“Ssh. You’re okay. I’ve got you.” He hummed to her, one of the old country tunes from earlier in the evening, and pressed a kiss against her hair.
Her fingers were hooked over his forearms, nails digging in. She’d touched down like a feather, but now that slight sway to her body was becoming a more insistent rock against his hold. “Rory. I can’t let go…I’m falling…”
Unease rippled through him, but he spoke soothingly. This was the flipside of the involuntary, pleasurable reaction she’d just experienced. A reaction she had no way to handle, no context, just his word. He had to make sure she could count on it, lean on it.
“You don’t have to let go,” he told her. “And I’m not letting go of you. Just hang on.”
“Why…why…why…” He thought she was trying to ask him a question, the way she was struggling with the single word, but a blink later, there was no spare energy to figure it out.
Everything changed.
Yes, an orgasm could be a deeper-than-the-body experience, opening rooms in the heart that had been closed up for too long. But instead of turning the knob and pushing inward, her release had ripped them off the hinges, busting the frame.
Words disappeared, replaced by a raw, wailing cry. He was holding a wounded wild animal, not a woman. But she’d taken him at his word. She wasn’t fighting to get away. She held onto as much of him as she could, with raking nails, pummeling fists, biting teeth.
His upper body was far stronger than hers, but she had the advantage of greater mobility. One of her thrashings tipped her over his arm, overbalancing him and the chair. Which, damn it all, broke his hold. She hit the floor on one knee as he grabbed onto her nearby bed, trying to catch himself. He missed, toppling out of the seat and onto the floor. The braked chair had tipped but it found the dresser, which sent it back to all wheels.
He’d been afraid he’d land on her, but she had rolled, was on her feet. She ran into everything in her path, as if what she was seeing wasn’t this room. She knocked items off the dresser, then found the opening to the bedroom with flailing hands and was through it. She plowed into the sideboard in the kitchen. The flower vase rocked precariously, but didn’t topple.
“No. Daralyn, stop.” He bellowed it, but it was too late. She had slipped and stumbled through the kitchen and was at her front door. In the next breath she was out of it.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
He pushed himself to a sitting position, grabbed his phone off the end of the bed. Every part of him roared in protest, but he needed back up. He used voice control to try Marcus, then Thomas. Nothing.
While doing that, he was swearing, getting himself back into the chair, a process that required him to pull himself over to it, tuck his knees up against his body and use the leverage of that position and his core strength to haul himself back up into the seat. All of which took too much fucking time.
He shoved himself out of the bedroom, headed for the front door, standing wide open. Even as he went that way, his gaze was already darting over the limited rectangle of outdoor area he could see, trying to find her.
He couldn’t hear her, which scared him worse than that wailing she’d been doing. The saying “sounded like a dying animal” was inaccurate, because a wounded animal, instinctually motivated not to draw the attention of predators, hid and became more silent if he or she could.
He came out the front door, his breath sobbing in his throat. If she’d run into the fields behind the house, he couldn’t follow her. And what if she abruptly emerged from a field onto the road? At this time of night, she could be stepping in front of the car of a lightly buzzed neighbor, coming back from one of the local watering holes.
Fortunately, in the same blink of time that terrifying possibility and plenty more went through his mind, he also saw she was here. She was safe.
Marcus and Thomas hadn’t answered their phones because they were with her. He suspected they’d seen her burst out the front door from their living room windows. She’d gone to ground in a nook formed by the rear corner of their house and the porch. She was backed in that alcove like a spider in a knot hole. Hunched into herself, down close to the ground, keening, rocking. Her robe was still off her shoulders, but she had it gathered around her like a blanket. It split open over her thigh practically to her hip, leaving no doubt she wore nothing under it.
He balanced on his back wheels to get off her front patio and manage the rough expanse of ground between it and her. His heart was in his throat, his head pounding. If he’d hurt her, set her back months on the progress she’d made in her day-to-day world, he’d never forgive himself.
He’d told her he wouldn’t let her go. And she’d broken free, because he wasn’t strong enough, whole enough, to be able to deliver on that promise.
He snarled at himself. No time for this fucking self-pitying shit. He was aware that Marcus said something to him, maybe Thomas, too, but he had one goal and he couldn’t let anything interfere with it. He rolled right up to her, stopped where his feet were almost touching her folded-up legs. “Daralyn, look at me.”
His faith in his gut was not bullshit. Though telling himself that and acting on it were different things, he wouldn’t let himself back away from it. It sliced into his gut like knives, but he sharpened his tone. “Stop this shit and look at me. Right now.”
She cut off mid-keen. Her eyes snapped up to him, wheeled around, then came back to him. Rory didn’t waste any time, making full use of the sudden attention. He put out his hand, keeping his tone brusque. “Come here.”
She was staring at his hand. He could see her trying to make sense of it. He refused to doubt himself, even if the effort burned like acid in his chest.
“You make me wait, and you’ll regret it,” he said quietly. “I’ll use your brush on your bare ass instead of my hand.”
That flicker again. He sensed there was no real comprehension right now. Just feeling. He was banking she would move toward sanctuary on instinct, and she needed that sanctuary to be solid stone. It had to be able to handle the power of the storm within her. He’d be the still point at the center of that storm.
“I’m here, baby,” he said. “Come here.”
Slowly, she pushed herself up to her feet. Her legs were shaking, but she reached out and then he had her hand. He drew her in closer. Where she’d been sitting was where condensation from the roof fell and rarely dried out, since it stayed a shady spot through most of the day. As such, she had mud on her pretty robe, her bare legs.
She blinked, her gaze falling to it. “‘I am clay that was never shaped.’”
The hollowness to her voice, that unnatural, hair-raising cadence, was the same as earlier, when she’d repeated what her uncle had said to her, about men’s weakness. Why was it so many monsters twisted Bible quotes for their crazy shit?
Well, there were people who weren’t monsters, who used it as well. His mother, for one. The designs of fate were a fucking mystery to him most days, but this was one of those moments when it made its intentions clear. A lifetime of Elaine making him go to church, study the Bible with her, offered him the important part of the quote, the part her uncle and father had left out when they’d used it against her.
“‘You are fearfully and wonderfully made,’” he said, then reminded her she wasn’t alone. “‘Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay.’”