He tightened his arms around her. “I know.”
“I’m serious.” She looked up into his face. “We’re doing this, we’re moving forward and chasing this thing, but in here”—she tapped her temple—“I’m constantly flip-flopping between ‘This is exactly something my dad would have done’ and ‘There is no way he found the money and hid it again; not even Duke was that big an asshole.’？”
Lily shook her head. “I thought all of his trips and treasure hunts and stupid riddles were a waste of time, and I resented him for it. But look at me now: I’m in a cabin at the bottom of a canyon, looking for his clues on a tree stump. How fucked up is that?”
“Lil,” Leo said quietly, “it’s okay to want this, and go after this, and still be mad, too.” Reaching up, he cupped her jaw. “You don’t have to pick one or the other.”
“Am I crazy?” she asked.
“If you are, then I am, too.”
She nodded, and her eyes dropped to his mouth, expression softening. Abruptly, she tore her gaze away, looking past him and toward the tent-covered window. “I wonder if we should keep going.”
Leo touched her jaw, turning her face back. “I seem to remember someone saying the rain could be dangerous.”
It seemed like she unconsciously pressed closer to him even as she said, “But Nic and the boys are expecting to meet us tomorrow.”
“Nicole will check the weather,” Leo told her, heating under her wavering resolve. “She’ll yell about it but know we were delayed by the storm.”
He bent to kiss her just as she stretched on her toes, meeting his mouth with soft, eager lips. The rain outside felt like it was sitting on this little section of canyon, stuck between peaks, and they both knew further exploration was futile until it let up.
Or maybe they were both happy to have an excuse.
“I guess you’re right,” she said between kisses. “And look how dark those clouds are.”
He hummed against her.
“Sun will set soon…” she said.
It wouldn’t, but he wasn’t about to correct her.
So Leo nodded, sucking on her bottom lip, her jaw, running his hands up underneath her shirt to cup her breasts. “Might as well find another way to kill the time.”
He hurriedly spread out the sleeping bag, and Lily stepped back, undressing while he watched. It was only late afternoon, but the canyon walls cast the inside of the cabin into shadow. Lily stared at his face and he followed the path of her hands as she dragged every piece of her clothing off with deliberate slowness. He could barely suck in a full breath, watching her.
The sight of her teasing him this way meant his undressing was far less seductive—a shirt discarded as quickly as possible so he didn’t lose sight of her fingers flirting with the strap of her simple cotton bra; jeans kicked off in an effort to not trip when she hooked her thumb into the waistband of her underwear and slid them down her legs.
He hadn’t seen her naked in so long, and for a while, looking and touching and tasting was all he could do. But when he drew his tongue over her and her back arched from the sleeping bag and her hands dug into his hair, Leo felt like he was waking up, as if the intervening ten years had been a nightmare, as if he’d just closed his eyes at the ranch and a lifetime of anguish passed behind his lids, and then he opened them again and found Lily exactly the same: skin flushed, soft thighs open, heels digging into the bed, wanting him.
Inside their tiny cabin, he loved her with his mouth and his fingers until she cried out, pulling him up and over her. He’d forgotten the width of her smile and the mischief in her hazel eyes, the way her kiss could turn from sated and soft into searching and biting, the way she rolled over onto him, pinning his hands over his head, scraping her way down his body to taste and lick, to make him crazy.
His hands dug into her soft tangle of hair, touching and tugging and begging with his fingertips, and she scaled back up his body again, rolling him over her. Wrapping her arms and legs around him in a wild coil of clasping limbs and arching hips, asking him with words and gestures to touch her and tell her what he felt.
She asked him if he wanted to—of course he wanted to—and they dug around, finding the condoms in the bag.
“There’s a joke here about a dead man’s condoms,” Leo told her, pulling out the box Terry had packed.
Lily pressed two fingers to his lips. “Let’s make it later.”
He couldn’t believe that his hands were shaking as he tore open the packet and rolled on the condom, but they were. Sex was sex, but love was a different language, and Leo hadn’t spoken it in ten years. He felt rusty. Whispering as he focused on the task at hand, he said, “I do want to point out that they’re ribbed for her pleasure.”