heels at the backs of my thighs I give it to her, and the studwork groans, and the air mattress protests, and neither of us laughs, because it stopped being funny somewhere around the third time she moaned my name like a prayer against the rafters.

I brace above her on both forearms, careful with all of my weight, and she pulls me down anyway, wanting the crush of me, and I give her that too. Her nails rake my back. Her breath breaks apart. When she tips over the edge a second time she takes me with her, and I bury a sound against her throat that no camera on earth will ever capture.

After, she sprawls across the wall of me, boneless, sweat cooling on both of us in the unfinished dark. My arm covers her whole back. Her ear rests over the slow drum of my heart.

"That was real," I tell the ceiling.