Page 6 of Catalyst

"Let go," he says against my skin.

He means more than the shirt. He always means more than the words.

I let go. The fabric. The tension in my shoulders. The part of me that runs contingency plans for every room I enter. All of it releases under his hands, his mouth, the steady pressure of a man who doesn't rush because he doesn't have to. I'm not going anywhere, and we both know it.

He strips me the way he does everything. Thorough. Unhurried. Each button is a decision he's already made. Every inch of skin he uncovers gets the full attention of his hands before he moves to the next.

His palm spreads flat across my stomach. Calluses dragging over skin that has never once stopped being shocked by the contrast. Scarred on unmarked. Earned on inherited. Hands that work timber and rope and iron, touching a woman who spent her career behind a desk and a badge.

The shirt hits the floor. His mouth replaces his hands on my collarbone, open and hot, teeth grazing the ridge of bone hard enough to pull a gasp out of me that I don't authorize. He takes his time there. Tasting. His hands slide my bra straps down my shoulders with the precision of someone who has mapped this terrain before and knows exactly which route gets the response he wants.

The bra drops. His palms close over my breasts, and the roughness drags across my nipples and sends a jolt straight through my center. Thumbs stroking. Pressure building until my spine bows into the doorframe and my breathing goes ragged.

"Easy," he says. Low. Steady. A command, not a comfort.

He drops to his knees. My jeans go next, pulled down my hips, taking everything underneath with them. His mouth follows the line of my hip bone, the crease of my thigh, breath hot on skin that is already flushed and hypersensitive. His grip spreads my thighs apart, and the noise I make when his tongue presses into me is something I will never admit to outside this cabin.

He takes me apart slow and relentless, reading my body with the same focused patience he brings to everything he considers his. Every shift of my hips, every hitch in my breathing, he registers and uses. Fingers pressing into the muscle of my thighs, holding me open, holding me still, and the pleasure builds with devastating precision. He knows exactly where the edge is. He has no intention of letting me reach it yet.

When my legs start shaking, he stops. Stands. Lifts me off my feet and carries me to the bed. The mattress catches my weight, and his body covers mine in the space between one breath and the next. Forearms braced on either side of my head. The hard planes of his chest and stomach pressing mine into the sheets. The rigid length of him through the fabric he hasn't removed yet, heavy and hot where it presses into my thigh.

He pulls his shirt over his head. Sheds the rest.

Bare skin on bare skin, chest to chest, hip to hip, so immediate and raw that my body arcs up into him before conscious thought has any say in the matter.

"Look at me," he says.

My eyes open. His face is close enough that I can see the flecks of darker blue in his irises, the lines that grief carved into the skin beside his mouth. He is looking at nothing and no one except the woman beneath him.

He reaches between us and positions himself. Holds my gaze while he pushes inside me. A single, controlled press that stretches me open around him until he's seated fully and the fullness is so complete my pulse hammers where our bodies meet. The noise that leaves my throat has no training behind it. No strategy. Just my body answering his, unguarded and entirely his.

He sets the pace, and the pace is devastating. Long, deep strokes that pull back until I'm nearly empty and then fill me completely, friction dragging over every nerve ending until the sensation blurs the line between pleasure and something closer to breaking. His grip locks on my hip, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks I'll feel tomorrow, and the pressure anchors me to something physical and immediate while everything else dissolves.

His free hand catches my wrists and pins them above my head. One hand. Both wrists. The grip is firm enough that testing it would be pointless, and I don't test it. I don't want to. The surrender doesn't feel like loss. It feels like the first honest thing I've done in years.

He drops his forehead to mine. His breathing is ragged now, the control starting to fray at the edges, and the exact moment he stops holding back registers in every cell of my body.

The pace changes. Harder. Deeper. He hooks his free hand behind my knee and pushes my thigh higher, opening me wider, and the angle shifts just enough that the next stroke hits a place inside me that makes my entire body seize.

His hips drive into mine with an intensity that replaces the breath in my lungs with something that sounds like his name and feels like falling.

This. This is the moment it hits me. Pinned beneath him. Wrists held. His weight pressing me into a mattress in a cabin on a mountain in a town I chose because I had nowhere else to go. I am more exposed than I have ever been.

I am not afraid.

I spent years after Baker died convincing myself that forward motion was the same as purpose. New city. New job. New identity. Alaska. I kept moving because stopping meant sitting still with the silence, and the silence sounded too much like a negotiation I'd lost. Rhys didn't fix me. He didn't save me. He gave me one honest thing in a life full of calculated decisions, and I chose it. The way I chose this town. The way I chose this cabin. The way I chose to build something instead of running toward the next crisis that would give me a reason not to think. The way I chose him.

Home. The word surfaces from somewhere I've been protecting for months, and it doesn't mean the cabin or the town or the mountain. It means the weight of his body on mine. The grip of his hands. The sound of him letting go of everything except this moment. Home is not a place I found. It's a choice I made the day I stopped running and decided that the man in front of me was worth the terrifying act of staying still.

He comes apart with his face buried in my neck, releasing my wrists to grip the sheets on either side of my head. The last thrust drives deep enough that it takes me over the edge with him. My spine lifts off the mattress. His name tears from my throat in a sound I couldn't hold back if my life depended on it.

His forehead drops to the curve of my shoulder. His breathing slows against my skin, each exhale warm and ragged, evening out by degrees until the tension leaves his body and his full weight settles over me.

We lie there. His arm heavy across my waist. My back fitted to his chest. The cabin is dark except for the light from the woodstove leaking through the grate, and the quiet that settles over us is the kind that doesn't need filling.

His thumb traces a slow line along my hip bone. Back and forth. Unhurried. I close my eyes and let my breathing match his, and for the first time since I can remember, my body isn't running threat assessments. Not the exits. Not the sight lines. Not the distance to the door.

There is just his arm. His warmth. The steady rise and fall of his chest where it presses to my spine.