Jurassic Heart (20 page)

When I arrived, he was sitting at his small computer table, working. The door was open, so I knocked lightly, pleased when he looked up at me with a smile. It faded, though, when he saw the expression on my face.

“What’s up?” he asked, pushing himself away from the desk.

I crossed to him silently, slid onto his lap, and wrapped my arms around his neck. He held on to me tightly, his lips pressed to my forehead. Part of me wanted to cry—but I hadn’t cried since my grandma died, so I used all of my strength not to.

“Tell me, Nick,” Hunter murmured, stroking my hair.

Pulling away from his touch, I gave him a small smile. “It’s not so bad. Just a really crappy day.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not more shit on the dig….”

“Yeah. Someone broke in last night and smashed up a skeleton. Raven was halfway through excavating it.”

“Shit,” he muttered. “Shit.”

“Yeah. It’s been a spectacularly shit day, if I’m honest.” I didn’t tell him about the conversation with River. He didn’t need to know about that.

“Have the cops been out?”

“They’ve been all over us like bees on honey. They reinterviewed my team, wanting to know everyone’s movements. They seem to keep coming back to the idea that it’s an inside job.”

“What do you think?”

I sighed again. “I don’t know. The thought of it being someone I trust, who I’m working with every day, probably teaching—it makes me feel sick. I just can’t see that anyone would do something like this. Everyone’s invested in this dig, professionally and emotionally.”

“I can see how it would be hard to look at your friends and think they could be capable of doing something like that.”

“And it’s not just the sabotage either,” I said, on a roll now. “Someone sent threatening letters and a mutilated doll, and beat Eric White so bad he’s been in the hospital for weeks on a fucking ventilator. I can’t think of any of my friends doing that, you know?”

I mentally went through the rest of the team, forcing myself to reassess each person and what I knew of them—what I
thought
I knew of them. Even under close examination, it didn’t fit for me. Nothing made sense anymore.

“Having to question your friends and your team must be hard.”

“It is!”

The accusation toward Andre and Pete was on the tip of my tongue, but I hesitated, then hoped Hunter hadn’t noticed it.

“What?”

Damn.

“It’s just the two grad students. I still don’t feel like I know them very well, even after working with them all this time.”

Hunter trailed his strong hand from the back of my neck all the way down my spine, then back up again. He was good at this, making me feel safe, like it was okay to talk about stuff without being judged.

“Have you spoken to them?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No. I don’t want them to feel like I’m accusing them of anything. As far as I know, they haven’t done anything wrong. There’s no law against being quiet and reserved.”

“What’s your gut feeling? I have a lot of faith in gut feelings.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t think they have anything to do with
it.”

“No?”

“No. They’re good kids. I think they’re most likely a bit intimidated since a lot of us have worked together before. But they seem as invested in the success of the dig as everyone else.”

Hunter kissed my neck, and I sighed softly.

“Do you want to go out? Get some fresh air, something to eat?” Hunter offered.

“No. Thank you. Could we just order in? Watch a movie or something?”

“Sure.” He nudged me off his lap and toward the sofa. “Any preferences?”

We settled on Chinese food, and he put the order in while I flipped through the TV channels looking for something to watch. When he joined me on the couch, he let me rest my head on his shoulder, seeking out that gentle comfort.

When the food turned up, we ate sitting on the floor, the food spread over Hunter’s low coffee table.

“Was this homemade?” I asked, running my hand over the smooth wood.

“Mhmm,” he said around a long noodle, and then slurped it up. “It was one of the first things my dad helped me make. I think I was about sixteen.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thanks.”

Once we’d finished eating and packed away the leftovers, we returned to snuggling on the couch. Not that I would ever call it snuggling out loud. Hunter asked if I would stay the night. It was easy to agree.

Once we tumbled into bed together, it didn’t take long until we were naked, then sucking each other. Then he was pushing into me carefully and slowly, like it meant something more than dick-in-ass.

“Fuck me,” I murmured, trying to be firm without yelling it like some deranged porn star.

“No.”

“Fuck me, Hunter.”

He laughed softly and pushed into me again, still slowly enough to make me want to scream. “No.”

“Why not?”

Kissing up the side of my neck, then biting my earlobe didn’t help with the frustration. “Because,” he said. “I figure making love to you will piss you off a lot more.”

“I hate you,” I snapped, using my heels to dig into his ass and try to urge him on.

He kissed me again. “No you don’t.”

I’d been fighting him for so damn long, and after the weekend in the cabin, I thought we had made some progress in the almost-relationship we had brewing. I wasn’t ready to be
made love
to, though, not by Hunter. Not by the first guy I had trusted in so long. Giving him the chance to love me meant giving him the opportunity to break my heart, and I’d vowed never to be that vulnerable ever again.

“Give it up, Nick,” he murmured, now gently rocking inside me, waiting for something.

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“Don’t be. Trust me.”

I blinked my eyes open and caught his stare. Everything about him was calm reassurance and tenderness and something else I didn’t want to put a label on.

“Okay,” I said, feeling more exposed than I had in a long, long time.

Hunter kissed me. It was a soft, slow, painfully sweet kiss, and I wound my arms around his neck, holding on to him and begging for more in a different way now. I still wasn’t ready to be made love to, to make love with him, but I made the decision to stop fighting it and just let it be.

I was vaguely aware I was shaking, either because his cock was poking deliciously against my prostate or because he had just said he loved me (in a roundabout way), or maybe both.

Under his gentle attention, I relaxed, not needing to prove myself or rush to any conclusion. Hunter was happy to take things slow, driving us both toward climax with kisses and gentle touches as much as those deep, resonating thrusts.

I wanted to pull him in farther, to take his body as deep as I could, to make it so there was as little as possible between us. I skimmed my hands over his back, mapping his skin with my fingertips, noting and memorizing all the bumps and scars and freckles.

I wanted to kiss him. Hunter’s lips were so soft, so pliant when I pressed for more. He kissed so sweetly.

I wanted, I wanted, and he gave it to me. He gave me everything.

When he whispered in my ear, “Now, Nick,” I wasn’t sure if it was an order or a plea, but I shuddered in response and came hard. Hunter’s lips were pressed hard to my shoulder as he came too, and I wondered if he would leave marks on my skin. I hoped he would.

We clung to each other for as long as we could, our hands still wandering over skin that was silky with sweat. When he eventually pulled away, I sobbed at the loss of him inside me, and he immediately leaned in to brush his lips over mine.

He cleaned up quickly using a towel from the floor, then wiped the mixture of cum and lube and sweat from my skin, making me shiver at the sensation of rough fabric over my hypersensitive skin.

This time it felt good to let him hold me, all his long limbs wrapped around mine. I’d resisted for so long, not wanting to make this connection, not with this man. There was little use in denying what we had, though.

Hunter kissed down my neck, skimming his lips over my shoulder while his hand journeyed over my chest, gently stroking my nipples, the ticklish bits around my ribs, the bony jut of my hip. He didn’t seem to mind I was skinny everywhere and chubby around my middle, or that I wasn’t used to letting someone hold me this intimately, and so I kept wriggling to get comfortable.

I hadn’t been looking for this. I thought I’d never find it, and if I did, it wouldn’t be allowed. I’d fallen in love with the most inappropriate people in the past, and I didn’t want that anymore. My heart was a closely guarded secret, but with Hunter, all those secrets started to come out.

“Do you want kids?” he murmured against my shoulder.

“Maybe one day,” I said. “If the situation was right and I could give them a loving home with two parents, then yes. Maybe.”

“Will you ever fuck bareback?”

“Yes. If both my partner and I are negative, then that’s not a problem.”

“I’m negative.”

I twisted in his arms and pressed a little kiss to the underside of his jaw. “That’s good to know. I haven’t been tested in a while, though, so I’d have to get that done before I put you at risk.”

“Do you have particularly risky sex?”

“All sex is risky.”

“Nick.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have risky sex. But still, I won’t do it until I know for sure. This is a very grown-up conversation.”

“Sometimes they need to be had.”

“That’s true.”

“Will you tell me who hurt you?”

A muscle in my jaw clenched involuntarily at the question, and I tried not to bristle, instead rolling back over and letting him scoop me into his arms again.

“Not just one person,” I said, even though I didn’t want to. “It was more like a series of people over a number of years.”

“I can’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt you,” he murmured, tightening his arm around my waist once again.

“They weren’t necessarily bad people,” I admitted. “They were just the wrong people. Okay, one of them was a bad person. I’ve always been drawn to men who are a certain type—big and strong.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“There is when they decide to use that strength against you,” I said. “Oh fuck it. Now I sound like some abused wife, and I’m not.”

“No one said you were.”

“I know,” I said with a long sigh.

“Is that why you resisted me so much at first? Because I’m a big, tall guy and you associate me with a certain type?”

“No. I resisted you at first because you were the asshole who was trying to get my dig shut down.”

Hunter laughed then, one of the deep, rumbling, gorgeous laughs. “I’m not that asshole anymore.”

“Of course you are. Your turn.”

“My turn to what?”

“Tell me all your secrets,” I whispered.

I closed my eyes and listened while he painted pictures with his low, rumbly voice. There was no way someone got to almost forty years old without having stories to tell, and Hunter was very good at telling them. A part of me didn’t really want to know about his previous lovers, probably in the same way that he avoided details about my past with Boner.

I listened to four years of living with someone condensed down into a few minutes, the lies, the cheating, the broken promises that led to Hunter leaving a man he’d promised to love forever.

“You were married?” I asked, interrupting the “forever” part of the story.

“No. Close to it, though.”

“Oh.”

The nomadic lifestyle had been a fairly recent development, a rebellion against the stoic, stable life he’d built with a university professor in Montreal. He’d returned first to this part of the country, where his grandfather’s family was from, then picked up his work and let it take him all over the world.

“Do you ever get lonely?” I asked.

“Do you?”

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not very often, though. I don’t work in isolation.”

He kissed my shoulder. “I’ll make you a deal….”

“I’m done making deals with you. They never turn out well for me.”

“They turn out just fine, stop bitching. I’ll make you a deal: you can look after me.”

“And…?”

“And nothing,” he said softly. “You’re the one driving this relationship, Nick. We go at your pace, with whatever you’re comfortable doing. I’m going to let you look after me, and when you’re ready, you can let me look after you too.”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting out of the deal, and my sex-sated, sleepy brain wasn’t up to figuring it out.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Will you let me go to sleep now?”

“Of course. Sweet dreams.”

I didn’t want to dignify that with an answer and definitely did not want to analyze why I mouthed the words back to him, in the dark, where he couldn’t see.

W
HEN
EVERYONE
piled into cars and headed away from the dig in the direction of Joe’s, I was still concerned I wouldn’t be welcome there. I hadn’t gone in since the night I punched Hunter in the face.

Most of the team had insisted we needed to go out together to commiserate and mourn the sabotaged skeleton, but I wasn’t convinced that they needed any convincing at all. There was going to be beer, whiskey, and, apparently, really good food. That was reason enough as far as I was concerned.