was everything he needed. I took his mouth as I drove my groin against his, and feeling our bodies aligned like this was un-fucking-believable. We weren’t naked, but it was close enough, maybe the closest we’d ever get, so I wanted to savor it, savor him.
“I can’t get enough of you,” Julian said, cupping my ass and thrusting upward.
“You feel so good,” I moaned against his lips as I skated toward the edge. “Already close.”
“Me too.” Julian circled his hand around both our cocks, and the friction from our shafts rubbing together was my undoing. I had never been so turned-on in my life.
“Right there. Right fucking there. Oh God, yes.” I buried my cries in his shoulder as I came, my jizz hitting his stomach and mixing with his own as he shuddered beneath me.
Afterward, we lay quietly, lazily kissing and catching our breath. I didn’t want to move for anything, but I knew being out in the open like this wasn’t the best idea either.
“Let’s clean up,” I said, finally lifting my head and quickly surveying our surroundings.
“Just a minute more,” he said and pulled me down again for a slow, toe-curling kiss, and fuck, was there anything better than Julian North’s tongue in my mouth?
We were just straightening our clothes and tucking ourselves back in when there was a pop of gunfire. My head snapped toward the ranch. What in the hell? When there were more shots with short pauses in between, I wondered if someone was in the middle of target practice. It would be one of the only reasons a gun would be firing on my father’s ranch, something he frowned upon, especially close to the pastures, which might’ve caused a stampede.
When I glanced back at Julian, I gasped. He was crouched on the ground with his arms shielding his head. Holy shit.
He was rocking and softly swearing to himself, his shirt soaked with sweat. And it was fucking heartbreaking to witness. The gunfire seemed to have abated, at least momentarily, and I approached Julian carefully. I didn’t want to startle him, but I also knew that he was having one of his episodes—one much worse than the couple I’d witnessed before—and he needed something or someone to help get him through it.
“No, they can’t be. They’re gone. They’re just…gone,” he was saying over and over in a broken voice that clawed at my insides. As I squatted down beside him, I realized this might’ve been his nightmare come to life. Had he gone back in time to directly after the roadside bomb?
I froze, my entire body tingling with awareness as I tried to picture what he was seeing in his mind’s eye. And based on his reaction and the story he’d shared, it was devastating.
“Julian.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat, trying to keep my voice level. “Hey, it’s Kerry Carmichael, and you’re in Wyoming at Firefly Farm.” I tentatively touched his knee with the tips of my fingers, hoping to be a buffer between his living nightmare and reality. “We rode out to the pond on the four-wheelers.”
He grew very still, as if listening to me and trying to make sense of what he was hearing. So I continued talking, hoping to ground him in our surroundings.
“There was some gunfire coming from the ranch, but everything is okay, I promise,” I said with a degree of certainty even though I wasn’t able to investigate the source. “You’re not hurt, and nobody else is either.”
There was a drawn-out moment of silence as he focused on me, blinking rapidly.
“Kerry?” he whispered, bringing his arms down to his sides and squinting into the sunlight.
“It’s me,” I said in a wrecked voice because it was torture seeing him this way. “And everything’s gonna be fine.”
Suddenly he launched himself into my arms and burst into tears. He wept against my shoulder, my shirt drenched with tears, his body trembling from head to toe.
“That’s it, let it all out,” I murmured against his head. “It’s okay. You’re safe with me.”
“I was so goddamned scared,” he said between sobs, and at first I thought he was referring to the pops of gunfire. But soon enough I realized he was referring to the incident. “I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t fucking save them.”
“Shh, I know,” I replied in a soothing tone, my own voice quavering as I rubbed gentle circles between his shoulder blades.
“They’ll never see their families again.” He shuddered. “And Arash’s mom. The way she sounded when