“Good,” I say with my teeth at the base of his throat, scraping until he shivers and his hips jolt forward, hard where I’m soft. The metal of the table bites into the back of my thighs, the surface cold against my bare skin. “Because this time I want you to watch.”
The hand on my cheek slips into my hair, tilting my head back as his mouth finds mine. It’s a rough kiss, possessive, and I hold onto the sides of his torso as he bends me backwards over the tabletop. A perfect curve, his hands holding me up. He pulls back and drags his nose against my jaw, dips down and presses a single, lingering kiss on my shoulder.
He doesn’t say anything as he presses into me, a thick slide of heat that has me shifting my body against the table—trying to take more. Trying to take it all. He watches with his head tipped down between us, a low groan that sounds like my name. I close my eyes and feel him everywhere he’s tucked against me. One hand in my hair. The other on my thigh, guiding my leg wider. His deep, panting breaths against the sensitive skin behind my ear. The tiny restless movement of his body against mine when our hips tuck together, like he wants to move but can’t quite yet. Like he needs a moment to collect himself.
He pulls out slightly and pushes back in, a short stilted movement that still, somehow, manages to steal my breath. He curses and does it again, a messy grind on his retreat that rubs against me in all the right places. My hand slips down to his jaw, fingers curling against his rough stubble. I guide his face until he’s looking at us on the glass wall to our left.
“Watch,” I tell him.
We look like something from a dream. A filthy dream that I’ve had a million times where I wake up still tangled in the sheets. My heart in my throat and a thin sheen of sweat on my skin, a drumbeat of wanting between my thighs.
My legs are curled high around his hips, my back arched in a delicate bend against the tabletop, anchored with his hand twisted through my hair. His body, strong and tall above me. His jeans caught halfway down his legs. I look at him in our reflection and the storm raging in those green eyes. Banked desire. A wordless promise.
He pulls out slowly. Thrusts back in so hard the entire table shakes. A planter goes crashing to the ground and I cling to him.
And I don’t hide a single thing from him as I fall apart.
“Evie.”
I grumble and swat at the warm pressure at my back, a heavy hand at my waist over the thick quilt. Beckett huffs a laugh and his hand squeezes, rubbing over the flank of my thigh and back again. I have marks on my legs from the metal of the table last night, light bruises from when Beckett pulled me from the edge, turned me around, and bent me at the waist. There, he said with his mouth at my ear, his hand between my legs. Now we can both watch.
I shiver as I remember, and Beckett gives a knowing chuckle above me.
“Why did you wake me up?” I whine into the pillow, pulling the blankets further over my shoulder and burrowing down. His bed is perfectly warm, his body my own personal space heater.
Except his body is currently fully dressed and above the covers, a baseball hat pulled backwards over his messy blonde hair. I blink at him over my shoulder, confused.
“Why are you dressed? Is everything okay?”
His thumb traces over my bottom lip, a half-smile on his handsome face. “Everything is fine. Kind of. They delivered our saplings to the wrong farm. Barney and I have to drive up to upstate New York and grab them.”
“New York?”
He hums in the affirmative.
I blink some more. “Right now?”
He nods. “If we wait for them to do it, it’ll be next week. I don’t want the trees to dry out.”
“Can’t have that,” I mumble, still half-asleep. His smile widens.
“No, we can’t.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Not long. We should be back tomorrow night.”
I sit up on the bed and rub my hands against my eyes. Prancer lets out a plaintive meow from her place at the edge of the bed, upset by the disruption. I drop my hands and yawn in Beckett’s general direction. “I’ll come with you.”
He shakes his head and shifts forward to brush a kiss against my lips. Soft. Perfect. “Stay here,” he says. He hesitates for a second and then curls his hand around my neck, his palm sweeping against sleep-warm skin. “Sleep in my bed while I’m gone, yeah? I’ll see you when I get back.”
I collapse back to the pillows and blankets with a grateful sigh and bury my face in flannel. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” The mattress dips at my waist and warm lips drift across my forehead. “Get some rest.”
“Have fun with the trees,” I mumble.
The last thing I hear before I drift back to sleep is his rough chuckle, his fingertips carding through my hair.
When I wake up again, I’m curled on Beckett’s side of the bed, clinging to the sleeve of a flannel hanging from the bedpost. I laugh at myself and give in to an indulgent stretch beneath the comforter. There hadn’t been a discussion last night as to where I would sleep. We stumbled in from the greenhouse with our clothes rumpled and I followed Beckett into his bedroom. I draped my body over his, pressed a sleepy kiss to his mouth and fell asleep with his arm slung over my hip.
He grumbled about me hogging the blankets, but I woke up in the middle of the night to Beckett holding most of them close to his chest, his face buried in my hair.
I reach blindly for my phone on the nightstand, squinting at the screen. The house sounds too quiet without Beckett here. I miss the sound of drawers opening in the kitchen, metal spoons and the clink of his coffee mug.
10:37 am
Josie: Text me when you’ve got a second. I’ve got news.
I tap her name and let my phone rest against my chest as it begins to ring. I stretch out my legs with another groan.
“You don’t need to sound so smug,” Josie says when she answers, catching the tail end of my stretching sounds. I let my body flop back to the bed, my arms above my head. My hand brushes against something soft and cool and I wrap my fingers around it.
A long green stem. A cluster of small blue blooms. Meadow sage, I think it’s called.
I hold it under my nose with a smile.
“What’s your news?”
“Nuh-uh,” Josie admonishes. “You were way too short on our video call. I have things I want to discuss first.”
I said maybe two words to Josie the other morning in the kitchen before I slammed the laptop shut. Luckily she had been too gobsmacked by the appearance of Beckett’s bare torso to do anything but gape like a fish.
I guess she’s collected herself.
“I’d like to start with the tattoo along his collarbone and work my way down.”
I laugh. “No.”
“I took a quick screenshot, but he moved. It’s kind of blurry.”
“You … what?”
“I’m gonna frame it and put it on my wall.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Does he have flowers on one arm and the stars on the other? Because that’s pretty devastating.”
It is devastating. Lovely and sentimental and sexy as hell, too. I had curled my hand around the constellation on his forearm last night when he braced his palm on the table next to me. A bull with its horns lowered. Crowns of thick, vibrant greenery twisted around its head. “I’m not going to objectify him.”