Page 55 of You Can Run

Her hands slid up his chest, over his shoulders, pulling him closer. The wet fabric between them was nothing, less than nothing, and when his fingers found the top button of the shirt, she didn't stop him.

He undid it slowly. Then the next. His hands were clumsy with cold and something else, trembling against her skin as the shirt opened and the air hit her.

“Baby,” he said against her mouth, and the way he said it—raw and half-wrecked, like he still couldn't believe she was letting him—made her eyes sting.

“I'm here,” she said.

His forehead dropped to hers, and for a second he just breathed, his hands flat against her bare skin, holding still in a way she understood was him giving her one last chance to change her mind.

She answered by pulling his shirt over his head.

His skin was hot under her hands. She ran her palms up his chest, feeling the hard terrain of him. His hands were at her shoulders, sliding the wet shirt the rest of the way down her arms. It hit the floor with a sodden thud.

She was standing in just the sequined dress now, soaked through, the fabric clinging to her like a second skin. She watched his eyes move over her and watched him stop trying to hide what was there.

“You're freezing,” he said again.

“So warm me up.”

He reached for one of the rough towels on the rack by the kitchenette. He didn't hand it to her. He stepped into her space and draped it over her head, and then he was gently rubbing her hair dry, his hands working through the wet pink strands like he needed to keep them busy or they'd do something else entirely.

“Hold still,” he muttered.

She didn't hold still. She pressed her palms flat against his stomach. The muscle contracted under her touch like she'd burned him.

His hands stopped moving. The towel hung around her neck and he used it to pull her an inch closer, his breathing uneven now.

Jessica leaned in and pressed her mouth to the hollow of his throat. She felt his pulse hammering against her lips, felt his whole body go taut, and understood with a sudden, dizzying clarity that Dante Cruz—the man who'd escaped the scariest gang in the country, who'd survived federal prison and witness protection—was barely holding it together because her mouth was on his neck.

He found the zipper at the back of the dress. It was stuck; salt and grit from the road had jammed the teeth. She felt him pull once, carefully, then again with less patience, and then the metal gave and the fabric parted and his hands were on her bare back, palms sliding down her spine, and she stopped thinking.

“Daniel,” she said against his skin, and her use of his real name did something to him she could feel in his entire body.

His hands tightened at her hips. He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her backward until her shoulders hit the wall beside the bed. The wood groaned behind her.

He kissed her again. She tasted rain and salt and him, and when his hand came up to the back of her neck, fingers tangling in her damp hair, tilting her head back, she let him.

“This is real,” he said against her throat. Not a question. A thing he needed to say out loud once, even if neither of them was allowed to keep it.

“I know,” she said.

He pulled back just enough to look at her, and what she saw in his face wasn't the controlled, guarded man who'd been managing this for days. It was someone younger, rawer, closer to the Daniel she'd known in a trailer in Chicago.

He set her down on the bed and followed her onto it, the wool blanket rough against her skin as the dress slid the rest of the way off. His weight settled over her, and she pulled him down, her hands at the back of his neck, and for a while the storm outside was just sound, meaningless noise against the windows.

His hands were everywhere. Unhurried now, slower, almost reverent, like he was relearning the geography of someone he'd memorized years ago and wasn't sure what had changed. When his fingers found the curve of her breast and her breath caught, he came back to it, paying attention in a way that made her chest ache, because she'd forgotten what it felt like to be touched by someone who was actually present.

She said his name again, quieter this time, and he answered by pressing his mouth to her collarbone, her ribs, the soft skin below her navel, his lips tracing a path that was slow and deliberate and devastating.

She was pulling him back up to her, her breathing ragged, her body focused on nothing except where he was and where she needed him to be, when?—

Thump.

It wasn't the wind. The wind was a constant howl, a shifting pressure that hadn't stopped since they'd arrived. This was solid and heavy. The sound of something hitting the wooden pilings beneath the house.

Dante went still above her. Every muscle locked at once, his breath held, his eyes fixed on the dark rectangle of the door.

“Dante?” she whispered, her voice ragged.