Make Me Yours (Men of Gold Mountain)

by Rebecca Brooks

  “I made it!” she cried.

  “I knew you would.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  “Would I have let you down?”

  There was a beat, and he thought maybe he shouldn’t have said that. But she was panting too hard to tell him if she still thought the answer to that was yes.

  He helped her to her feet, bracing her as she half fell against him.

  “Water,” he said, holding her steady as he got the bottle for her. “And chocolate.” He produced a bar from his backpack.

  “There you go again with the bribery.”

  He yanked it back. “You don’t want it?”

  Claire grabbed it before he could pretend to put it away. “Don’t even think you can keep that from me.”

  He laughed, relenting, and they sat on the ledge, legs dangling over the rock face, eating chocolate and nuts and apples and looking out at the trees all lit up in red and gold.

  “You’re not mad I dragged you out here, are you?” he asked as the sun beat down on his face.

  “Furious,” she said and laughed. “It’s funny.” She looked up at the sky wisped with clouds. “I moved here in part to do stuff like this. But then I just got busy, I guess.”

  “You could take Maya climbing.”

  She gave him a very Claire look. “She’s five, Ryan.”

  “So? You start them young, and they’re so much less afraid than the old fogeys with their backaches and their muscle tears.”

  “There’s such a thing as healthy fear. If you had it, you’d know to give that shoulder a rest.”

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. But he couldn’t complain when she shifted so she was sitting behind him.

  “Let me at least loosen it up while your muscles are warm.”

  Her hands went to his shoulder, and he tried not to groan, which would only prove that she was right—it did hurt. But he couldn’t help relaxing into her touch, that perfect mixture of pressure and pain.

  “You need to be careful,” she said as she worked.

  “It’s better than sitting in a van for hours.”

  “Still, you can’t just charge into this full speed until you’re healed.”

  He smiled at her concern. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I’m serious, Ryan,” she said, pressing deeper. “I know what I’m talking about.”

  He knew she was right. But she was being so rational. What about the times when thinking didn’t work?

  “When you find something you love, it’s not so easy to stop. No matter if it’s good for you or not.”

  The words just came out. He wasn’t even sure what he meant. Was he accusing her of having given up on him? Or was he reminding her that just because she’d left didn’t mean he’d been able to shut off his feelings?

  Or maybe they really were just talking about rock climbing. Maybe there was nothing else here.

  When she asked him how he got into the sport, he thought about making something up. He could say a buddy convinced him, or someone from Square One gave him a lesson. It didn’t have to be serious.

  But he was trying to be honest. He was trying to show her who he really was.

  “It was after rehab,” he admitted. “At first, my sponsor suggested I try running. Something to burn off excess energy, give me a goal—your typical self-help BS.”

  He laughed at the memory of trying to eke out half a mile in the sub-zero Chicago winter and running straight into a Starbucks instead.

  “Then I passed a climbing gym and decided to check it out. I realized I liked the focus, the strategy involved, the fact that it’s not the same monotonous routine.”

  “And rehab? What made you finally do it?” Her voice was soft. Searching. Like maybe she didn’t really understand what had brought him there.

  There were times when the truth was hard to hold. Finding the words, stringing them together, saying them out loud—it felt like being split open along a seam, and if he started with a small slit, it would keep growing, like a rip in his jeans, more and more of him unraveling. It was better to keep it patched up, keep the holes closed, keep his mouth shut.

  But the answer to Claire’s question wasn’t some long explanation. It was one word and one word only, and he knew he could say it.

  “You.”

  Her hands froze on his shoulders. “What?”

  “You left me.”

  “I didn’t make you drink.” She said it with such sharpness, he wondered how many times she’d had to remind herself of that fact.

  He turned on the rock so he could look into her eyes when he said, “Of course not.”

  He used to blame everyone for his drinking. His band mates for encouraging it. His manager for telling him he was better on stage when he “loosened up.” His mom for turning a blind eye. His dad—well, just for being his dad.

  And Claire, even Claire, for putting up with his bullshit for so many years.

  “You’re making excuses again,” his sponsor would say, over and over until Ryan stopped finding people to blame and started looking squarely at the one person who was responsible. The person he’d had to finally start giving a shit about: himself.

  “I drank for a lot of reasons,” he said slowly. “And for no reason at all, other than the fact that once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop. When you left me…” He ran his hand through his hair, trying to keep his shit together as he struggled to explain this. “I knew I’d fucked up, big time. But when I finally woke up that day, I just couldn’t piece it together.”

  Claire looked at him, and he saw her eyes were rimmed with red. “But you didn’t even try to find out. I thought you were fine with letting me go. I thought you’d made your choice clear.”

  “But I did try,” he said, confused. “I called your parents so much, I—”

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  Did she not know?

  “Your dad threatened to change the number if I didn’t stop.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “That’s not true. My parents never heard from you. I was a mess those first few months, afraid I’d made the wrong decision, and they kept reminding me that you hadn’t even called them when, obviously, you must have figured out where I was.”

  She looked at him like she wanted him to tell her something else, to admit that it was he and not her parents who’d lied. But he couldn’t do it, and in his silence, he watched the truth wash over her. And with it, a whole new kind of pain.

  “They wanted you to stay away from me,” he said, his jaw clenching in anger, even though he wasn’t at all surprised.

  She stood up quickly, pacing away from him and back again, as though she had to keep moving, to do something. But there was nothing to do anymore.

  He went to reach for her, but at the same time, he knew that there were some things she had to face alone.

  “I was such a wreck after that,” he said hoarsely. “When it was clear you weren’t coming back, I threw myself into the band, into work. I told myself I had everything I wanted. We’d just gotten signed, the venues we sold out were better than ever. The music was awesome. I even started making some money.” He tried to laugh, remembering what a big fucking deal it had been when he could finally afford to move out of that miserable basement apartment they’d shared.

  She stopped pacing and dropped her hands by her side.

  “But without you, things got worse. No, not things,” he corrected himself. “I got worse. Probably hard to imagine, but there you have it. Little White Lie broke up because no one could stand me. I wasn’t even doing any work anymore. I wasn’t writing, and I could barely perform. One day, I looked around and realized I’d pushed away everything that mattered. And that’s when I did it. Four of the most miserable months of my life.” He shook his head ruefully, remembering. “The worst part about rehab is that you just want to be drunk to get through it. The boredom. The pain. That moment of clarity when you’re finally stone cold sober and can actually look at your life an
d realize you hate what you see.”

  “And now?” she asked, taking a step toward him again.

  He faced her squarely. “And now I love what I’m looking at.”

  She touched his arm. “I’m being serious.”

  “I am, too.”

  “So, you’re happy?”

  “It’s still life, Claire. It has its ups and downs.”

  “But Chicago?”

  “Chicago is okay.”

  Actually, it was pretty damn good to him these days, especially with Eddie working so tirelessly to resuscitate Little White Lie. But he didn’t want to say any of that. He didn’t want her to think about the world outside of here, the one where they weren’t the only two people under the sun, where they had too much history to be together.

  He just wanted to reach for her, take her in his arms, and finally let himself kiss her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Claire’s head was spinning, her heart was pounding, but all she could do was open herself to his kiss. She closed her eyes, ignited by his touch and the heat of the sun, and let herself be taken.

  If Ryan had brought her here to show her another side of himself, it was working. It wasn’t just everything he’d confessed. She could see for herself the changes he’d made in his life, so that it was suddenly hard to remember that the man she was kissing was the same one who’d broken her heart all those years ago.

  “You’re different,” she murmured as she tasted him. “You’re more like you used to be, but it’s not just that. There’s something else, too.”

  “I’m not the only one who’s grown.”

  She pulled away a little to look at him, not sure what he meant.

  “Don’t you think you’ve changed, Claire Collins?” he said, his voice a whisper brushing against her ears like the wind, pushing her hair back, letting the breeze—or maybe that was his lips—raise cool goose bumps on the tender flesh of her neck.

  Touch me, she willed him. Stop fucking teasing me and touch me.

  If she was looking for proof that he was right, that was it: the demanding voice in her head, the one that begged and cursed and pleaded. The part of her that wanted.

  And it wasn’t just a voice. It wasn’t a secret inside her head.

  She hooked her finger in the waistband of his shorts. She could see the outline of his thigh muscles, hard and strong as they disappeared up the fabric. And the outline of something else, clear and prominent, its own rock-hard protrusion.

  “Maybe I have,” she whispered in his ear and yanked him closer.

  She drew her hand down between them. It was the same thing she’d done to him at the base of the cliff. Only this time, she pressed all the way against him, and she wasn’t just grazing his cock.

  There, in that movement, was everything she needed him to know. She wasn’t on the sidelines anymore. She wasn’t letting him make all the decisions.

  She knew what she wanted. And she’d developed a tendency to get what she set her sights on—if she worked for it hard enough.

  She was willing to work for this, sliding her palm over the front of his shorts, stroking his erection through the fabric. She heard his moan in her ear, felt the buck of his hips pressing into her, looking for leverage, demanding to push, to thrust, to be inside her already.

  “You dirty tease,” he said as she grazed her thumb across the tip of his cock and then slid down again, still not giving him satisfaction—not through his shorts and with all their clothes still on.

  “I’m not teasing,” she said, letting her fingers stroke and pull back, touch him and then release. “I mean everything I’m doing to you.”

  His groan was low. Masculine. This was the same man who looked at the route up the rock with such intensity it was as though he was boring through stone. He was the same man who stood on stage, the darkness all around him, a bright light focused on his face as he commanded the crowd.

  His teeth went to the side of her neck, a hard bite that made her knees threaten to give out. She threw her head back, let him kiss her salty bare skin, devouring her, one hand in her hair, the other palming her ass, pulling her tight to him so it wasn’t just her hand that was stroking his cock but her whole body, her stomach, the top of her thigh pressing against him.

  “Fuck,” he groaned as she moved her hips.

  “Too much?” she asked, and the sound he made may have started out as a laugh, but it ended as a growl, low and throaty in her ear. A dangerous, animalistic sound. A sound that said if she followed him this far, there’d be no turning back.

  But she couldn’t think about it, couldn’t parse through the “what now’s” and all the reasons they should stop. It was the same way she’d felt when she first met him at the bar, heard him sing, felt his eyes on her. Everything else receded until it was just the two of them, together. Just him and the mountains all around them and the steep edge of the precipice they’d somehow made it up.

  He spun her so her back was pressed to his torso, his arms tight around her.

  “Like this?” he asked as he reached around and cupped her through her leggings.

  “Yes,” she whispered, grinding back against him.

  His hand moved under her clothes, pushing aside her underwear, and stroked softly. “Or like this?”

  “More,” she panted.

  He slid a finger inside. She widened her legs to draw him deeper.

  “That’s it,” he urged her as she took him in, his finger stretching her, making her squirm and whimper for more.

  “You want this?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “Say it,” he demanded, driving inside her, his finger pressed right where she needed it and his other arm wrapped around her, holding her so there was nowhere to go but back against him.

  “I want you,” she panted, before realizing that sure as hell wasn’t what he’d asked. He’d meant this, his finger inside her, soon to be his cock. Fucking her, taking her, another round of nothing but sex, just a little morning gratification for both of them.

  But she’d said she wanted him. Not just anyone, not just anything. His fingers, his cock. His breath in his ear, his body against her. His orgasm, his loss of control. Everything about him making her fall apart.

  She wondered if he’d register the shift. She felt like she should resist, pull back, keep this from going too far.

  But it was too late. For both of them.

  Because he didn’t pull away.

  “I’m always going to give you what you want,” he said, and she felt the pressure, the sweet, aching stretch as another finger entered her, and she had to have it, had to have more.

  She reached behind her, pulling his hips closer. She fumbled to pull down his shorts and felt the length of him spring free. She stroked him as he worked his fingers inside her, pressing the heel of his palm to her clit.

  “This is all yours,” he said as sensation coursed through her, rising like a wave that, when it broke, was going to break hard. “Anything you want,” he panted, his voice urging her on, his fingers making it hard to think of anything else.

  “Take what you want,” he said again. “You’re not allowed to hold back with me anymore.”

  “No?” she asked, the one word all she could manage.

  “No,” he said, his hand moving faster, harder. “You’re going to come.”

  “Because you told me to?”

  “Because you want it. And you’re not going to deny what you want.”

  It wasn’t just that he drove a tempting bargain. Everything he was doing to her made it impossible for her to disagree. How could he touch her like this? How could he know her body so well?

  She wanted to say it was just sex. Rub the right place and what did she expect would happen?

  But she couldn’t pretend she didn’t feel it, the pleasure building deep inside her. He didn’t just go through the right motions but stroked and pressed and circled and teased, made the pleasure build at just the right pace, drawing her back when
she got too close, making it last until she couldn’t anymore, she couldn’t, she couldn’t—

  She came with a cry, collapsing against the slab of his chest. But he was supporting her, keeping her grounded, drawing out the waves as he held her shuddering body against his.

  “That’s it, baby,” he murmured in her ear. How could his hands be that strong and his mouth that soft, his body so forceful and his kisses so light they somehow made her heart beat even faster than if he’d just pressed her up against a rock or a tree or whatever and taken her?

  She leaned her body back against him, her head on his shoulder, the sun warming her face, her bare arms, her thighs still sweetly trembling.

  He took his hand out of her leggings and stroked softly up her belly, trailing her wetness over her skin, as if she could have forgotten what he did to her, the way her body responded to his every touch.

  He brought his fingers to his mouth. Licked. Traced the first two fingers across her lips so she could taste herself and him at the same time. The wetness of both of them, mingled.

  Then his fingers in her mouth. Her, sucking. Twirling her tongue. That tongue that was going to do such things to him.

  So much for recovery time. She didn’t want to recover. She didn’t want to be done with him, be over this, have everything go back to normal—whatever that was.

  Back to work and stress and fretting and always being the responsible one, the one at home, the one who lived in these gorgeous mountains but was so busy with the routine of her life that she hardly ever stepped outside to see it.

  Back to telling herself she had everything she needed so she never had to acknowledge that small part of her that felt sorrow and longing, that missed what she’d once had—someone’s arms around her, loving her.

  And not just someone.

  Him.

  She turned and dropped to her knees.

  He was rock hard. The idea that touching her had turned him on that much made heat pulse between her legs all over again.

  His cock was perfect. Not a battering ram, but just enough to feel a sweet stretch, a sense of fullness as she took him into her mouth, in and out. He had a view of the whole valley and the cliffs to draw his eyes, but he wasn’t looking at any of that.