Page 85 of The Sniper

“We don’t have much time,” he murmured, but I shook my head.

“We have this.”

He turned me to face him, water cascading between us, rivulets tracking over his chest, down his abs, pooling at our feet like a baptism. I tilted my chin up, kissed the pulse beneath his jaw, then reached between us and guided him back inside me.

The angle was new, the sensation sharper—his hands gripping my hips, mine braced against the tile behind me. Every thrust was wet, deep, unrelenting. Water slapped against our skin, steam rising around us like smoke.

He lifted one of my legs, hooked it over his hip, and thrust deeper. I gasped, nails digging into his back, anchoring myself to the only thing in the world that felt real.

The water kept falling.

Washing us.

Washing me.

And I thought of every sermon I’d ever heard about salvation. About purity. About the holy.

None of them came close to this.

To Noah’s breath against my ear. To his cock driving into me like a promise. To the feel of his heartbeatpounding wild against mine, like the world might end and he needed me to know it beat for me first.

He pulled back just enough to look me in the eye. “This,” he whispered. “This is what I’ll fight for.”

I kissed him—hard and open and desperate—and let the flood take me again.

But I didn’t want to stand anymore. Didn’t want to feel the weight of the world in my knees or the distance between us in the few inches still separating our bodies. I wanted to be lower. Grounded. Rooted in something raw and real.

I reached behind him and turned the dial all the way to warm, then tugged his hand and sank down to the slick tile floor, the water raining harder now.

Noah followed, eyes dark, jaw tight, his knees planting on either side of me as he knelt in front of me under the spray.

The water slicked his hair to his forehead, ran down the ridges of his chest and over the muscles in his arms, and I watched every drop.

He cupped my face and kissed me again—slower this time—and I reached between us, wrapped my hand around his length, and stroked him in slow, wet pulls that made his breath catch.

“Hallie Mae,” he rasped, voice cracked open with want and wonder.

I didn’t answer.

I just leaned in and took him into my mouth, one inch at a time, eyes never leaving his.

He gasped, one hand flying to my hair, the other braced against the tile wall as my tongue curled beneath him, sucking slow and deep as the water poured down my back. His hips flexed but didn’t push—didn’t force.He let me take my time. Let me worship him like he’d worshipped me.

The tile was cool beneath my knees, the water hot across my skin, and all I could hear was his breathing—the staggered, ragged kind.

“You’re killing me,” he groaned, fingers tightening in my hair. “You don’t even know what you’re doing to me.”

But I did. Because this was about remembrance—leaving a piece of myself with him to carry into whatever war he was walking into.

I pulled back just enough to whisper, “Lie down.”

He blinked, dazed. “What?”

“Here,” I said, guiding him gently. “On the floor. With me.”

He obeyed, body easing back against the tile. I crawled over him, kissed his ribs, his chest, the flutter of his heart under his skin.

Then I climbed atop him, slow and unhurried, and sank down.

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