Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor Book 1)

Passionate

(PĂSH′Ə-NĬT) CAPABLE OF, HAVING, OR DOMINATED BY POWERFUL EMOTIONS: OR MARKED BY STRONG SEXUAL DESIRE; AMOROUS OR LUSTFUL.

Cady woke with a stiff back, a full bladder, and an empty stomach. In her high-handed insistence on proving just how capable she was of sleeping in a tent in the wilderness, she had neglected to consider the fact that: A. Her body hated her even when given a down mattress pad to sleep on. B. She hadn’t eaten since the pitifully small granola bar she had awkwardly inhaled while in Cy’s truck, and: C. She hadn’t bothered to scout out the toilet situation.

As she lay staring up at the tent’s ceiling, she had a sinking feeling that the “situation” for her involved squatting behind a bush.

Unlike Fox, whose unfair biological advantage would allow him to just unzip the tent flap and hang out a hose.

Shifting within the cocooned warmth of her sleeping bag, Cady turned her stiff neck toward the deep, heavy breathing that had doubled as a sound machine while she slept.

Sometime in that interval, Fox had rolled toward her, one massive forearm pillowed beneath his head, the fur blanket sliding down the powerful slope of his torso to barely cover his hip, and—

Speaking of hanging out a hose.

Only, it wasn’t hanging so much as poking out from beneath the fur like a curious cave creature, its cyclopean eye staring straight at her.

“Oh no you don’t,” she whispered, gently lifting the fabric back over his erection. This proved to have quite the opposite of her intended effect when her mouth immediately began to water at the sight of its full length and girth in high relief beneath the caveman skirt.

Of all the times for the clouds to fuck off under a full moon.

Cady bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut.

If she could only fall back asleep…

She conjured a peaceful green field and invited the sheep therein to leap over a fence behind the screens of her eyelids.

One. Two. Three.

Four caught its hoof on the post and face-planted in a cow pie when Fox moaned in his sleep.

A soul-deep, rib-cage-vibrating, abdominal-tightening, ovary-stimulating groan that sent moisture flooding much further south with a bonus involuntary clench.

Which only reminded her that she had to pee.

With a beleaguered sigh, she began the painstaking process of wriggling her arms out of the quilted fabric with as little rustling as possible.

Fox, gods be thanked, appeared to be a heavy sleeper. And, gods also be thanked, she still wore her coat, jeans, socks and shoes. Purely for practical reasons, she unzipped the top twelve inches as quietly as possible before peeling it back from her torso.

She immediately missed the warmth.

Were it not for shame and the memory of the Oreos in the side pocket of her pack, she might have been tempted to stay there and let nature take its humiliating course.

The real trouble came when it was time to sit up.

Her back seized up, sending radiating pain through her hips and fiery arrows into her muscles.

Cady gritted her teeth and mentally taco-kicked the version of herself who had foolishly boasted about her ability to handle a two-mile hike.

After an eternity of painfully minute progress, she had freed her lower extremities, a thin sheen of sweat on her face. Her palms boasted several indentations from the uneven ground of the tent’s floor. Her bladder was quickly becoming a waterbed for her lungs.

Rocking onto hands and knees, she crept toward the mouth of the tent and the dark splotch of her pack near the entry flap.

“Don’t.”

Cady froze with her fingers a hairsbreadth from the zipper, glancing back to see Fox’s eyes firmly shut and his hands balled into fists at his sides.

Still sleeping.

Altering her intended route, she reached for her bag instead.

Fox emitted a low growl, his long leg kicking out and rolling him onto his back. The blanket slid off him once again.

Cady whimpered, unable to tear her eyes away as she frisked her pack for the familiar shape of sandwich cookie.

Jackpot.

Sustenance in hand, she crouch-walked her way to the exit and slowly created a Cady-sized opening in the zipper before nearly somersaulting out.

A damp, pine-scented blast turned her sweat into a thin candy shell of icy cold. Without her glasses, the moon was a half-melted lemon drop, turning the landscape iron gray. Her options for cover were—quite literally—few and far between.

The charcoal smudge of the tree line might as well be a league away, given the urgency of her need. Stalking past the firepit, she rounded to the side of the tent without a window and quickly unbuttoned and unzipped her pants.

Sinking down into a squat, she retracted her earlier thanks and went so far as to curse the old gods and the new for the six years it required to relieve herself.

“Who even invented quads?” Cady unceremoniously bounced to finish her transaction and felt panic grip her chest when her legs refused to straighten.

Okay, she told herself. Don’t panic. Air drying is a thing. Just give it a minute.

Only, she wasn’t sure she had a minute. Magma coursed through her quads, and the frigid wind across her nether bits was waking the chill the sleeping bag and the radiator of Fox’s body had chased away.

Let’s try this again. Slowly.

Planting her hands on her knees for leverage, she breathed in, breathed out, and attempted to stand.

Nope.

She got about halfway before she locked up like a rusty hinge.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Motherfucking Astrid and her extra-salty bullshit.

Cady watched the white clouds of her breath disappear into the wind, contemplating desperate options.

Call for Fox?

Because that was exactly what this day needed. The man who’d bounced after bestowing a triple-orgasm combo that altered the space-time continuum to find her stuck with her pants around her knees and a pack of Oreos in her pocket.

She could do something about one of those items, at least.

And anyway, as she seemed to be burning sugars in her thighs, she really ought to replace it with something, right?

Careful as she was, the telltale crinkle seemed to echo down the valley to the sleeping town below.

How the ever-loving fuck was it possible to have an AI entity in your phone capable of drafting articles of confederation for an interplanetary treaty, but no one had managed to invent Oreo packaging that didn’t sound like a badger fight in a cellophane sack?

She’d managed to liberate a lone cookie and get it halfway to her mouth when she heard a rustle. Then a jingle.

The night wind disappeared below the primal rushing of her pulse in her ears.

This cannot be It. Not the woman who collects terrible taxidermy being mauled by an actual bear.

“I’ll take the cross-eyed puma out of my Etsy shopping cart the second I have cell reception, I swear,” she whispered to Whomever It May Concern. “Just please, please let me get out of this alive.”

Blinding light blasted her irises. Cady’s arm flew up to cover her eyes, a hand held out to shield her sizzling corneas.

Wasn’t that supposed to happen after you died?

“What the fuck are you doing?” The deep, rumbling voice was not, in fact, the Prime Creator, but Fox, his rumpled silhouette barely visible behind the sunburst.

“Well, I was trying to go to the restroom without disturbing your sleep, but now I’m praying for death to end my humiliation. You want to turn that off?”

Being Fox, he didn’t.

What he did was lower it.

“Jesus fucking Christ, woman,” he growled. “Pull your pants up!”

“Put your pants on!” Even when she blinked blue spots and squiggles out of her vision, the light bouncing from the frost-covered earth was sufficient to see that he was still naked.

And at half-mast.

Impressive at this temperature, she thought, wondering if she might be depraved.

“Why aren’t you moving?” he asked with a measure less middle-of-the-night irritation in his sleep-thickened voice.

“My back locked up.” A phrase altogether inadequate for the agonizing involuntary paralysis.

“Fuck, why didn’t you say that?” The beam shifted as he tucked a fire-hydrant-sized flashlight beneath his arm and stalked over to her.

“It was next on my agenda.”

He approached her from the side. “Hold still.”

The pain lashed through her body and out of her mouth in a fierce pulse of irritation. “Like I have a fucking choice, you dickhole. I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”

“I know,” he said. Warm, rough knuckles brushed her knees as he located the lacy edge of her panties and gently skimmed up her goosefleshed thighs.

“Oh, God, this is humiliating.”

“I once got food poisoning and shit myself when we were on a thirteen-hour convoy to Arghandab, if it helps.”

And weirdly, it did.

Fox set the flashlight down on the ground, and in its ambient glow, Cady saw his big, bare foot step parallel to her poorly chosen sneaker.

“I’m not going to pull your pants up until I fix you.”

Cady rotated her head at an owlish angle to try to find his eyes. “Fix…me?”

Fox nodded his shaggy head. “You’re going to hinge forward at the hips. But keep your back as straight as you can. Got it?”

She nodded.

His hand hovered close enough to the small of her back for her to feel its warmth. “Good. Now stick your arms straight out to the sides like you’re flying.”

Cady did so. An inopportune moment to remember that one of those hands still held an Oreo.

Fox made a sound somewhere between a snort and a chuckle. “No wonder Momma came.”

“Momma?” she asked.

“One of last season’s yearlings. Junior is her first fawn,” he said. His hair-roughened thighs pressed against the backs of hers as his hands braced her hips. “So far, so good?”

Under different circumstances, it would be fucking fantastic. “Mmhmm,” she grunted.

“I’m going to wrap my arms around your rib cage and lift you. Just let your legs hang heavy.”

“That’s pretty much what they always do.”

His torso folded over hers, his forearms anchoring her to him, pelvis to pelvis. “Not always.” The husky note of his observation further heated her cheeks.

Okay, so there was that one time after orgasm number two that they’d started to shake like they were hooked to a generator, but thinking about that with his partially inflated cock nudging her ass would do her absolutely no good whatsoever.

And yet…

“Ready?”

“Yep.”

The ground disappeared from beneath the soles of her sneakers as he lifted her. Back flush to his chest, she felt herself gradually approaching vertical.

A pop, a tingle, and her legs dropped limp as a clubbed fish.

Her body still felt like she’d been hit by a truck, but only a medium-sized one as opposed to an eighteen-wheeler.

“What did you do?” she asked as she slid down his body and touched down on the ground.

“Called the Hicks maneuver. One of the guys in my squadron showed me after I fucked up my back during a CASEVAC operation.” His chin dipped near her shoulder as he helped wiggle her jeans up her hips.

“That’s unbelievable,” Cady said, taking a few exploratory steps.

“That your back is better?” he asked, reaching down to grab the flashlight.

“That anyone could lift you.”

He grunted something that may have been amusement or annoyance as he walked back toward the tent.

Cady shoved the cookie in mouth, hoping to distract herself from the sight of his perfectly formed ass in the bluish light of early dawn.

He illuminated the tent’s interior like a lantern with the flashlight. “Coming?” he asked.

Spontaneously, if he kept this up.

Once safely inside, she took the maximum dose of the pain meds that made life somewhat tolerable and washed them down with several gulps from her water bottle. This time, she removed her shoes before carefully crawling back into the sleeping bag.

Fox already lay on his back with his blanket covering him, his eyes closed and his brute-iful face aimed up toward the tent’s pitched roof. The corner of his mouth curled.

“And you said I couldn’t carry you over the threshold.”

Had she said that? A million years ago, maybe.

He clicked off the light, and whether because of her medicine’s absorption in her empty stomach or some magic post-panic elixir, she dropped off to sleep.

She woke a little over an hour later.

The muscle relaxers had been hard at work while she slept, and though her back held a memory of her earlier agony, she was able to sit herself up with almost minimal profanity. With eyes stripped of their dulling veil, she saw her surroundings as if for the first time.

Fox might have been in this very tent when he called her.

The jingling she’d always fantasized into a butler for him was an alarm for wild animals. The state-of-the-art multi-head shower, an icy lake. The four-poster bed with brocade coverlets, a heavy-duty sleeping bag on the ground. The library—complete with rolling ladder—a cardboard box lined with an oversized vacuum bag to keep out the moisture.

This was how he lived.

This was how he lived while simultaneously keeping her shop afloat.

Fox grimaced in his sleep, his lips peeling back from his teeth as his body began to twitch. His fingers tightened into fists, and his eyeballs rolled beneath the thin skin of his lids. What she had mistaken for a groan of pleasure before now sounded completely different from this new vantage.

Pain.

His chest rose and fell in rapid puffs. The rounded globes of his eyes began to roll beneath the thin skin of his lids.

“No,” he said through a clenched jaw. The scar on his ribs puckered as he flinched.

Cady’s own heart had begun to accelerate.

She’d heard of night terrors, but had never witnessed one in real time. Nor could she remember what kind of traumatizing dreams it was okay to wake people up from, and which should be allowed to run their course.

Either way, being woken by touch from a dream where he was already being touched in a way he didn’t appreciate seemed like a distinctly bad idea.

The answer hit her in a flash of inspiration.

Reaching into the pocket of her coat, she pulled out the packet of cookies and opened it as aggressively as possible.

Fox sat bolt upright, breathing hard, his eyes opening on the world but still reflecting the shock of the one he’d left.

“Bad dream?” she asked.

He flopped back onto his bedroll, pectorals flexing as he lifted his forearms over his head to cover his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

“Midnight snack?” She took a cookie for herself and bit into it. “The filling is the perfect temperature from being in my pocket.”

“It’s four a.m.,” he grumbled.

“You don’t have any yak’s milk or anything, do you?” she asked, swallowing a grainy mouthful.

“Huh?”

“With the hunting and the gathering and whatnot, I just thought you’d have figured out how to milk something out here.” She shrugged.

Fox sat up again and leaned forward to hook a finger through the small glass loop on the growler’s neck and heft it onto his shoulder with a practiced swing. Lifting his bicep brought it directly to his lips.

“Is that what those are for?” she asked, already on her second Oreo. “I’d always wondered.”

A droplet disappeared into his beard and reappeared on his stubbled throat. He offered the jug to her, and she washed down her cookies with water that tasted better than anything that came with artesian prominently featured on the label.

Maybe it was madness.

Maybe the pheromones radiating from his naked skin. Maybe it was the memory of him hard while he slept next to her. Maybe it was the sight of a single battery-powered reading lamp clipped to a piece of carboard he’d duct-taped to one of the tent’s inner pockets.

Whatever the case, Cady scooted toward Fox’s reclining body like a spastic caterpillar, not stopping until she was nestled into his side.

Fox cracked an eyelid. “What are you doing?”

“Sharing body heat?”

“That works best skin to skin.”

“In that case…” She unzipped the sleeping bag, then her jacket, and was already reaching for the button on her jeans before recognition dawned on Fox’s sleep-creased features. His large, warm hand covered her cold, stiff fingers.

“Bad idea,” he said.

“So, you’re the only one who gets to be naked?” she teased. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“‘Fair’ fucked all the way off a long time ago, where you’re concerned.” The tendons on his neck stood out as he lifted his head to look her in the eye. “It’s hard enough to keep my hands off you as it is.”

“But your hands aren’t off me.” She flicked her eyes down to the tips of his fingers just above the waistband of her jeans.

He yanked his arm back like her skin was lava.

And it was damn near the truth. She burned for him. Embers smoldered everywhere he’d touched and everywhere he hadn’t, tinder waiting the smallest spark to ignite.

“Nothing good can come from our being together again, Cady.” He brushed a lock of tangled hair away from her cheek.

“You’re wrong.” She pressed her palm against his knuckles to mold his hand to her cheek. “I don’t know how my body is going to feel from one day to the next. From one hour to another. When the misery will set in, and it’s everything I can do just to open my eyes on another day.” A hot tear leaked from the corner of her eye and trickled into her ear. “Because this is good. Right here, right now. Your skin on my skin. I’ll take good, even if it’s just for this minute. And the next. And the next.”

A piece of his soul tore loose and exited on a groan that brought his mouth to hers.

Their kiss was not a reunion, but a revolution, their bodies changing what their minds could not. Lips and tongues and teeth transmuted the bitter words that had separated them into the simple truth of mutual need.

Fox’s fingers tangled into the hair at her nape while she slipped hers beneath his blanket, greedy for the parts of him she hadn’t gotten to touch in their frantic first time at Nevermore. The taut muscles of his lower back, the muscular curve of his ass, and the dangerous ridge where his abdominals narrowed to the base of his cock. He sucked in a breath against the sensitive skin of her neck as she wrapped her hand around him.

Already, he was thickening, pulsing under her touch as he peeled her out of her coat, her sweater, her t-shirt.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he breathed into her hair.

“So are you.” Pushing up on her elbow, she wriggled free of the sleeping bag and sat back to shimmy out of her jeans. Fox helped pull them free of her tired feet, capturing her ankle and pressing a kiss to one instep, then the other.

Cady tried to squirm away, but he held her fast, pressing the thick tips of his fingers to the soles of her feet, which sent strange little shocks curling around the base of her spine by way of her sex.

“What are you doing to me?” she said, her head falling back.

“Reflexology.” He moved his thumb to a place that made her pelvic floor contract.

Her toes curled as her hips arched of their own volition. “If you’re an incubus, just say that.”

“What I am is a man who loves your body.” Fox trailed his fingers up her leg and inner thigh, but Cady caught him before he could reach the part of her aching for his touch.

“Not yet.” If she allowed him to work his probably demon-bestowed magic already, her brain was likely to leak out her ears before she could do the things she wanted while the half-light still made her bold enough to do them.

“Lie down,” she ordered him, sitting back on her heels.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, lips quirked in a sardonic smile.

Releasing her hair from its hasty braid, she ran her fingers through it, letting it trail across his skin as she lowered her mouth to the part of him darkened with blood and twitching with need.

Cady took her time, rubbed her cheek against his belly, grazed his hip crease with her tongue, breathed down the length of him before dragging her lips back up again.

Fox’s stomach muscles jerked when she reached his taut, silky head. She parted her lips to flick her tongue over the delicate seam, earning a curse that felt like a badge of honor.

She repeated the process, mapping him with her mouth. Studying what made his hips jerk. His fists tighten. His jaw clench and his breathing quicken.

Only when he was panting and sweating like an overworked horse did she close her lips over him.

Fox hissed out a breath and uttered a grunt that hit her squarely between her belly button and spine.

His hips surged upward, driving him deeper into her mouth and her tongue over every ridge and ripple. When she had him coated and slick, she added her hand to the efforts, creating a syncopated rhythm that spurred him on.

She waited until his hips began to thrust him in and out of her grip to ask her question.

“Did you watch me from the hill?”

Fox froze, his entire body tensing.

Cady looked at him from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. “While we were on the phone that night,” she said, “were you watching me?”

The ravening, hungry part of him she had glimpsed the night of the storm swam to the surface once again. His pupils dilated, and his mouth turned down at the corners.

“Yes,” he said.

Cady grazed his head with the flat of her palm. “Did you like watching me?”

“I fucking loved it.” If she had expected him to be abashed, she was sorely mistaken. Challenge lived in his eyes, daring her to admit that the only thing about that night she would change was wishing she could have watched him return.

“What did you see?” she asked in a breathy voice she almost didn’t recognize.

“Not enough,” he said.

“You didn’t watch me touch myself?” she asked, moving her other hand over the dampening patch on the front of her panties.

“No.” The cords on his neck stood out as she slipped a finger below the lace.

“Do you want to watch me now?”

His eyelids fell half-closed. “Gods, yes.”

Keeping her right hand on him, she widened her knees and slid her left hand beneath the silky fabric.

“Pull them to the side,” he ordered her in a voice that made her clench.

“We have the same problem that we did that night,” she said. “There’s only so much I can do with one hand.”

Fox sat up. Sweat ran down the ridge of his stomach as he lifted her hand from his cock and placed it on her own sex.

A sound like a purr rumbled from him as he slid his fingers between hers, coating them with her moisture and bringing his slick hand back to his cock. Matching her rhythm, he began stroking himself, his eyes fixed on her the whole time.

Cady could feel it building, the first flutters of her release quickening within her.

Fox bit his lower lip and gripped the base of his cock, ceasing all other motion on a long exhale. He beckoned to her with the other hand, guiding her to straddle his hips.

“Kneel,” he said, borrowing a line from her fantasy.

Only, he wasn’t standing in front of her. He was lying below her.

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” she insisted, once she understood what he intended to do. “You don’t understand. I don’t— You can’t— A hike happened between me and my last shower.”

A wicked light danced in the depths of his eyes. “Good. Spread yourself for me.” His dark gaze burned up at her from beneath his lowered brows.

Cady could scarcely keep the breath moving in and out of her lungs, but slid her hands downward to reveal the very heart of her aching, intimate flesh.

Fox hummed in appreciation, dragged the straps of her bra down her arms, and moved the cups aside to free her breasts. He captured the pearly peak of one nipple between his thumb and forefinger and brought his mouth to the other, flicking and teasing her with the tip of his tongue.

Cady’s stomach began to quake, and her inner thighs were tight as bowstrings.

“Please,” she said. “I need—”

Palming her ass, Fox hoisted her up to his mouth, and the world ended.

The sounds she made could no longer be classified as human, and for once, she didn’t care. Didn’t care who or what knew she had taken this pleasure for herself.

“Come here,” he said when her tremors had ceased.

Cady glanced at his outstretched legs and extending arms, reading the invitation to be on top.

“My back… I can’t—”

“Yes, you can.” His long, sinewy arms stretched around her hips, his forearms beneath the backs of her thighs and his hands cupping her ass. “Put your hands on my shoulders and rest your weight on my hands.”

“I really don’t think—”

Fox delivered a lightly stinging slap that vibrated straight through to her core to one side of her ass. “Do it.”

She did it.

Angling his hips back, Fox lowered her until he nudged her opening. She felt him there, hot and throbbing and alive for her.

“Tell me when you’re ready for more.”

“More,” she breathed.

His muscles flexed beneath her palms as he lowered her.

By degrees, Cady’s body relaxed around him, and she sank until he was buried to the hilt. They stayed that way for an immeasurable stretch, breathing together. To have him physically inside her body when for so long he’d been just a voice in her head…

Cady began to move. The heat of their joined bodies burned away the last scraps of her self-consciousness, her fear that her body may not be capable of making love to him this way.

“I love…how you feel.”

She rolled him inside her, feeling him with every part of her most secret self.

“That’s it,” Fox coaxed, supporting her weight through every rise and thrust up to meet her every descent. “Take it all.”

They slipped into a rhythm that became a dance of sound, sweat-slicked flesh colliding in time with their ecstatic call and response.

“Fox.” His name escaped her on a plaintive note, her second undoing looming like a summer storm, hot and electric.

His thumb found her engorged flesh and circled it once before oblivion took her in a thunderclap. Fox drove into her as she contracted around him, following her down with a roar that elicited a cry from the forest beyond.

She collapsed against him, torso to torso, her cheek resting at the base of his neck.

Drowsiness injected her exhausted limbs with lead, and for once, she didn’t try to fight it. Didn’t try to prove her capability or offer assurances that this hadn’t cost her dearly.

It had.

It would.

But until then, Fox became the place she could rest.

If only for a chapter in her life’s long story.