She looked up at him, her eyes meeting his, then she stroked her tongue over his body. Over and over again. Giving him gifts he didn’t deserve, gifts he wasn’t strong enough to say no to.
Because he wanted it. He wanted everything in this moment.
Wanted to be baptized in this need and made a new creation.
But it was impossible. For men like him.
It was impossible.
She took him in deep, and he let his head fall back, a prayer on his lips.
Tala.
And it felt unfair. To know that all this time love had been sitting out here in the middle of the woods, but he hadn’t known where to find it.
Knowing that she was real and true and wonderful and... Could never really be his.
But she was his now. The sweet, soft suction of her lips drawing him closer and closer to a heaven he could not stay in.
A heaven he could never inherit. Because in the end, he was damned, and he’d heard there was Grace so amazing out there, but none of it was left over for him.
She teased him, tortured him until he reached the end of himself. Until he laid her down on the floor beneath the tree, looking at the lights in the colorful glow they cast over her bare skin. Until he pinned her hands up over her head and positioned himself between her legs, thrusting home.
Home.
Home was inside her. With her. Home was her. And always would be.
His thoughts fractured as he thrust inside of her, as he lost himself in the rhythm of knowing her. The hot flush of intimacy that he had never experienced anywhere else. That he hadn’t believed existed until her.
He was a man who had never known softness before, and now he was drowning in it.
Drowning in her.
And he shouted out her name in the end, and she clung to his shoulders and said his.
Like marriage vows. And then she curled up against him and started to drift to sleep in his arms. “I love you,” he whispered. And she wrapped her arms around his and said nothing. But he could’ve sworn that he felt a tear land on his wrist.
“Merry Christmas.”
And he knew what he had to do next.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE WOKE UP when she heard him moving around the living room.
She had known that he would do this. She had known that it was the end. Last night when he had told her that he loved her, she had known. And she should have said it back, because she felt it, with every inch of her, all the way down. But she had known that it wasn’t a declaration of love built around him staying.
She had known.
“You’re just going to go?” she asked.
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because. I have to turn myself in. I have to face the police. I have to face Jake. And in the end, I don’t know what’s going to be left. I might end up in prison. I might not be able to clear my name. I ran from the law, whether I was an innocent man or not. And then there were the years beforehand when I was an innocent. I’m going to have to confess to crimes, Tala, and it doesn’t matter that I was a child when I committed them. The truth of the matter is, I committed them.”
“Just stay here,” she said, her voice breaking. “Please.”
“You know that I can’t.”
She did know. Because she knew him. And she knew that he was right.
Because she had fought to get away from her parents and...
But she felt like it didn’t matter. She felt like the broader world didn’t matter. She would go into hiding if it meant that she could be with him. Because with him she had found something new and different and special. With him she had found a freedom in herself and with herself that she hadn’t known existed.
But he wouldn’t ask that of her. And if he did... Well then he wouldn’t be the man that she knew he was. The man that she loved would sacrifice for her, because it was who he was.
Because he cared about her in a way that no one else in her life ever had.
“But you have to say goodbye to me.”
Something in his expression changed, the light in his eyes like a black flame. “It’s the one thing I wasn’t sure I could do.”
And she wanted to weep. She hadn’t said very many goodbyes in her life. But the one she’d said to her mother, when she had left without a word, had been easy. Simple. But devastating all the same.
She had known that she was going on to something better, at least.
But this didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel good or better. “I have something for you,” he said. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “In a couple of days, you go there. To that address. When you go into the cabin, lift up the floorboards beneath the window in the back of the living area. What you find there... It’s for you.”
“Okay,” she said, feeling numb.
And then, with darkness still ensconced in the cottage, her outlaw disappeared through the same door he’d come in. Just as suddenly.
But this time, the hole was in her. And she didn’t think that it would ever fully heal.
* * *
THE SUN WAS just rising when he walked into the sheriff’s station in Copper Ridge. “I’d like to speak to sheriff Eli Garrett,” he said.
“He just got in,” the woman at the front said.
He cleared his throat. “Tell him that Clayton Everett’s here to turn himself in.”
The woman’s eyes went wide. “I will.”
She scurried away, and a moment later, a tall, broad-chested man in a tan uniform came walking toward him. “Clayton Everett,” he said. “I’m Sheriff Eli Garrett. I hear you have something you want to talk to me about.”
Clayton nodded. “There are warrants out for my arrest.”
“I know,” he said. “I tend to remember the people in the area with warrants out. Given that we don’t have a whole lot of crime around here. I have some for your brother, Jake, also.”
“Yeah. You would. Listen, Sheriff. I could’ve hidden from you. But the bottom line is, I’m in love. With a woman. And I need to clear all these decks if I’m going to have a hope in hell at a future with her. If that ends in prison... Then so be it. But I’m not consigning her to a life with a man on the run. I’m not making it so that she’s looking over her shoulder all the time. When it was just me, that was fine. But I want everything with her. A real future. I don’t expect you to believe everything I’m going to tell you. But trust me when I say I haven’t been involved with the Everett family business for more than a decade. I was raised in it. And I’ve done some shit. I’m not going to lie to you.”