Bonus Scene: Slow Burn - Copper Ridge Book 1

Bonus Chapter - Gemma

     The house has never been this quiet.

    Not the held-breath quiet of late nights when Ivy was asleep down the hall — that was a different kind of quiet, watchful and conditional, always one small nightmare away from ending. This is empty-house quiet. Just the refrigerator hum and the distant sound of Beck in the living room and the very specific, low-grade electricity of a woman who has Plans.

    Capital P.

    Ivy is at her first sleepover. She packed her backpack with the thoroughness of someone preparing for a wilderness expedition — three changes of clothes, her stuffed triceratops, a laminated dinosaur fact card she made herself in case her new friends had questions, and a detailed set of care instructions she dictated to me for Stego's benefit while she was away. I promised to follow every point. Beck promised with slightly less conviction. Ivy noticed, made him repeat himself, and then extracted a secondary promise from me to supervise him.

    The backpack left the house. Ivy left the house, waving out the car window like a tiny, opinionated general dispatching her troops. And now here I am, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at what I've put on, feeling a very specific and deeply satisfying kind of smug.

    The silk wrap dress is not complicated. Deep green, cut just short enough to be interesting, with a neckline that does exactly what I need it to do. I bought it weeks ago with tonight in mind and buried it behind my paramedic gear in the back of the closet, because Beck has the inconvenient habit of noticing things.

He has not noticed this yet.

He is about to.

  ***

    Beck is in the kitchen when I come out, leaning against the counter in that faded blue henley, reading something on his phone. He has a beer beside him and the look of a man who has fully resigned himself to a quiet evening and made his peace with it.

    His eyes come up when he hears me.

    They make the trip from my face to the hem of the dress and back in approximately half a second. For a man who normally moves like he's being billed by the hour, this is a land speed record.

    He sets the phone down.

    "Hi," I say.

    "Hi," he says. His voice has the carefully level quality of a man recalibrating in real time. I can practically hear the gears.

    This is deeply, deeply satisfying.

    "Thought we could watch a movie," I say, leaning against the doorframe in the way I know lands well. "Or something."

    Beck's jaw moves. He has a brief visible conversation with himself. He is a fire captain. He has stood in front of actual structural fires and made command decisions in seconds. He is not going to be undone by a silk dress and a woman who is enjoying herself entirely too much.

    "Or something," he says, finally, in a tone I would describe as controlled but sincerely invested.

    "Want a beer first? I was going to open wine."

    "I'm fine."

    "You sure? You look a little—"

    "I'm fine, Gemma."

    The way he says my name is its own complete sentence. I push off the doorframe and cross toward him, and his posture shifts the way it does when he's paying close attention — shoulders dropping slightly, chin tilting, that small tell he still doesn't know I've cataloged. I reach past him for the wine on the counter, which requires leaning in close enough that his breath changes. The beer he set down is sweating a ring onto the tile. I take my time finding the wine opener.

    "You did that on purpose," he says.

    "I don't know what you mean."

    "You absolutely—" He stops. Studies me. "You bought that dress for tonight."

    "This old thing?"

    His mouth flattens, fighting a smile. "You have never described anything you own as 'this old thing' in your life."

    Fair. He gets credit for knowing me.

    "Maybe I dressed up," I say.

    "You dressed up," he repeats.

    "Ivy's at her first sleepover. The house is quiet." I pour the wine, slow, looking at him over my shoulder. "A woman can dress up."

    Beck picks his beer up again, which is either habit or a deliberate decision to give his hands something to do. I'm betting on the second.

    "She texted already," he says. "Sara's mom sent a picture."

    "I saw it." Ivy's face beaming over a plate of macaroni, triceratops under one arm, looking like a person who had never once worried about anything. "She's fine."

    "She's fine," he confirms, and the set of his shoulders drops a fraction, the tension he'd been carrying since Ivy's car disappeared finally gone.

    I take my wine and close the remaining distance between us.

    "So," I say. "It's just us."

    His hand comes up and tucks a strand of my hair back, slow and deliberate. His thumb grazes my cheekbone on the return trip. "Yeah."

    "I had some thoughts about that."

    "Did you."

    "I've been thinking about it for a while, actually."

    The thumb traces my jaw. His eyes are doing the math — the kind that ends with him deciding he's in trouble and accepting it as an operating condition. "How long is a while?"

    "Long enough to hide a dress in the back of a closet for three weeks."

    The real smile breaks through. The slow one, crooked, warm, the one he saves for things that are actually good. "You hid a dress."

    "You notice things."

    "I do notice things," he agrees. "I noticed when you put Kevin on the high shelf. I noticed when you moved my coffee to make room for yours. I noticed the dress."

    I pull back just far enough to look at him. "You knew?"

    "The tag was still on it." His expression is composed and deeply pleased with itself. "I've been waiting."

    This absolute, insufferable—

    "Beck Delano," I say.

    "Gemma Lockhart," he says.

    "You let me plan this entire evening—"

    "You were having fun planning it." He is entirely unapologetic. "I didn't want to ruin it."

    He is the most aggravating man I have ever loved. I tell him so. He nods like I've confirmed something he already suspected, and then his hands slide to my hips through the silk, and the rest of my prepared remarks disappear entirely.

  ***

    I kiss him first, because Beck would wait me out all night just to see what I'd do.

    His hands tighten on my hips the moment I do, pulling me flush against him, and he kisses me back the way he does everything — slowly, completely, like he has nowhere else to be. His mouth is warm and tastes like beer and he makes a low sound against my lips when I press closer that I feel in my sternum.

    I have other plans.

    I walk him backward out of the kitchen. He goes, and I savor that — the fact that Beck Delano, who moves through the world like he built it, will follow me. He navigates the hallway without breaking the kiss, which speaks either to spatial memory or a frankly impressive level of commitment, and we make it to the bedroom with only one minor collision with the doorframe that neither of us acknowledges.

    The lamp on the nightstand throws warm light across the room. I reach up and push his henley off his shoulders. He lifts his arms to let me, watching me the way he always does — completely, with that steady, cataloging attention that used to unsettle me and now does something entirely different. I take my time with it, because I can.

    "Every bit of it," I tell him, when he asks if this is still the plan.

    I reach back for the tie at my waist. The wrap dress takes about four seconds to remove, which I am choosing to see as a design feature and not the single flaw in my elaborate evening. What's underneath is not accidental — black lace, barely there, the kind of set that takes real commitment to buy in a small Montana town and real commitment to hide from a man who notices everything. Beck's expression makes up for every bit of it. His jaw doesn't drop — he's too controlled for that — but his eyes move over me in a slow, thorough sweep that starts at my face and takes its time getting back there, and his hands are moving before I've finished speaking.

    "Gemma," he says. His voice is down an entire register.

    "Captain," I say.

    He exhales through his nose. Reaches for me.

    I step back.

    He stills.

    "Not yet," I tell him.

    The precise, contained look that crosses his face is worth every bit of planning — the look of someone who has decided to wait and wants me to know it's a decision. There is a difference. He is making sure I know it.

    "Okay," he says.

    So we do this my way.

    I push him down onto the bed and he lands on his back, and I follow him down, straddling his hips, and the look on his face when I do — that particular combination of composed and completely undone — is the one I've been planning for. His hands settle at my waist, warm and steady, and he lets me have it. He is very good at waiting when he's decided waiting is worth it.

    I take my time. Beck's skin is warm everywhere and I've learned it the way you learn a place you intend to stay — the slope of his shoulders, the scar below his left collarbone from a ladder incident he described in exactly three words, the way his breath shortens when I press my mouth to the base of his throat. His hands tighten at my waist. He keeps them there, gripping hard, because I haven't given him permission to move them yet and we both know it.

    His eyes track every move I make. When I sit up and reach back to unhook my bra his jaw tightens, and when it falls away and I drop it off the side of the bed his exhale is slow and deliberate, the kind that means he is exercising significant self-control.

    Good.

    I take his hands from my waist and move them where I want them. His palms cover my breasts and he watches my face when he does it — that cataloging attention fully deployed — and when his thumbs drag slow circles over my nipples my breath catches loud enough that there's no pretending otherwise. He does it again, a little harder, and my hips roll against him involuntarily.

    "You're going to be insufferable about this," he says. Not to the ceiling this time. To me, watching me.

    "I have no idea what you mean," I say, which comes out considerably less composed than I'd like.

    "The look on your face right now."

    "I'm not making a face."

    His thumbs move again, and he rolls my nipples between his fingers, and whatever I was going to say next evaporates entirely.

    "You were saying?" he asks.

    I lean down and kiss him hard to end the argument. His hands stay on my breasts, warm and certain, and I feel everything he does from my chest down to where I'm pressed against him, and I decide the argument can stay ended. When I reach down between us and wrap my hand around him his breath punches out against my mouth, and I feel him shudder, and that shudder is its own very satisfying victory.

    "Gemma." My name in that register, rough at the edges.

    "Still my turn," I tell him.

    He makes a sound that is not agreement and not quite protest and lives somewhere between the two. I hook my thumbs into the waistband of my panties and his eyes follow my hands all the way down. He lifts his hips to help me get them off without being asked, which I appreciate, and I drop them off the side of the bed next to the bra because symmetry matters. I lift my hips, position myself, and sink down onto him slowly — deliberately slowly — and the stretch of him filling me pulls a sound out of me that I didn't plan for. His hands grip my hips. His head drops back. His whole body goes taut under mine, holding himself still through what is clearly enormous effort, and I take a moment at the bottom of it, adjusting, feeling the fullness of him, before I start to move.

    "You are doing this on purpose," he grits out.

    "Captain," I say, finding my rhythm, slow and deliberate. "I have been doing this on purpose since I walked into the kitchen in that dress."

    The laugh breaks through, breathless. His hands flex at my hips. "Fair point."

    Beck's jaw is tight. His eyes are on me — dark, fully present — and I ride him slow and steady while he watches, his grip tightening every time I roll my hips just right. I lean forward and brace my hands on his chest and find the angle that makes my breath catch on every stroke and I stop being smug about it because there's nothing left to be smug about, just the heat of him, the slide, the way he fills me completely each time I come down.

    "Gemma." A warning, this time.

    "I know," I tell him.

    His hands urge my pace higher and I let him, because at this point we're well past the point where I'm keeping score — or I'm keeping score and the math has become extremely favorable and I don't need to press the advantage. The slow rhythm I'd been so pleased with dissolves into something considerably less controlled, his hips rising to meet mine, and somewhere in that I lose the thread of the plan entirely and I don't want it back.

    Then his hands slide lower and he rolls me under him in one efficient motion and whatever was patient in his expression a moment ago is completely gone.

    "My turn," he says.

    "I said not tonight, Captain."

    "You got your tonight." His voice is low and his mouth is at my jaw, my neck, the soft spot below my ear that he found early and has been deploying strategically ever since. "Now it's mine."

    It is a genuinely compelling argument.

    "You're not supposed to negotiate," I tell him.

    "I'm not negotiating," he says. "I'm stating my position."

    He settles between my thighs and pushes into me and I arch up against him because the angle is different now, deeper, and the sound I make is entirely involuntary.

    "That's the same—" I start.

    "It's really not," he says, and moves, and I lose the sentence completely.

    This is the thing about Beck's version of taking his time — it is not passive and it is not gentle and it is absolutely deliberate. He knows where my attention goes and he goes there on purpose. His mouth finds my breast, his tongue circling my nipple while he drives into me slow and deep, and I stop forming sentences somewhere around the third time he does it, my fingers in his hair holding him there, my hips rolling up to meet every stroke. He knows what he's doing. He has always known exactly what he's doing, and right now what he's doing is taking me completely apart.

    "Beck—" I manage.

    "Told you," he says against my breast, and I can feel him smiling, and I would have something to say about that except he chooses that moment to change the angle and reach between us, his thumb finding where I need it most, and then there's nothing left to say at all.

    I come apart with his name in my mouth and his hands on me everywhere, and he follows me over not long after, his face pressed to my neck, my name said low and rough like it means something. Like it's the only word he knows.

    When I get to the other side of it I'm warm all the way down to my feet and not entirely sure I remember my own name, and I would tell him so except that would mean he wins, and I still have some pride.

    Afterward I'm warm all the way down to my feet and Beck is on his back with one arm tucked under my shoulders and the ceiling fan is moving slowly overhead and the house is still quiet except for us.

    "Fine," I say, once I've recovered enough to form words.

    "Fine," he repeats, like he's filing it.

    "Equal billing on the plan, it turns out. Collaborative effort from start to finish."

    The laugh is low and real and it moves through me all the way down to my knees. "That's very generous."

    "I thought so."

    His hand moves up and down my back, slow and easy, not going anywhere. The ceiling fan turns. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. Outside, somewhere, Copper Ridge is doing whatever Copper Ridge does on a quiet evening when no one it belongs to needs anything from it.

    The thought surfaces sometimes — how I came to this town with nothing but a duffel bag and a fern and a plan to stay just long enough to get my head together, and somehow the head-getting-together involved a grumpy fire captain and his dinosaur-obsessed kid and an in-law suite that stopped being an exit strategy before I'd even unpacked.

  ***

    We end up exactly where we always end up — Beck at one end, me at the other, feet in his lap, the remote a subject of active dispute. He's in sweatpants and I'm in his henley because it was closer than anything else and it smells like him and I am entirely unapologetic about this. My wine glass is on the end table. His beer is on the coffee table. Stego is asleep in Ivy's room, which he has apparently decided is his room in Ivy's absence, and Clarence is nowhere visible, which means he's either in the in-law suite or judging us from somewhere inconvenient.

    "The volcano documentary," I say.

    "You've seen the volcano documentary."

    "I like the volcano documentary. It's restful."

    "It's two hours of lava."

    "Beck." I look at him with great patience. "Lava is inherently restful."

    "That is not a coherent position."

    "Things moving slowly and inevitably toward their conclusion. Very soothing. I find it extremely calming."

    He stares at the TV. "You spend all day managing emergencies and you unwind by watching volcanoes destroy things."

    "Slowly," I clarify. "The whole point is the slowness. There's no urgency. Nobody is calling in an ALS unit."

    "Unless they're too close to the lava," he says.

    "Nobody gets close to the lava. That's also the point."

    Beck rubs the side of his face with his free hand. His other hand has settled at my ankle, doing the small circles it does automatically now — the ones he almost certainly doesn't notice. I have noticed every single time. I am not mentioning it ever.

    "There's a thriller," he says.

    "Does anyone survive?"

    He looks at me. "I haven't seen it."

    "So fifty-fifty odds. Those are not calming odds."

    His phone buzzes on the cushion beside him.

    He picks it up. His expression shifts the way it only does for her — the particular stillness he gets when Ivy enters a room, even just as a photo on a screen.

    He turns the screen toward me.

    Ivy. In what appears to be a blanket fort of considerable structural ambition. She is grinning so wide it is almost entirely teeth, her hair in two lopsided pigtails that someone attempted and she clearly improved upon, stuffed triceratops under one arm and her free hand giving a full, committed thumbs-up directly at the camera. She looks like a person who is having the best night of her life and has decided to formally document this for the record.

    "She's okay," I say.

    Beck doesn't answer right away. His thumb moves over the photo once, steady and unhurried, the way he looks at things he means to keep.

    Then he looks at me.

    The lamp on the end table throws warm light across the couch. His henley is enormous on me and my hair is a disaster and my wine glass is sweating a ring I'll deal with tomorrow, and Beck is looking at me with the real smile — the expression that still gets me, that still does exactly what it did the first time I saw it.

    He pulls my feet more firmly into his lap.

    "Yeah," he says. "We all are."

    He puts the phone face-down on the cushion and points the remote at the TV.

    The volcano documentary starts.

    I pick up my wine, fold my arms behind my head, and watch lava move with great and unhurried inevitability down the side of a mountain. Beck sits with his hand warm and steady at my ankle, and I think: yeah. This is what staying feels like. 

    This is everything.