Page 117 of Tessa and Nash

"Don’t stop," she begs, and it’s the sound of her voice, breathless and pleading, that breaks the last of my control.

I give her what she needs. I push her, harder, until she’s coming undone beneath me. The sound of her climax, the way her body quivers and tightens around me, sends me over the edge. I lose myself in her, in the way she shatters for me, in the way she lets go, offering herself completely.

And as I spill into her, the release is almost violent. Everything in me is breaking as we fall together, consumed by the connection that’s pulled us into this moment.

We’re both breathless, trembling, as I collapse onto her, our bodies slick with sweat, tangled together in a heap of exhaustion and euphoria.

My arm curls around her instinctively, and I trace slow patterns along her arm until her breathing evens out.

Immediately, I know I’m in trouble.

Not because of the storm or because Juniper House is cut off from the world, a forgotten dot on the map. Not because there’s a land war waiting for us back in Buckhorn, sharpened and ready to draw blood the second we set foot in town again.

I’m in trouble because my heart hurts.

Because it aches for Tessa Long in this quiet, private, terrifying way that has nothing to do with heat or adrenaline or getting carried away in a house full of old paper and older ghosts.

It’s the ache of wanting.

A wanting I know I’m not allowed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tessa

January 17th

The storm finally breaks around seven AM, the snow letting up and the clouds retreating like a curtain being pulled back, revealing blue skies I didn’t even know we still had.

The world outside is different now. The snow came through and erased the sharp edges of everything. Except the part of me that’s still vibrating.

We sit in the truck for a while, both of us staring out the windshield, waiting for someone else to make the first move.

The journal sits in my bag on the floor between my boots, heavy as a confession.

Nash keeps his eyes on the windshield, avoiding both the journal and me, which is honestly impressive, given his usual inability to stop looking at anything that might ruin his life.

“Well,” he says eventually, like he’s casually commenting on the weather and not the fact that we just dug up the kind of family secret people build wars around. “We made it.”

“Technically,” I reply, because sarcasm is still the closest thing I have to oxygen. “Although none of this looks really real, does it?”

He lets out a breath that might be a laugh if it wasn’t so tired.

“You ready to go back to real life?”

The question lands oddly.

Real life.

As if what happened in Juniper House didn’t count because it was cold and isolated and no one was watching. As if the past stops existing when you leave the room where you found it.

“I have work this morning,” I say instead of answering, because that’s safer. “And a town full of people who think they’re entitled to my personal life now that I’m ‘engaged’.”

Nash’s mouth twitches. “Yeah. Buckhorn’s really consistent about that.”

I don’t look at him, because if I do, I’ll remember his voice in the dark. The way he said my name like it mattered, the way he held me without performing, like he wasn’t trying to win anything.

He just wanted me.