High Risk (Point of No Return Book 1)

by Brenna Aubrey

  Control was quickly slipping away from me as she started to move her hips in conjunction with mine, like a well-practiced, intimate dance we’d known all along without realizing it. This dance was only ours—Gray’s and mine.

  I buried my face in her sweet-smelling neck and quickened my pace, listening carefully for any change in her breathing, the tension in her body. Instead, I heard encouragement. “Yes—that feels good.”

  Fuck, this woman was blowing my mind. She wasn’t the proverbial iceberg floating on the water, mostly hidden. She was the glacier to my mountain, carving new patterns in my soul, leaving her indelible mark.

  Careful, I warned myself. This one could hurt. A lot.

  Then again, I had the immense power to hurt her as well. Just as right now my body was hurting hers. She was being very brave about it, I knew, but I could tell that when I moved certain ways, it caused her pain. It was temporary, yes. But I was hurting her.

  And I had the potential to hurt her a lot more than this.

  I vowed right then and there with everything in me that I wouldn’t.

  My eyes squeezed closed, feeling the familiar cues of my body and where they were leading. Her hands were on my back now, cupped around my shoulder blades, her harsh breathing in my ear as I sped up, racing toward climax, my body tensing in that pleasurable trek toward the summit.

  She arched her back beneath me, gasping my name, and that was it for me. I was lost in her. Every muscle in my body tense, my breath stilling as the throes of climax swept over me, submerging awareness of everything else, contracting over and over again. Like a waterfall into the most pristine, clear forest pool, I emptied myself into her.

  Sweaty and out of breath, I all but collapsed on her before quickly rolling to the side, though it had taken every inch of my willpower to pull myself away from her. Too much. Too powerful, these sensations, these feelings.

  Quick as I could, I ducked into the bathroom to get rid of the condom, then came back into the bed. She’d crawled under the covers, so I joined her there.

  A poignant high washed over me. Before she could say anything or even move, I reached over and pulled her to me, so that she lay across my chest. Because the thought of being even inches away from her right now was intolerable.

  I needed her body against mine, her skin on my skin, her breath mixing with mine, her sweat and mine—all night. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  She pressed her soft cheek to my chest, and my eyelids slowly closed. I could lie like this for days and have everything I wanted in my arms. The most comforting contentment enveloped me at that moment. My fingers found the soft nape of her neck, the silky strands of her short hair. She was precious. And maybe, just maybe, I could deserve her. Eventually.

  “Well, that certainly wasn’t how I was expecting things to go tonight,” she said quietly after a long while of us simply caressing each other. My hand stroked the soft skin of her back, hers smoothing over my chest and abdomen.

  “Can’t say I’m unhappy in the least,” I said through a grin.

  Her head popped up, and she returned my smile. “Me either.” I kissed her soundly along her jaw, her neck, the salty taste of her driving me to distraction. And those urges, so recently satisfied, were now reawakening.

  “Hmm,” she said, arching her neck toward me. “Better take care, there, Commander Tyler. Or there’s going to be an encore performance.”

  I grinned wickedly against her neck. “Oh, you can bet on it. There is definitely going to be a round two.”

  I was ready now, but that would be too fast for her. I stopped stroking her back and held her close instead. I didn’t kiss her again, and I tried to think about something else besides rolling over and starting this all over again. But damn, I sure wanted to.

  Surprisingly, I liked doing this almost as much.

  “Mmm, this is nice,” she drawled lazily, tracing some kind of idle pattern across my stomach. “You aren’t ticklish though.”

  “Nope. I’m an insensitive bastard, even in that way.”

  Her hand stopped, and she turned to look into my face. “Who said you were insensitive?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve lost count.”

  Her dark brows rose. “Bed partners?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to talk about other bed partners. For some reason it felt like that would trivialize what this was. This was so different—in ways I didn’t even want to examine. The tangle of feelings vying for dominance inside my chest, for one. “I don’t cuddle after sex, ever.”

  “You mean, like you’re doing right now?”

  “This is an anomaly.” And I swallowed a pang of emotion.

  “So you’ve had lovers—”

  “—sex partners—” I corrected.

  “—accuse you of being insensitive because you won’t cuddle afterward?”

  “Or call them later, yeah.”

  She grinned. “This mean you aren’t going to call me?”

  I pushed her hair back from her face, not so much because it was in her eyes as because I loved to touch her hair. “Given the fact that we are cuddling right at this very moment—and that you’ve been living here—I doubt it.”

  “Is your body rebelling right now? Screaming out in protest of the cuddling?”

  I brushed my thumb across her cheek, down those irresistible ridges above her lip. She put her lips together and kissed the tip of my thumb. My body was rather enjoying this, in all honesty. As much as I wanted to fuck her again—and ASAP—I also wanted this. What was this?

  “Nope.” I gave the simplest answer. The one that wouldn’t give her ways to dig deeper, like she usually did.

  “Oh God. This isn’t some…pity cuddle, is it?” Her head came up, her eyes wide. “You’re not doing this because it was my first time and so you think I need comforting or something?”

  I smiled at her honest fear. “I am not feeling one ounce of pity right now. Pity is the furthest thing from my mind.”

  “Good,” she said, still running her fingers across my skin. I closed my eyes, relishing her touch. It was like that touch of rain and fresh air against my face the moment they’d open the Soyuz capsule on the Kazakh Steppe after landing from the ISS. It was my first assignment of nearly half a year on station. Nothing had been sweeter than that first breath of fresh air after six months shut inside a can of recycled air, no matter how much it had hurt to return to full gravity.

  And she was that same sweet breath of air in human form. Her cool, soft skin pressed to mine. The smell of strawberries and the salty tang of her sweat. I could feel myself drifting away. I was almost in lucid dreamland when she shifted slightly beside me and my eyes opened again. “So I guess, in the end, it was a good thing I turned off that lamp.” She let the statement drift off.

  I knew her well enough by now to know that wasn’t an offhand statement. Nevertheless, even the slightest hint she might turn off the light and bring in the darkness again was enough to make me tense involuntarily.

  She felt it, lifting her head to look into my face. Whatever she saw concerned her enough to frown. “What is it that terrifies you? What do you see in the dark?”

  I stared up at the ceiling, ignoring her scrutiny. I wanted to blow off the question. But something pulled at me to respond—maybe it was the almost tangible feel of her eyes on my face? My barriers softened, and I let out a long sigh. Weary, down to my bones. I could no longer fight to keep that all up. My lids closed, eyes squeezing shut.

  “On the far side of the planet, when it’s nighttime, it’s very dark. During the day, Earth is this brilliant blue-and-white glowing ball that outshines everything, so that you can’t even see a star in the sky when you look out into space. But during the night, you can see spots of light outlining the cities, but the blackness of space, the dark station above. It…” I shuddered involuntarily.

  She pressed a long kiss to my chest, her arms tightening around me, reassuring me of her presence. I started to stroke her hair but still did n
ot look at her.

  “It’s the last thing he saw…Xander—he even said. He said that he couldn’t think of a more spectacular view to be his last one.”

  She was silent for a minute, perhaps wishing for me to continue. But I had no desire to.

  “But what do you see…in the dark?”

  I shook my head, trying to blank out the image that rose in my mind—a corpse, suffocated in his own suit, drifting on orbit, a man-sized, man-shaped satellite. Waiting, just waiting until orbital decay and inevitable immolation in the atmosphere. Instantaneous cremation.

  Xander’s sightless eyes. Xander’s voiceless, perhaps open mouth. Silence and blackness. His spacesuit turned into a coffin. I shuddered again.

  She smoothed her hand on my chest. “You could tell me if you wanted to. It might make you feel better.”

  I blinked. Tell her? Unburden myself of the truth that only I knew? I swallowed a monstrous lump in my throat.

  She reared up on one elbow, propping herself there, and leaned in to kiss my face, then caressed my cheek softly with her hand. “There’s no judgment here. At all.”

  I blew out a breath, feeling pressure mount in my chest, beneath my skin. That same anger—anger at Xander, yes, but more fury at myself. I shook my head. “I told him not to. Damn it all. He was so fucking stubborn.”

  The rhythmic stroking of her fingers slowed only a little before resuming. When I said nothing else, she asked, “What did you tell him not to do?”

  Was I holding my breath? Why did my chest feel so tight? I forced myself to let it go. Let it go. Every breath was painful, tight, suffocating. I’d never revealed this to any living being and yet—it wanted to come out.

  I could hide the truth from everyone else. But from her?

  “Do you know about how things went down during the accident?” I asked.

  “I read the public transcripts. Watched the documentary and read some other articles. You guys were out there to repair an unexpected minor ammonia leak.”

  I nodded. “But when a blast of pressurized ammonia blew us back against the truss, my suit was breached. Xander panicked, but he couldn’t get to me because his tether was tangled.” My last bit of breath escaped my lungs with that admission, and my heart sped up like I was in the middle of a workout.

  I hadn’t told her anything that wasn’t on every official record of the accident. I sucked in a big gulp of air, thankful for her silence while I got this out.

  “He asked for permission to untether himself. I said no way. CAPCOM told him no, too. The leak in my suit was slow, and I had time to get the job done. So I made my way up to the valve to shut off the ammonia.”

  Here it came. The room whirled for an instant as my blood pressure shot up at the mere thought of verbalizing this. Where was the relief I was supposed to be feeling? Pain racked my body instead. Like a festering wound that needed to be dug out, drained.

  “He could see the leak in my suit, the gas escaping. And closing the valve was a two-man job.” Air, more air.

  She noticed my quickened respiration, her head coming up off my chest as if that would help me catch my breath. No chance of that.

  “Without warning, he was at my side, even though I knew he couldn’t have untangled his tether that quickly.” Was this my voice that sounded so strangled? “Houston kept wanting to know what happened, and I couldn’t say anything. Couldn’t reprimand Xander over the comms, or they’d know. As far as they knew, he’d untangled his tether. But I had visual confirmation otherwise.” I gulped air like it was my last breath. Beside me, she pressed her sweet body against mine. My grip around her tightened, but all I knew, all I saw…

  “I’m making my way to you now, Ty,” comes Xander’s voice over the comm.

  “Oh, you’ve untangled yourself? Excellent. Come join the party. We’ll have this done in no time.”

  He doesn’t reply, and I don’t think anything of it until he’s within eyeshot. His helmeted head pops up from below as he clings to the truss segment opposite me. I can confirm visually that he’s okay. And it’s clear that he’s no longer tethered to the station.

  And of course, if I make a comment on it over the comms, he’ll be in massive amounts of trouble. Our eyes meet, mine widened, and I shake my head vigorously. He doesn’t respond.

  My eyes squeezed shut. God forgive me. And yet, I didn’t believe in God. And I knew it was useless to call out to some higher power. I should have said something the minute I’d noticed his tether undone. I should have told them. Xander might still be here had I spoken up.

  Why the fuck did you do it, Xander?

  “He had everything to live for.” It was spilling out of me now, as if out of my control. As if this little sorceress in my arms had cast some spell on me to draw out the truth so that a curse would no longer harm my soul. But I knew that was impossible. This sin was mine to own. Mine forever. “He threw his life away to save me.”

  She murmured softly against my skin. It comforted me, like a prayer. “I will bet any money he didn’t think of it like that.”

  My eyes stung and I blinked, staring unseeing at the ceiling. “He had no fucking right to make that decision. He had no right. He had a wife. A kid. I had no one. Jesus,” I croaked, tears threatened to spring from my eyes. “You had to be a fucking hero,” I rasped in a dead voice.

  I reached up, rubbing my eyes through closed lids, praying she wouldn’t notice the tear that leaked out the corner before I managed to get myself under control. She said nothing for a long time, just held me, pressed her cheek to my shoulder.

  My strained heartbeat calmed. When my breathing matched it, she spoke again. “It’s okay to be angry at him.”

  I swallowed nails. They impaled my esophagus, my stomach. It made me feel like shit to be angry at him. I ground my teeth together.

  “You can’t understand,” I finally said.

  “You’re absolutely right. I can’t.”

  “I can’t look at them—Karen and AJ. I can’t talk to them. I— Knowing what I know. That he traded his life for mine.”

  “Did he, though? Did he know he was doing that? He saw your suit leaking. He saw that you needed help. He untethered himself to get to you faster because you were in distress, because he was worried about you. You would have done the same for him.”

  “I had less to lose.” That hung in the air between us. She had nothing to say to that because it was the truth.

  “What happened next? I mean…I know what happened in theory. But somewhere along the line, things went wrong again. I know when you got to the valve it was frozen.”

  I ran a palm over my forehead. “It hadn’t been touched in a decade. We were trying to work it loose, and it wouldn’t budge. I braced myself for leverage and—when it gave, it really gave. The torque sent us off-balance. I got yanked back because of my tether. But Xander fell against the array. The live current was what fried his suit.”

  Exhaustion settled over me and I was weak from the aftermath of having let that secret go but I was still angry. “I told CAPCOM I was going after him, but they wouldn’t let me. They cut off our communication with each other, and I couldn’t see where he’d bounced off to.”

  “But your suit was leaking. You couldn’t have gotten to him in time to get back to the airlock. And then you both would have died.”

  She was right, of course. All this, I knew. But it didn’t change how that made me feel and how I still couldn’t look Karen and AJ in the eyes knowing I kept that secret.

  After another long pause, she cleared her throat. “So this is the real reason NASA fired you? Because you wouldn’t come clean about Xander untethering himself?”

  I blinked in surprise, impressed at how quickly she’d leaped to that conclusion. “They have their suspicions, and they tried like hell to get me to admit what happened. I wouldn’t. They shitcanned me and blamed it on the fight with the flat-earther. Obviously, it’s a secret that can’t get out.”

  She nodded and looked into my fac
e. “And you won’t tell NASA what really happened because then they’ll pin the blame for the accident solely on Xander.”

  “I don’t want any of that to discredit his memory. Xander posthumously received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. That’s the highest award an astronaut can get.”

  She nodded. “You received it too.”

  I shrugged but didn’t say anything. Naturally, she called me on it.

  “Yours doesn’t mean any less, Ryan. That award is for important feats, but also for bravery during a space emergency—and preventing a major space disaster. You did that. Even if things didn’t end up the way you wanted. Xander saved you. You saved four other astronauts and the entire station. And accepting the accolades for that does not mean you are forgetting Xander’s sacrifice in any way. You sacrificed too. Xander is a hero. But so are you. You aren’t lesser because you lived. It just happened. And you can’t control what happened. But you can stop tormenting yourself about how it turned out.”

  My hand brushed down her delicate spine as she talked. I absorbed every word, took it in like it was water and I was desperate to drink. My arm tightened, and I hitched her body against me.

  Did I believe what she was telling me? Not necessarily. But I appreciated where the thoughts were coming from. And though this baring of my soul had been downright painful, it also felt good. So good to let someone in this close. Every muscle relaxed, and I closed my eyes—I was exposed, vulnerable. Yet with her, I felt safe.

  She smoothed her hand across my cheek once again, and I turned to look her in the eye. “Tell me what you are thinking,” she finally said.

  I rolled to my side to face her, my hand resting on her hip, pulling her against me. “I’m thinking about how sweet your lips taste.” I leaned down and kissed her soundly, aware that the surface temperature of our skin was quickly heating up. Her lips opened to mine immediately as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “And how much I want to keep tasting them—and every inch of you.”

  She leaned back when I would have gone in for a second approach, and our eyes met. “You’re using sex to avoid this subject, aren’t you?”