Consumed (Firefighters #1)(97)

Danny put his hands up to his face, his biceps thickening, his heavy chest rising and falling a number of times like he was trying to reel in his brain.

“Do you want to tell me what it was?” she said softly.

She wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. Night terrors were not uncommon, although she had never known him to have them before. Then again, she didn’t usually sleep with him.

Not that there had been much “sleeping” going on. After an anxious, anemic dinner of chicken, broccoli, and the entire half gallon of chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream she’d bought as a dessert, they’d put Soot in his crate and made no pretenses about what was going to happen the second they got upstairs.

Three times. Once in the shower. Once on the rug by the bed. Once in the bed.

As she put her arm around him, she hoped to ground him in reality. “It’s okay.”

She said that even though she didn’t know if that was true. She just wanted him to come back from where he had been.

“Yeah.” His voice was rough. “It’s okay. I’m all right. It wasn’t me.”

With a surge, he turned to her and kissed her urgently, bringing her against him, his warm hands traveling over her skin, delving between her thighs. As their mouths ground against each other’s, his hips surged, his erection hot and hard against her leg. Rolling over, she pulled him on top of her as his lips kissed their way down her neck to her collarbone. Lower. To her nipples, which he sucked as he stroked her sex.

“Anne . . . I need you.”

Raking her nails down his back, she arched against him. “I need you, too.”

He pushed his way between her legs and all but impaled her, his sex driving into her own and pumping like he was possessed. The headboard banged so hard against the wall, she was glad she didn’t live in an apartment, and as he shoved the pillows out of the way, one of them knocked some stuff off her bedside table.

Not that she cared.

She had things she didn’t want to think about, too. Things like that bullet, and Ripkin, and fires she was fighting even though their flames were out. But as he pounded into her and she linked her legs around his hips, nothing else registered. It was just the pleasure and the heat, the rising tide that wiped out everything but him.

She was dimly aware of him shifting, and then his hand was between them, his talented fingers going right for the top of her core. He knew exactly what she wanted and how to touch her—and the orgasm that shot through her was so violent, it was as if she hadn’t had sex in years.

Danny took things from there, his rhythm going back to haywire until he locked in against her and kicked deep inside of her.

And then all was still except for them breathing.

As he dropped his head into her hair, he mumbled something.

“What?”

“Must be heavy. Me. I.”

But when he went to roll off of her, she shook her head. “I like the way you feel.”

Over his big shoulder, she measured the light bleeding around the edges of the drapes. Dawn had arrived, the new day and all that BS. But she wanted to say in the cocoon of her bedroom forever, just the two of them.

Sweeping her hand down his back, she felt the muscles that fanned out from his spine, the smooth skin, the heat from his flesh. It felt good to not hurry, and with the security system on, she knew if anyone tried to get in, they’d hear about it. Also, Soot was downstairs in his crate, and going by the way he’d greeted the SWAT guys before he was properly introduced, the dog was an equally good alarm.

If Danny kept staying, she was going to have to bring the dog back up. Maybe she could put him in the bathroom.

Wrapping her arms around the vital man who was still inside of her, she put her face into Danny’s neck, his hair brushing her forehead, the shadow of his beard on her cheek. For some reason, she became acutely aware that her blunted arm was against his rib cage, and she thought about how he didn’t treat it as any different from any other part of her. He welcomed the contact, cherished it, craved it.

The way he treated her partial arm was better than any list of words he could have spoken to tell her he still found her beautiful, desirable . . . whole, even though she was missing a part. And though it scared her to admit it, this time here, with him, had healed her, even though she had no more open wounds.

Acceptance was a balm to that raw place she had refused to acknowledge.

Closing her eyes against sudden tears, she held onto him. “Danny . . .”

“Yes?”

I love you. “Thank you,” she breathed.

He pulled back a little. “For staying the night? Are you kidding me, I wouldn’t leave you here by yourself to deal with this. And whenever I’m off shift, you’ll have me back.”

“I would like that.”

“Me, too.”

His staying over wasn’t even about her car window getting shot out. It was about so much more, a connection that had started the day she had walked into the 499 as a probie and looked up, way up, into the blue eyes of an Irish wild man. Sometime along the way, over the passage of days and weeks and months, he had become part of her life, part of her history.

She told herself that it was only through retrospection that things felt inevitable. She wasn’t sure she believed that in her heart.

As the sun rose higher, it seemed as though they had been destined all along for each other.