Page 20 of Past Lives
The rain keeps falling, beating on the cars and the road. I pull Maya into my arms, feeling a sudden need that surprises us both. My hands shake against her back. When we kiss, it feels electric—like more than just desire. Her fingers grip my shirt, as if she’s afraid I’ll disappear. With my eyes closed, I see flashes of her face in different lights—a hundred kisses in a hundred lives. We pull apart, breathless, our foreheads touching. Fromher stunned look, I know she felt it too. We keep holding on, our fingers tightly linked.
In the end, the only story that matters is the one we piece together from moments like this—her drenched fingers tracing my collarbone, my heart hammering beneath her hand. I can’t deny fate—not when she stands before me, shivering, radiant, impossibly real.
Chapter 13
Maya
I can’t rememberwho moves first— me or him. In the fusion of rain and skin and breath, there’s only a blur, a fevered hurling of ourselves back inside the car before we’re both soaked to the bone. He slides in beside me, then his hands are in my hair, on my face, then beneath my chin, tilting, guiding, asking. When he kisses me again, everything in me ignites. It’s as if my body remembers him, in a way my mind does not.
The windows fog fast and thoroughly. We’re a tangle of limbs and open mouths and shuddering laughter that slips into groans. His fingers find my wrist, the small inside of my elbow, the edge of my blouse—he touches like a man charting the surface of a newly discovered planet, both reverent and hungry.
I think I might explode. “Heath,” I say, meaning it as a warning, but my voice comes out fractured and wanting.
He laughs, a low thrum against my jaw. “You’re freezing. And it’s only then that I realize I’m shaking, though not from the cold.
The back of his hand drags down my cheek, lingering at the bow of my lip. “We should go somewhere. Unless you want me to take you right here.”
I nearly say yes, because the idea of slowing down is painful. Instead, I reach for the gearshift, my desperation a littleembarrassing, but then again, nothing about this is reasonable. I pull away from the curb as I try to catch my breath. We don’t speak for the five miles to the next town, but the silence is gilded and vibrating.
Invergordon sits like an offering on the edge of the lake. I park outside a hotel I’ve only ever seen through a rain-blind windshield, a place with a lobby that smells of peat fire and whiskey, and the battered desk clerk only gives us a passing glance before sliding a heavy brass key across the counter.
Neither of us remembers to grab our luggage, but he holds my hand anyway as we take the stairs. The hallway is dim, carpeted in something thick and dark, and our door only half closes before we’re at each other again. I backstep blindly toward the bed, my spine bending to his touch. We fall, and the mattress greets us with a noisy protest.
Heath's mouth burns a trail down my throat, his teeth grazing the tender hollow where my pulse hammers wildly beneath the skin. I surrender every carefully constructed defense, every rule I've ever had about men dissolving like sugar on his tongue. His hands, rough and possessive, slide beneath my shirt to cup my breasts, his thumbs circling my nipples until they harden painfully. The sound that escapes him is primal, a growl that vibrates against my skin.
When his hot mouth replaces his fingers, I arch so violently I nearly cry out his name. His tongue lashes across my nipple in deliberate, torturous circles before he draws it between his lips and sucks with such fierce pressure that stars explode behind my eyelids. I lock my thighs around his hip, grinding shamelessly against him. His stubble scrapes deliciously across my sensitive flesh, leaving a constellation of raw, tingling marks that I'll feel for days.
His hand moves between my legs, cupping me through my jeans, and I realize I'm already soaked through, my arousal amolten pool that threatens to consume me from within. He growls when he feels it, his pupils dilating until his eyes are nearly black. His fingers make quick work of my button fly, and with one fluid motion, he peels away denim and lace, exposing me to the cool air and his burning gaze. When he traces one calloused finger through my slick folds, my hips buck so violently the ancient bedframe creaks in protest.
He drops to his knees like a man in worship, settling his broad shoulders between my trembling thighs. The look he gives me from beneath those heavy lashes is pure sin—lips parted, breath hot against my most sensitive flesh, eyes promising delicious devastation. When his tongue finally makes contact, the pleasure is so acute I taste blood from biting my lip. He devours me like a starving man at a feast, alternating between languid strokes that make me whimper and merciless circles around my swollen clit that have me fisting the sheets, arching shamelessly into his mouth as he holds me open, exposed and helpless beneath his relentless assault.
I come harder than I ever have, my entire body convulsing as waves crash through me. My thighs clamp around his head, but he doesn't stop—his tongue relentlessly circling, dipping, tasting. When I try to squirm away, oversensitive and gasping, his strong hands grip my hips, pinning me in place as he growls against my flesh. His face glistens in the dim light, my arousal coating his lips, chin, and even his cheeks as he devours me with renewed hunger. I'm still trembling from the aftershocks when he finds that perfect spot again, and impossibly, I'm climbing toward another peak, my back arching off the mattress. "Heath, I can't—" But I can, and I do, this orgasm even more violent than the first, my wetness flooding his eager mouth until he has to swallow, making obscene sounds of pleasure as if he's feasting on something divine. I slap my hand over my mouth to muffle my scream, certain the entire hotel can hear me coming apart.
He finally looks up, his face slick and triumphant, pupils blown wide. "I need you," he pants, voice rough. "I need?—"
"Yes." The word escapes before I can think. I pull him up, desperate for his weight on me, and he's already fumbling with his belt, hands shaking between restraint and abandon. I help him, yanking down his pants, greedy for the heat of him against my still-pulsing core.
He is thick and heavy against my thigh, his cock pulsing with need as he positions himself at my entrance. When he pushes into me, the stretch burns deliciously—my body yielding, then greedily swallowing him inch by inch. He buries himself to the hilt with a filthy groan, his mouth hot on my neck, teeth grazing my collarbone, tongue tracing the shell of my ear. "So tight," he growls, "like you were made for me." He thrusts slowly at first, withdrawing almost completely before sinking back in, the wet sounds of our bodies meeting making me flush with shameless want.
He whispers my name like a prayer to a forgotten deity, each syllable punctuated by a deeper thrust. His voice breaks when he tells me he's dreamed of this—of me—for lifetimes. I believe him. We rut like animals but cling like lovers who've crossed oceans of time to find each other. My nails carve crescents into his sweat-slicked back, my ankles locked at the base of his spine, forcing him deeper still. When he reaches between us to circle my clit with his thumb, the universe implodes—my cunt pulsing around him as he follows me into oblivion, his release hot and claiming inside me.
We collapse together, tangled and sticky, his face buried in the hollow of my throat where sweat pools like dew. The rain thunders against the century-old glass panes, each drop a tiny explosion in the quiet aftermath. His chest rises and falls against mine, our heartbeats syncopated like the tide coming in to claim what it's owed—relentless, inevitable. His arms form acage around me, fingers splayed possessively across my ribs, as if afraid I might dissolve into mist. He doesn't let me go, not for a long time.
Eventually, our breaths even out, and I stare at the ceiling, tracing the spiderweb of cracks in the Victorian plasterwork, yellowed with decades of cigarette smoke and neglect.
"This is insane," I whisper, the words barely audible above the storm, because it is, and because some part of me is still scared enough to want to name the madness before it names me.
Heath props himself on one elbow, the mattress dipping beneath his weight. The curve of his mouth is impossibly gentle, a stark contrast to the bruising intensity of before. Lamplight catches in his eyes, turning them to liquid amber. "If it's madness, I don't want the cure."
I want to laugh, or argue, but instead I just touch his face, the rough sandpaper of his beard against my fingertips, the unexpected softness beneath his eyes where the skin is thin as parchment. I don't know what I'm searching for among those familiar and unfamiliar features. I'm not even sure what I've found.
We fall asleep with the windows open, rain-scented air cooling our feverish skin, our hands linked across the rumpled sheets—my pale fingers threaded through his darker ones—as if even in dreams, neither of us is willing to let the other slip away into another century.
Chapter 14
Western Canada, 1842
The world acheswith silence as Maren Billings steps off the creaking plank onto the mud-choked earth of her new life in Canada’s Western territory.
