Longest Night (20 page)

“And deep inside, so do you,” he said with a dismissive half shrug. He brushed his fingertips over her jaw and pressed a thumb to the corner of her mouth.

“But—”

His thumb swiped over her mouth, pressing gently to silence her. “Tell me that you trust me, Cecily.”

“Ian…”

“Say it, Cecily. If you really do trust me, then say so.”

She closed her eyes and lifted her hand to take his. She pressed her lips to his palm and quietly said, “I trust you.”

He sighed as though relieved, as though there had been any doubt at all. “Thank you.” He spread his fingers to catch hers, lacing their hands together. He ducked his head to brush his lips over her knuckles, and when he spoke again, his voice was subdued, almost hesitant. “I have to tell you something, but I don't want you to say anything until you've made your decision.”

Anxiety twisted through her as she tried to anticipate his words and failed miserably. She'd been disoriented since this had all started, and she could still hardly believe he would give up Manhattan, just for her.

“What decision?”

“I want to be with you, Cecily.”

Her heart leaped. “I—”

“Cecily,” he interrupted. “Please, don't say anything. You need time to think, and you need to know… You have three choices here.” He squeezed her hand and met her eyes. “We go to Manhattan, together. We stay here, together. Or you tell me to leave.”

“Fuck. Ian—”

“Cecily,” he interrupted. “Three choices. One day, when you're ready, I'll ask which one you choose. Then, you can tell me—but not until then.”

She took a shaky breath. “Tell you what?” The obvious answer was which choice she would pick, but he wasn't one to ever choose the obvious answer.

“How you feel about me.”

The anxiety evaporated into a sense of desperate relief. She knew how she felt. She'd been wrestling with that realization for what felt like days now, though she couldn't say exactly when it had started. “But I know—”

“Not until then, Cecily,” he interrupted gently, “and you're not ready now.”

She folded her arm beneath herself and lay back down on her pillow. Ian mirrored her movement, and they looked into each other's eyes in the faint glow of reflected firelight. She smiled slightly. “This isn't how a normal relationship is supposed to work, you know.”

“I don't want normal. I want you.”

From anyone else, that would have been an insult, but she knew him too well to take it as such from him. “And how am I supposed to stand Manhattan for thirty seconds without ‘normal'?”

He huffed and untangled his fingers so he could brush her hair away from her face. His hand slipped down to the back of her neck, holding her steady for a brief kiss. “You're not meant to be a tourist, Cecily. Anyone ‘normal' venturing into
my
New York would be eaten alive. I want you strong and in control, but you will never, ever be normal.”

“How is that
possibly
a compliment?” she asked, trying for indignant, though she ruined it with another smile.

“I already told you. Normal is boring.”

November 1

“Do you
ever
sleep?” Cecily asked, her voice a low, lazy growl. She didn't open her eyes, but her fingers, resting on Ian's arm, lifted to slide forward over his wrist.

“Not much. I spend a lot of time just thinking. Still, I've slept more here than I ever did before,” he admitted, studying the subtle changes to Cecily's face as she awoke fully.

She laughed quietly, barely more than a huff of air and a smile. “Sleep okay when you did?”

“Fine.” He wanted to lift his hand to touch her face and smooth down her hair, but he held still. Her fingers moved and shifted aimlessly over his wrist.

“I didn't wake you up?” she asked self-consciously. “My nightmares and all…”

“You had two, but I was able to interrupt them.” He gave in to temptation and moved closer, shifting from his pillow to share hers. “Does it help? Do you feel better today than most mornings?”

She closed her eyes, considering, and slowly her lips turned up in a smile. “I think so.” She lifted her head enough to briefly kiss his lips. “It's barely dawn. Want to go back to sleep?”

“Cecily…”

Grinning now, she sat up and arched her back, eyes closing as she stretched. He admired the strength of her shoulders and back just as much as her curves, half-seen through her T-shirt. “Waste of time, right.”

He couldn't resist reaching out to smooth his hand up her back, careful not to disturb the T-shirt too much. “You know me so well.”

She pushed back against his hand and lowered her arms, rubbing briefly at her right shoulder. “Coffee? Breakfast?”

“Mmm.” Ian lay back, twisting to watch as she slipped out from under the blankets, trying not to disturb them too much. She circled around the foot of the bed, pausing for a few seconds to throw another split log on the fire, and then disappeared into the bathroom.

Sleepily, he looked up at the ceiling, thinking back to last night. Cecily had been restless, waking him every time she moved, and he'd finally given in to the impulse to spend the night watching her instead of sleeping. Observing her, he'd begun to categorize the signs differentiating her dreams and nightmares, and he'd carefully experimented with gentle ways to interrupt the nightmares before they took hold.

Then he smiled as he realized she hadn't expressed any concern for his presence during her nightmares. There was no warning that she might hurt him. Knowing she trusted him turned his smile into a grin.

He listened to the sounds of her morning routine, noting when the toilet flushed and how long the water ran in the sink, distinguishing the hot water tap by the rattling pipes from the water heater. Most of his thoughts, though, were caught up in the hazy, wonderful fog of affection—of love—that consumed him. He'd seen people in this state before, smiling at everything as if their private, personal emotions somehow made the whole world brighter, but only now did he actually understand it.

Somehow, just knowing that she was in the next room made even this boring, primitive cabin into something wonderful.

He rolled onto his side to face the bathroom door, thinking that the person he'd been just a month ago would have looked at this future-self in horror. Well, even he had his moments of idiocy.

She returned to the bedroom and gave him an odd, amused look, full of affection. She'd started toward the closet but diverted to the bed, where she leaned down, weight on her left arm, to give him another soft kiss. “Bathroom's yours,” she said unnecessarily, breath smelling of toothpaste, freckled skin flushed from a splash of warm water. “I'm going to fry up some eggs.”

“You could just come back to bed,” he suggested.

She grinned, the expression lighting up her whole face. “Or I could feed you up to a healthy weight, and then we could
both
go back to bed.”

Idly, he considered suggesting breakfast in bed, but she stood back up and walked to the closet, leaving him to silently admire the view. He let his eyes trace down what he could see of her back, over the curve of her ass, down her strong legs. He thought about his past girlfriends who did yoga or Pilates or rotted their brains with mindless jogging on treadmills. Not one of them could possibly compare to Cecily.

“Have you been to Greece?”

The apparent non sequitur didn't even get a strange look. She was accustomed to his habit of skipping the boring parts of conversations. “No. You?” she asked, taking far too many clothes out of the closet: jeans, a T-shirt, a button-down shirt, and a sweater. She draped everything over her arm and went to the dresser.

“Years ago. Family trip.” He curled around, bringing the pillow with him, so his view of Cecily continued without interruption. “They don't allow cars on Hydra Island. All travel is by foot or bicycle.”

She glanced curiously over her shoulder as she found socks, panties, and a bra. “Sounds different.”

“We could lease a villa there, on the beach. We'd never have to see anything, and you wouldn't have to put on all that clothing,” he said a bit petulantly.

She laughed and tossed her clothes on the foot of the bed. She crawled up over the covers to trap him under her weight. “How exactly are we supposed to lease a villa on some primitive Greek island?”

He freed his arm from the blankets so he could take hold of her hip, hoping to coax her into staying for at least a little while. Coffee sounded appealing, in a distant way, but she belonged here with him, not out in the kitchen. “I have my passport and credit cards. What else do we need?”

Grinning, she leaned down to kiss his nose, startling him. “Small steps, Ian. Let's start with coffee,” she said and got back off the bed, to his infinite disappointment.

***

Winter weather at the cabin was nothing if not unpredictable. By the time Cecily had the breakfast dishes washed and a second pot of coffee brewed, the clouds had dissipated, leaving the bright sun to melt through the thin crust of ice and snow. She dried her hands, looking out the kitchen window, and thought absently about all the things she'd normally be doing to prepare for winter. She had to check the snowmobile now, in case something had gone wrong while it sat idle over the summer. She could go look for more deadfall; there was never enough firewood. She could inspect the fuel lines to the generator for any cracking or brittle spots. She could try to catch her second deer.

Instead, she fixed up two mugs of coffee and carried them into the living room, where Ian was sprawled over the sofa, right arm draped out as though reaching for the fire. In his left hand, he held a paperback. The book didn't register at first; she had stocked the cabin with every book that caught her eye at various used bookstores, thinking it wise to have years' worth of winter reading materials on hand. Ian had dived into the collection without waiting for an invitation, so the sight of him reading was nothing new.

Then she saw the cover art: a giant wolf-man with an ax, a swordswoman in chain mail armor, and a leather-wearing man with two wicked daggers. It was
her
book, the first in a series she'd started two years ago.

“You know the target audience for that is age twelve to eighteen, don't you?” she asked self-consciously.

“So I gathered.” He rolled onto his side and pressed back against the cushions, making just enough room for her to perch on the edge of the sofa. “I've never read much fiction.”

She handed over the mug with three sugars, having learned not to mix them up. She didn't know which was worse: accidentally drinking sugar-laced coffee or Ian having a sip of straight black. “Don't feel obliged to read it.”

“I never feel obliged to do anything,” he said bluntly, grin flashing to life. He sat up, managing to take off his glasses, curl around her, and press a kiss to the back of her neck, all without spilling a drop of coffee. He settled at her side, pressed close from shoulder to knee, and set her book gently down on the coffee table. He put his glasses on top of it and rested his mug on his knee. “What about your other book?”

She hissed in a breath, closing her eyes. She'd known that he would have found those pages by now, but she hadn't really allowed herself to think about them. “It's not for children.”

His fingers pressed gently over her pulse. “At the bottom of the pages…”

“The
X.
I won't…I can't publish them under my name.” She laughed uncomfortably. “Cecily Knight is too…cheery. It's not a very pleasant story. God knows I wouldn't want to read it.”

“Does it help to write it?”

She shrugged. She turned the mug and took the handle with her left hand so she could drink without pulling away from his touch. “I don't know,” she finally admitted. “I haven't made it far enough. Thirty-something pages is barely the first couple of chapters.”

“Are you—”

She shook her head, rising abruptly. “We should go,” she interrupted. “The sooner we get that second deer, the better. Towing the trailer with the snowmobile is a bitch.”

Ian looked up at her with those too-sharp eyes, and she could almost see his brain analyzing her reaction. For one icy, suffocating moment, she thought he might push to keep her talking. But then he nodded and rose, fixing her with a wicked smile as he asked, “Care to help me change?”

She laughed, relieved, and pulled him down for a kiss, careful not to spill his coffee. “I'll help you warm up later. How's that?”

“I'll hold you to it.”

***

When successful, deer hunting was an acceptable pastime, if the alternative was sitting alone in an isolated cabin with terrible Internet speed and several thousand chewed-up paperback books. When unsuccessful, though, deer hunting was cold, boring, and frustrating, even with the distraction that Cecily presented simply by existing. In a rare moment of empathy, Ian recognized that he was close to snapping and tried to look for any distraction, but none of his usual coping mechanisms were available. His mobile was a dead lump of plastic with no signal, his guitar was at the cabin, and his last resort—idiot-baiting—was entirely out of the question, given that she was the only living creature in earshot. There certainly weren't any deer.

So Ian trailed through the little piles of snow and mud puddles, staying well behind her, and tried to be patient, but finally the cold and silence got the best of him. He stomped forward to where she was standing under a tree, surveying their surroundings with her field glasses.

“We're not going to starve,” he said, his voice sounding absurdly loud in the silent forest, though he kept to a normal speaking volume. “Is there any sensible reason for us to stay here, when we could instead be back at the cabin, having sex?”

Cecily had begun to turn, most likely to reprimand him for startling the game animals who weren't there anyway. Then she dropped the field glasses, leaving them to swing against the strap around her neck, and started to grin.

Ian glared.

Instead of backing down, she laughed. “I take it that counts as a romantic proposition, coming from you?”

The laugh seemed to slip beneath his skin, winding through his ribs and around his heart, pushing away his boredom and irritation.

Ignoring his fierce glare, she set her gloved hands on his waist, compressing the down parka to pull him close against her body. Her kiss was cold and hot at once, soothing his mood that much more. As if of their own volition, his hands came up to circle her shoulders, and the last of his pique slipped away under the teasing swipes of her tongue.

When the kiss ended, he asked, “Does this mean we can go back?”

To his limitless frustration, she shook her head. “No, but I think I owe you for last night.”

He blamed the cold on his inability to immediately see her intent. When she pushed him back, he almost tripped, startled. He scanned her face for any hint of anger or panic, but all he saw was sly amusement. Then his back hit a tree. Drops of water fell on his hood and rolled down the waterproof fabric, and the thick layer of down cushioned him from feeling the bark.

She kissed him again, pressing her chest against his, rising up on her toes to better reach. Despite heavy boots, he slipped on the tree roots and caught her arm for balance, remembering at the last moment to avoid her right shoulder. Then he almost slipped again as she dropped to a crouch in front of him, and her hands, now bare of gloves, slipped up under his hip-length parka to find his belt.

The last of his irritation vanished in a white-hot flash. Cecily was wonderful and brilliant, and even Ian could never predict what she'd do next. He dug his boots into the dirt between the tree roots and let his head fall back against the bark, closing his eyes in anticipation.

Then he almost yelped in indignant surprise. “Cold hands!” he snapped, sucking in his gut to avoid the icy touch.

She laughed, looking up at him. “I wasn't planning on using my hands.”

Oh
.

Ian's shiver had nothing to do with the cold. He thought about asking if she'd changed her mind about the condoms, but then decided there was no sense in talking at all. She opened his jeans, used icy fingers to tug down the waistband of his boxers, and licked at his cock just once. The contrast of freezing air and her hot tongue sent liquid fire boiling up from his gut, up through his spine, and into his brain, destroying all rational thought.

He reached down to touch her hair, but couldn't catch hold with his gloves on. Her laugh drove away the chilly air before her mouth followed, taking his entire half-hard cock into her mouth at once. Then she had to draw back as Ian went from halfway to entirely there in what felt like a single heartbeat.

“You're perfect,” he whispered, fighting to keep his balance only because falling would mean she'd
stop
. “Cecily, you're wonderful. Oh,
fuck
.”