Page 41 of Brawler
Fucking her. God yes! Fuck her and take her and consume her. Yes,fucking,yes.
And…talking to her, listening to her, going incandescent inside because she saw him. God…yes all over again. Christ, it had only been twenty-four hours. He’d known her for a single day and already she’d torn past defenses he’d kept solid for years. He’d never met anyone like Emily, and maybe that was the problem. He’d never allowed anyone this close. It was like crack, this obsession with her. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, salivating for more. She filled him up, spilled light into him, jacked him in places he’d never known could ache and hum.
The thought of losing her…the memory of her missing, even for a moment, came back at him even harder now.
He pulled his focus tight, resorted back to SEAL mode. Operator. Warrior. Survivalist. Never-quit-or-die resolve. One cave mouth was too shallow, too exposed. Another tunneled deep but with too many side passages, too many ways to get flanked. He crouched, scanning the ground, tracing airflow, listening to the drip of unseen water. His skin buzzed with it, that instinctive map his body made when a place could turn into a kill box. Finally, he found one, a natural choke point, narrow entry, ceiling high enough to keep them mobile, one way in, one way out. Defensible. Tactically sound.
Emily came up behind, boots scuffing on stone, and while he cataloged lines of fire and fallback options, she tipped her head back. Her sharp inhale caught his attention. “Wow, look how the walls glisten faintly with mineral sheen, water veining downlike silver threads.” A shaft of fading sunlight speared through the gaping opening above them, catching quartz embedded in the rock. “It shines like starlight trapped underground.” She swallowed hard. “Is that a—” She moved past him, slipped behind a wall, and with a curse, he followed her.
The narrow throat opened unexpectedly, the ceiling rising, the sound of dripping water gathering strength until it filled the air like a steady heartbeat. The ground sloped again, and then the chamber widened into a hollow where the jungle had carved out something secret.
A pool lay nestled at the heart of the cavern, fed by a narrow fall spilling from a cleft high in the stone. Water slid silver down the moss-draped rock, scattering into a thousand droplets before vanishing into the dark glass below. Mist hung in the air, cool against the sweat on his skin. The scent of wet earth and green moss rose thick, alive.
His eyes went first to the edges, to where shadows might conceal a threat, to the walls slick with moisture that could hamper escape. He saw terrain. Chokepoints. Cover. Survival.
Emily was ahead of him, her hand brushing the stone as though she were touching something holy. She tipped her face toward the falls, light from a hole in the cavern’s ceiling catching in her damp red hair, eyes wide with that reckless, unguarded wonder that made his chest ache.
“Look at this,” she whispered. “A hidden world.” She crouched near the water, moss lush under her boots, glowing almost emerald where droplets beaded and slid down.
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The picture burned itself into his head with too much clarity, her small body pressed to that moss, skin damp with mist, the thunder of the waterfall drowning out every sound but her breath against his throat.
Brawler dragged in air, forcing his focus back to the perimeter, to the mission. Beauty was her territory. Safety washis. Yet standing here, with silver water spilling behind her and that light in her eyes, he couldn’t shake the thought that this place wasn’t just defensible.
It was his crucible. His fucking downfall.
Her face rocked him, the appreciation reflecting in her eyes, the warmth in her voice, the awe at nature. All of it hit him so hard, he expected to stagger. “God,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”
He was wrong.She was his crucible. She was his fucking downfall.Something in him snapped, and he knew he had to get away from all of this, reset, decompress, and find a way to deal with all the tangled emotions this woman had stirred in him before he exploded from the pressure.
He turned on his heel and walked away, then picked up speed.
But, of course, Emily couldn’t let him just go.
“Christian? What’s wrong?”
He stopped, his back rigid. “It’s not beautiful! It’s defensible, shelter, practical!”
Fuck this ability to feel what others felt. Fuck it ten ways to hell. Concern, warmth, sadness, her aching attraction, and a pain that never seemed to go away. It all washed over him. His name on her lips, her voice, all the things he wanted seethed inside him.
He whirled. “Don’t.” His voice was rough, teeth gritted. “This isn’t a goddamn field trip?—"
“It was my field trip.”
“It’s not now. We have tangos on our ass and no quick way back to the jungle. This jaunt will adddaysto our trek back to the team.” His body tensed when she moved. He stared at her. She stopped in her tracks. “Goddammit. What a clusterfuck.” His jaw flexed so hard, it hurt. He huffed out a scoffing laugh. “You in the damn middle of it.” She opened her mouth, but hecut her off. “No. You don’t get to argue this one.” His voice rose, hard, ragged, shaking with something he couldn’t cage. “Christ, you think I want to tell Tex I lost you? You think I can handle finding you broken, or bleeding, or?—”
He cut himself off, running a hand over his face, pacing like a caged animal, his chest heaving. “You don’t get it. You don’t get how close, how goddamn close I came to—” He bit it off, snarling. “You can’t do that to me again.”
“How close you came to…what? When?”
“Losing it. Back there when you were journaling that damn paw print, and I told you to stay put.”
Emily just watched him, and he wanted to howl as more sensory stuff bombarded him, her throat tightening, her eyes flicking over his pacing, that pulse in her neck syncing with his fury. He didn’t understand what this was, only that it was so devastating, his senses overloaded.
He didn’t mean to; his mind was working on so many other points of entry that he must have lost his ability to reason, but once a round was chambered, it was bound to fire.
He should have kept her at bay. Should have told her this wasn’t the time, wasn’t the place. Instead, every muscle locked onto her. Finally, inevitably, he lost hisever-lovingmind. His mouth crashed into hers, and when she kissed him back, it wasn’t like anything he’d ever known.
His body lit up, not with the usual demand to burn off steam, but with something he couldn’t control, couldn’t contain. True desire. Nothing like the hurried, backroom tangles he knew. This wasn’t friction, wasn’t control, wasn’t a body under his just to bleed off pressure. This was a goddamn detonation of sensation. Her lips were soft but insistent, moving against his with a hunger that shot through his chest and into his bones. Gone was the need to spill, the mechanical urge to release, and all that wasleft was the primal, desperate need toget something back. From her. God, from her.
