Page 39 of Anything for You (Veterans of Silver Ridge #7)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Dove

A ctually, I remained in a solid, technically uninflamed state.

My lashes fluttered and I was breathing hard. He was just holding me there, held and cherished but also somehow… restrained.

“So, uh, that means you want to continue? Or, you know, see what happens?” I asked, breathless from his proximity and the sheer wanting.

“Yes, Dove. I do. Do you?”

And the second the “yes” left my tongue, his lips were on mine.

This kiss was completely new. It seemed crazy we’d only ever really kissed once, but thanks to my work schedule, then illness, sure enough our first had been our only save a quick peck or two saying goodbye.

Dorian’s gentleness was always there, steady and reliable under the surface.

But now, there was an insistence, a kind of hunger in the nip and press and pull of his mouth.

Our kisses grew deeper, more mesmerizing, and his hand in my hair tightened just like my arms around his neck.

My ankles hooked behind his back, and he leaned over, pressing close, closer.

His tongue teased the seam of my lips and I opened to him, welcoming the intensity and thrill of another layer of intimacy unfolding between us.

It all felt so good. So perfectly right.

I could kiss him all night, if he’d let me.

But just as the thought slotted into my brain, he pulled back, running flat hands down my back in a soothing, thrilling caress.

“Let’s have dinner.”

My brain was still processing the delicious sensations he’d imparted with that mouth, so understanding the words coming out of it took a minute.

“Dinner?”

“Dinner.”

“Not more kissing?” It sounded a little pathetic, but I didn’t blame myself. Not when this man had been kissing me like that…

“Not right now, Dove.” That golden-brown gaze pinned me in place for a beat, then his hands gripped my thighs.

The heat from his palms had me swallowing down an objection to his proposal even as I let my legs unwrap and my arms slide away, untethering him from me.

He huffed. “You have no idea what you do to me.”

“Please feel free to tell me,” I said, not ready to let this moment go.

He grinned again. My heart flipped and mooned around like a lovesick teen again.

With two fingers, he nudged my chin up, urging me to look at him. I did, knowing the eye contact would do nothing for the need to calm down.

“I would do anything for you, Dove. And right now, what I’m doing is for both of us.”

This, I wasn’t certain I understood. “Don’t tell me you’re worried you’ll lose control or something? That we’ll go too far too soon?”

I’d only seen this kind of thing in books and movies, so I’d never imagined it actually happening.

“It’s not a matter of control. At any point, at any time, you can tell me to stop and I’ll stop.

There’s no point at which your consent becomes a given.

But I also know that I want you, and it seems like you return the feeling, and we’re both coming from a place where it seems like doing everything all at once might not be the way to go if we want to respect each other and whatever we’re doing here. ”

Though the effort failed miserably, I did try to smother the smile working its way to the surface. Ultimately, there was no point in pretending I didn’t love every word of what he’d said.

“Fair points, Forrester. Fair points.” I gripped the front of his shirt and exhaled long and loud. “Though there are a lot of stops along the way between kissing and sleeping together. It’s not like we’re about to have sex here on the countertop, right?”

The thoughts sprang out as they had a tendency to do—haphazard and a little thoughtless as to whether I should’ve censored some of them for people outside the wild west that was my mind.

“Hopefully someday, but no. Not right now.”

My gaze snapped up to meet his, eyes wide, and found him grinning. I shook my head, delighted he could be playful about this.

“Fine then. Let’s have an early dinner. But we should maybe head to your house, because I don’t have much here.”

He gave me a look that said, Obviously , and so we made our way across the driveway and into his house. Bear greeted me enthusiastically, and after a few minutes, Dorian had put me to work making a salad while he prepped chicken breasts.

We’d come a long way this afternoon, but I worried maybe it wasn’t all settled. Particularly, what had set off the nightmare and whether I could help with that in any way.

“You don’t have to talk about this at all. Please hear me say that. But I do want to circle back to what happened last night.”

Subtle, Dove. Super subtle. Don’t say the word “nightmare” and it totally won’t spook him.

The gas stove clicked on and he drizzled oil into a stainless steel pan, then turned to me as he nestled breaded chicken breasts into the pan.

“It was a twist on a recurring nightmare. I’m back at the spot where a mission went wrong.

Same place Kenny lost his fingers. He was dealing with the explosive, but Baseline, one of our team, got shot in the neck.

I did what I could, but Doc was already working on someone, and I held him while he bled out. ”

Horror and grief shrouded my mind as I moved toward him. He seemed remarkably calm considering the awful events.

“That’s the part I relive. Those last few minutes.

The words I said. The look in his eyes. But sometimes, the person dying isn’t Baseline.

And last night, it wasn’t. Or, it was… until it shifted to something new.

” He swallowed, ga ze on the contents of the pan, before he finished. “Last night, it was you.”

Tears welled, and I wrapped my arms around him. He turned, accepting the embrace.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said, his cheek resting on my head.

I moved so I could see him—so he could see my face and understand me. “No, I wasn’t thinking that at all. I’m heartbroken you had to live through that in the first place, let alone dream of it. I’m so sorry, Dorian.”

He let me hug him a while longer before he pulled back and moved to the stove, neatly turning the chicken, then gathering me right back into him.

“Sometimes, I feel kind of… foolish for the way I’ve struggled with that memory.

Even now, when I’ve processed a lot that I simply couldn’t for years, I wonder why I’ve been taken to my knees by that one.

Of course it’s awful, but it’s this gut-level knowledge that death comes for us all that shook me so deeply then. ”

I stayed quiet, eager to understand what I could.

“So much of what you do in the EMU is based on years of training and rehearsal and preparation. There comes a sense of invincibility, almost an arrogance you have to have to do the job. It’s part of compartmentalizing.

And when that breaks down…” He squeezed me tight, then released me and stepped back, keeping his hand at my waist. “When it broke down for me, it broke down there. In that moment.”

“I can’t even begin to imagine what that was like.”

He stepped forward, crowding me and brushing hair back from my face.

“I don’t want you to. This is what a therapist is for.

They’re trained to take the burdens. And I promise you, I’ll talk with my doc about this, okay?

I’ve learned the lesson that letting things fester or convincing myself I’ve handled them when all I’ve actually done is shove them down into a hole I think I can ignore has consequences. ”

“I’m glad. I’m sorry you had to learn that, but I’m proud of you.

That said, I don’t want you to feel like there are things you can’t tell me.

Only what you want to, of course. I’m sheltered in a lot of ways, I guess, but I don’t want to be kept separate from the hard things. I don’t think it’ll work that way.”

His eyes softened, and he dipped his head, straining to press a kiss to my lips before pulling back and turning to the stove again. “If the same goes for you, I’m in.”

And amazingly enough, I was, too.

I hadn’t talked about my past much at all.

He already knew as much as my friends did.

I didn’t tend to keep things to myself, but I had no desire to talk about my life growing up in a cult.

Maybe it was because I didn’t want to look too hard at how it’d shaped me.

Lately, it’d been because I’d been so busy with work and stressed about getting Nan settled, so the girl who got to be with her friends didn’t want to dwell on how her creepy cult upbringing might’ve hampered her ability to connect with men or even attempt dating.

Yet, here we were. Shining light on the dark places and clearing them out a little. And even though we’d covered some awfully hard ground, I felt nothing but hopeful for what lay ahead if we kept going.