🔥 Bone to Pick

Thank you for reading Bone to Pick! As promised, here’s your exclusive bonus chapter — the wedding night scene that was too hot for Amazon. 🔥

Bonus Chapter: The Wedding Night

Silas POV — Set two years after the epilogue. Their wedding night at Hell Creek.

Contains: Explicit MF content, outdoor intimacy, possessive claiming, praise kink, emotional intensity, and two paleontologists who can’t keep their hands off each other.
Reader discretion advised. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

The reception ended at midnight.

By 12:15, I had my wife in my truck, driving away from the converted barn where our colleagues were still dancing to music that was too loud and drinking champagne that was too expensive, and Elena was laughing in the passenger seat with her shoes off and her veil trailing out the open window like a white flag of surrender.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You’ll see.”

“Silas. It’s after midnight. We’re in the middle of Montana. Our hotel is in the opposite direction.”

“I know.”

She studied me in the dashboard light—my wife, my partner, the woman who’d spent two years excavating every wall I’d ever built and had decided, against all evidence and reason, that what was underneath was worth keeping. Her hair was coming undone from the elaborate updo her sister had insisted on. Her mascara was slightly smudged from crying during the vows. Her dress—ivory silk, deceptively simple, outrageously expensive—was bunched around her thighs from climbing into the truck.

She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And I’d spent my life looking at dinosaurs.

“You’re taking me to the site,” she said. Not a question.

“I’m taking you to the overlook.”

Something shifted in her expression—recognition, memory, heat. The overlook. Where I’d proposed. Where we’d watched a thousand sunsets since then, cataloging fossils and planning papers and building a life out of shared dirt and shared dreams.

“You’re insane,” she said.

“You married me anyway.”

“I did.” She reached across the console and put her hand on my thigh—high, deliberate, a promise of what was coming. “I really did.”

The drive took twenty minutes. The road to the site was familiar now—every pothole, every curve, every stretch of darkness that gave way to starlight. Two years of summers here had made it home in a way my Chicago apartment never had been. Two years of Elena beside me had made everywhere home.

I parked at the trailhead. Killed the engine. The silence of the badlands rushed in—no music, no traffic, no human noise. Just wind and stars and the patient, ancient presence of sixty-six million years of compressed history.

“I can’t hike in this dress,” Elena said.

“You won’t have to.”

I got out, came around to her side, and lifted her from the truck before she could protest. She made that sound—the startled, delighted yelp I’d first heard three years ago when I’d picked her up in a flooded tent—and her arms went around my neck instinctively.

“You’re going to throw out your back,” she said.

“You weigh nothing.”

“I weigh a normal amount for a woman of my height and build.”

“You weigh nothing, and I will carry you up this trail, and you will stop arguing with me on our wedding night.”

She stopped arguing. Instead, she pressed her face into my neck and breathed me in—sweat and champagne and the particular smell of a man who’d just danced for four hours in a suit he’d sworn he’d never wear—and I felt her smile against my skin.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know.”

“That’s not the right response.”

“I love you too. I’ve loved you since you walked onto this site with fogged-up glasses and carried sixty pounds of equipment three miles in hundred-degree heat rather than leave it behind. I’ve loved you through two papers and one correction and three grant proposals and approximately seventeen arguments about stratigraphy. I will love you until the sun burns out and the fossils turn to dust and there’s nothing left but us, holding on.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s better.”

The trail to the overlook was short but steep. I’d done it a hundred times with equipment. I could do it with my wife in my arms, her silk dress trailing behind us, her bare feet pale in the starlight.

The overlook opened up like a gift—a flat shelf of sandstone overlooking the canyon, the dig site invisible in the darkness below, the sky above exploding with stars. I’d brought blankets earlier in the day, when Elena was getting her hair done and I was supposedly “checking on the reception venue.” They were spread across the rock, weighted down with stones, waiting.

“You planned this,” she said.

“I’m an academic. We plan everything.”

“You stole my line.”

“You stole my heart. We’re even.”

I set her down on the blankets. She sank into them, silk pooling around her, and looked up at me with eyes that reflected starlight and something hotter.

“Dr. Thorne,” she said. “Are you planning to consummate our marriage on a cliff in the middle of Montana?”

“Dr. Thorne.” I knelt in front of her, running my hands up her calves, her knees, the silk of her thighs. “I’m planning to consummate our marriage in the place where I proposed, overlooking the site where we met, under stars that watched dinosaurs walk sixty-six million years ago.” I pushed the dress higher. “Unless you’d prefer the hotel.”

“The hotel has air conditioning.”

“It does.”

“And a bed.”

“Also true.”

“And walls, so no one can hear me scream.”

My hands stilled on her thighs. “Elena.”

“No one’s here, Silas.” She caught my wrist and moved my hand higher—past the silk, past the lace, to the heat of her. “No one but us and the fossils. And they’ve been keeping secrets for sixty-six million years. They can keep one more.”

I kissed her.

Three years of kissing this woman, and it still hit me like the first time—that electric shock of connection, that sense of coming home to a place I’d never known I was looking for. She tasted like champagne and wedding cake and the future, and her hands were already working at my tie, my buttons, the layers of formal wear that separated us.

“Too many clothes,” she said against my mouth.

“You’re wearing a dress that cost more than my first truck.”

“And I’m about to let you take it off me on a rock. Your point?”

I found the zipper at her back. Drew it down slowly, the way I’d done a thousand times with a thousand other zippers, but this one was different. This was the dress she’d worn to marry me. This was the fabric she’d chosen to pledge her life in. This was—

“Silas. Less reverence, more urgency.”

I pulled the dress off her shoulders. She lifted her hips and let it pool beneath her, ivory silk on plaid blankets, and she was wearing—

Nothing.

She was wearing nothing under the dress.

“Surprise,” she said, and the smile on her face was the one I’d been chasing since the first day—not the professional smile, not the careful smile, but the real one. The one that reached her eyes and crinkled the corners and made her look like a woman who’d finally stopped hiding.

“You’re going to kill me,” I said.

“That’s the goal. Slowly, ideally.”

I stripped off my jacket. My shirt. My belt. She watched with the same focused attention she brought to excavation—cataloguing each movement, assessing each newly revealed surface. When I shoved my pants down and kicked them aside, her breath caught.

“You’re beautiful,” she said.

“That’s my line.”

“Then say it.”

I lowered myself over her, skin to skin, the night air cool on my back and her body hot beneath me. “You’re beautiful. You’re brilliant. You’re mine.” I kissed her collarbone. Her breast. The soft swell of her stomach. “You’ve been mine since you walked three miles in the heat rather than leave your instruments behind. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving I’m worth the effort.”

“Silas—”

“Shh. Let me worship you.”

I worked my way down her body. Took my time. Let her feel every press of my lips, every scrape of my stubble, every deliberate touch that said you’re important and you’re loved and I’m never letting you go. When I reached the heat between her thighs, she was already shaking.

“Please,” she breathed.

I gave her what she wanted.

The first stroke of my tongue made her arch off the blankets. The second made her cry out—loud and unself-conscious in a way she’d never been in the tent, in the motel, in all the places we’d been forced to be quiet. Here, under the stars, with sixty-six million years of patience watching over us, she could be as loud as she wanted.

I made sure she was.

I learned her again—the angle that made her gasp, the pressure that made her beg, the rhythm that built and built until her fingers were digging into my scalp and her hips were lifting to meet me and she was chanting my name like a prayer.

“Silas—Silas, please, I need—”

I knew what she needed. I slid two fingers inside her while my mouth worked her clit, and she shattered—a full-body shudder that went on and on, her back arching off the rock, her voice echoing across the canyon.

Let the fossils hear. Let the earth remember. Dr. Elena Thorne had just come screaming her husband’s name under the Montana stars.

I crawled up her body while she was still trembling. Positioned myself at her entrance. Looked into her eyes.

“Hi, wife,” I said.

“Hi, husband.” Her voice was wrecked. “Are you going to make love to me, or are you going to gloat?”

“Both.”

I pushed inside her in one long stroke.

She gasped. I groaned. The sensation of being inside her—hot, tight, home—was something I’d never get used to, would never take for granted, would spend the rest of my life being grateful for.

“Move,” she demanded.

I moved.

Deep, slow strokes that hit bottom and lingered. I watched her face—the flutter of her eyelashes, the part of her lips, the flush that spread from her cheeks to her chest. I watched her the way I’d watched fossils emerge from stone, with the same patience and attention and awe.

“Faster,” she said.

I went faster.

“Harder.”

I went harder.

She wrapped her legs around my waist and met me thrust for thrust, and the sound of our bodies coming together echoed off the canyon walls, and the stars wheeled overhead, and I thought—not for the first time—that this woman had saved me. Not from the world. From myself. From the bitter, isolated man I’d been becoming before she walked onto this site and demanded, with her fogged-up glasses and her tiny brushes and her absolute refusal to be intimidated, that I become someone worth excavating.

“I love you,” I said, and my voice cracked on the words. “Elena. I love you so much it terrifies me.”

“I know.” She cupped my face in both hands. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here. I’m yours.”

Something broke open in my chest—not pain, but release. The last wall. The final layer. The thing I’d been protecting for thirty-eight years, finally exposed to the light.

I kissed her. Poured everything into it. Moved inside her with a rhythm that was no longer about control but about connection—about two bodies and two hearts and two lives becoming one.

When she came the second time, I followed. Buried myself deep. Let go of everything I’d been holding and gave it all to her—my pleasure, my future, my whole fragile, reconstructed heart.

We lay tangled together afterward, my jacket thrown over her shoulders to ward off the chill, her head on my chest, our heartbeats slowly returning to normal.

“We should probably go to the hotel eventually,” she said.

“Probably.”

“There’s a very nice bed there. Very clean sheets.”

“So I hear.”

“We just had sex on a rock, Silas.”

“We just made love on the overlook where I proposed to you, overlooking the site where we met, under the same stars that watched dinosaurs walk. If you want to reduce that to ‘sex on a rock,’ I can’t stop you, but I think you’re underselling it.”

She laughed—that bright, surprised sound I’d been addicted to since the first time I’d earned it. “Fine. We just consummated our eternal bond in a location of profound geological and personal significance.”

“Better.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You married me.”

“I really did.” She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at me with an expression that was soft and fierce and utterly, completely in love. “I really, really did.”

I pulled her down for another kiss. Let it linger. Let the night stretch around us like a promise.

Somewhere below us, in the darkness of the canyon, the fossils waited. Sixty-six million years of patience, finally rewarded. Two Dakotaraptors who’d died holding each other through the end of the world. A nest site with eggs that told a story of protection and hope. Thousands of bones, waiting to be found by the team we’d built together.

The earth keeps what it’s given.

So did we.

“Ready to go to the hotel?” Elena asked.

“In a minute.” I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close. “I want to remember this. All of it. The stars, the rock, the way you look right now.”

“How do I look right now?”

“Like a woman who just got thoroughly loved on a cliff in Montana.”

“Romantic.”

“I try.”

She settled back against my chest. We lay there in the silence, watching the stars, breathing together, two scientists who’d spent their lives studying how things endured finally understanding that they’d become something worth studying themselves.

Eventually, we got dressed. Eventually, we drove to the hotel with its clean sheets and its air conditioning and its bed that was not made of sandstone. Eventually, we made love again—slower this time, softer, in the way of people who had all the time in the world.

But first, we stayed. We held on. We let the earth keep this moment the way it had kept everything else.

Some things are meant to endure.

We were one of them.

The End… for now. 🦖💕

💕 Thank You for Reading!

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Coming Soon: More Hell Creek

Marco Reyes is getting his own book…

The grad student who talks too fast. The quiet researcher who’s been watching him. One expedition that changes everything.

Stay tuned for Book 2 in the Hell Creek series.

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