Page 88 of Bend Toward the Sun

Her voice was muffled against the table, and her hips canted backward into him. “Yes.Now.” Before the final syllable was past her lips, Harry knocked her thighs wider with his knee and drove into her. A frenzied rhythm immediately consumed him. His fingers dug into her hips, pressing flesh hard enough to meet bone. Rowan’s fingernails skidded against the surface of the table as he railed into her from behind. Hair falling in his eyes, shorts sliding down his ass with every unrestrained thrust, Harry was a mess, ablaze inside her volcanic heat. When she slammed a hand against the table for leverage to grind back into him, he thought the wood beneath them would surely burn to ash.

Her free hand was buried between her legs, working hard, greedy for another orgasm. She chased that second release, commanding him to give her more. Faster, she wanted, and faster is what he gave her. She crashed against him, rising to the tips of her toes as she came. His own roaring detonation answered hers, blasting through him hard enough to buckle his knees. He had to grip the edge of the table to remain inside her, hunching over her back to ride the sensation to the end.

She’d emptied him all the way down to the marrow of his bones.

Rational thought returned moments later. Harry straightened to look down at her back. At the body he’d used like a vessel. Her ribs were faintly visible with every ragged inhale andexhale. He traced the twin dimples above the split of her ass, and the columns of muscle bracketing her spine. The beloved freckles adorning her skin. His mouth knew every single one.

Harry slid a hand along her shoulder blades. Reverent. Soothing.

What the fuck had he done?

Shame prickled, raising every hair on his arms in gooseflesh. He took a deep breath through his nose. The air smelled like sex and soil, and the perfume of roses.

Staggering backward, he withdrew from her and deftly removed the condom, tossing it into a nearby trash bin. Rowan straightened and turned as he pulled up his shorts with shaking hands. Harry saw her wince and cup a hand around her hip.

She met his eyes. One of her cheeks was red from the friction against the table. With both hands, she pushed her hair away from her face, watching him with unnerving clarity. When she raised her arms to slip on her tank top, he saw a faint bruise springing to the surface on her hip bone. Because of him.

She padded away on bare feet and came back a moment later, wearing her khaki shorts. Pink color was high in her cheeks, and her eyes glowed like rubies.

Harry was still speechless. Self-disgust choked him.

Fuck,he was a dick.

Drowning in the existential misery of self-doubt, he’d come here to heal, and instead exchanged that pain for the fathomless torment of wanting her. Knowing she’d never give him more than her body. Hell, he’d wanted to rediscover himself, and he’d succeeded. Only now, he had no idea who he was without her.

Somewhere in central California, Cora Woodward’s husband, Wesley, cared for a son who had to grow up without his mother. Harry could close his eyes and see the man’s kind, round face. He could imagine Wesley sitting up on sleeplessnights with the baby, staring at the ceiling, realizing he’d started to forget the sound of Cora’s laugh, or the smell of her hair.

Perhaps Harry falling in love with a woman he’d never get to keep was the cosmically cruel penance he’d earned and deserved.

God, I’m an asshole.

What a false fucking equivalence. A wife—a mother—was dead. Rowan was emotionally distant, but he could still touch her, see her, hear her voice.

He might never heal from the loss of Cora Woodward, and he hated himself even more for making her death abouthim. Disgusted, Harry wrenched up the zipper of his shorts, then pressed the heels of his palms into his eyelids until pinpoints of light flashed in the blackness.

Shame was a haze of red filling his brain. Harry slid to his knees and wrapped his hands around Rowan’s waist, pressing his face into her belly.

“I hurt you.”

“You didn’t.” She twined her fingers through the hair at his nape. “I wanted all of it. Every moment.”

He clung to her there for a long time, feeling her belly rising and falling against his face, his hands clamped against the hip bones he’d bruised with his unrestrained thrusts. Several times, Rowan tried to tug him up to stand, but when he refused to budge, she dropped to her knees to join him on the floor. She took his face in her hands, forcing him to meet her eyes.

“I’m not hurt.” Sweat made auburn curls spring out like fiddleheads at her temples. “It was—nice.”

The words were probably meant as an olive branch. He knew her humor well enough by now. But Harry had to swallow the sourness rising in his throat. That she’d liked it made him feel exponentially worse. Ofcourseshe’d liked it. This wasall she wanted—messy, detached sex. And he’d taken as eagerly as she’d given, like a stray begging for scraps.

She would own him until his last breath. Even if she walked out of here tonight—or a month from now, or a year from now, and left him permanently behind, this feeling would never lose potency. Harry wanted every single atom of Rowan McKinnon.

He was defenseless against her, and against his own pathetic, pathetic need.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Rowan

Harry hadn’t been around to help in a week. His truck in the carriage house driveway was the only sign he still lived there at all.

Last weekend, the Bradys’ campfire had been too much. Will had looked right at her during his toasts about family. When Grey had called her Rosie, she’d relived Edie’s loss with a simultaneous surge of affection for the little boy. It felt soheavy. Then when Gia and Maren had looped her in on their conversation about baby names, they might as well have asked her to strip naked and dance around the lawn. Rowan’s tool kit was utterly empty in situations like that. She’d felt like an impostor, the same hollow sense ofothernessshe’d felt the first night she’d met them. The Brady roots went as deep as their decades-old grapevines, and she was a perpetually spinning maple seed sailing through air, never landing in suitable enough soil to put down roots of her own.