by Leigh Evans
“I can’t,” I quavered. “It’s too nice.”
“Okay, hang on.” He did a thigh press, reached under himself, and pulled off his towel. Back down we went. “Here, take this.” A vague wave toward my nose. “Blow, and then I’ll tell you the rest.”
I did.
“I was thinking about you one night before I fell asleep.” His fingers combed my hair away from my ear. “And then … There you were. Real as life. If I could have waded out of that damn water, I would have wrung your little neck.”
I dabbed at my leaking nose.
“Then this … thing happened.” His tone turned bewildered. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and then … I don’t know how to describe it. You just … flowed into me. Like I’d opened a book, and I could read you. All of a sudden, I heard your thoughts like they were mine. Not only that, I could see some of your memories. I know it sounds whacked, but it was like I stood inside you, and if I turned around, I’d see every part of you.”
“You told me you don’t remember the dreams,” I whispered.
His thumb stroked the curve of my peaked ear. “What I said was I forgot the details. I’m a guy, okay? Some things aren’t worth remembering. But I think I remember the important stuff.”
“Like?”
His arm tightened. “You were so sad,” he said. “So young. All filled up with grief and guilt. And…” A lift of his shoulder. “All I wanted to do was to hold you. Protect you. But you wouldn’t let me—night after night you stood underneath that tree beating yourself up and making me stay in the damn pool. Every night, you fought with me. Every fucking night. You are so stubborn.”
Up to that moment his penis had been forget-about-it soft. But now, I could feel it, hardening underneath me. “You know I hate water now, right? Can’t stand ponds or lakes … I’ll even go out of my way not to walk through a puddle.” A soft huff—hot and Trowbridge scented—into my ear. “I don’t hate you, sweetheart. If anything, you’re my personal addiction. I’d wake up every morning wanting you so bad my balls ached.”
My Were did a somersault as his scent grew spicy with musk.
“I learned something in Merenwyn,” he said pensively. “All my life I wanted to avoid the future I saw ahead of me—I didn’t want to run a pack. I hated being led, and figured that meant I’d be happier as a rogue. But life with the Raha’ells—it made choices real simple. It was either step up or die.”
All I could feel was his heat and his arousal hard against my hip.
“I was forced to become an Alpha in Merenwyn,” he said in that crystal-fragile silence. “And I found out that I really was born to be one. I’m a natural leader.” He gave up on my ear and used his hand to tip up my chin. “I’ve had enough of you standing under some damn cherry tree.” Blue eyes gleamed. Then he gave me a sweet smile and nuzzled the corner of my mouth with his warm lips. “Stay with me. Be with me. All that other shit, we’ll figure it out.”
“Promise me you won’t kill him.”
“I promise.”
Love’s a sneaky fighter. She whispers to your greatest need. She wins her battle not through sweat and logic, but with a look, a gesture, a feral recognition of weakness. And the other part of you thinks, I can do this. I can take a thin thread of bliss and spin it into a length of silk that will stretch a lifetime.
I gently touched his cheek and felt the smooth spots he’d shaved clean, and the bristly parts he’d missed. “There’s so much—”
“Just for once, stop thinking.” He ran a thumb over my bottom lip. “I love your mouth,” he said, his voice raw in a way that sent a shiver up my spine.
Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me.
His hands went under my butt, and he lifted me as he stood. Desire swamped me as I wrapped my legs around his waist.
* * *
Four strides took us to the mattress.
Trowbridge turned at the foot of it. Lifted me a little higher. I tightened my hold, preparing for the long sweet slide to the bed, but instead of falling backward, he sat us on the edge of the mattress. His strong hands cupped my waist. My knees bracketed his long thighs.
Goddess, he was aroused.
His erection was hard as a staff—a long, hot ridge against my belly. Delicious and sinful was the smell of his desire—heady, too, the combined scent of us.
Finally.
Eyes hooded, Trowbridge eased Merry off my neck. I took her from him and twisted to place her on the bedside table, but the surface was coated with grime, and befouled by a dusty coffee mug ring. With a murmur of apology, I hooked her chain on the bedside lamp’s finial instead. As I did, my lover pulled the Royal Amulet up over his head with a great deal less ceremony and delicacy than he’d accorded Merry. He passed him to me.
Ralph spat a flash of reproof as I stretched to hook him on the lampshade. The moment the two Fae gold lengths touched—Ralph’s heavier, serpentine chain covering Merry’s fine delicate filigree—the air sparked, brilliant blue-white.
My best friend’s amber stone flushed a brilliant red-orange.
“They’ve got some electricity going on between them,” I said, watching Merry hurriedly put some distance between her and Ralph. Trowbridge nodded—a quick, harsh bob—then stretched to rotate the shade. Three quick turns and our amulets were facing the quilt rack.
Alone at last.
With exquisite tenderness, Trowbridge used the pad of his index finger to blot away a tear lingering on my lower lash. “I really do hate it when you cry,” he said quietly.
“I don’t do it often.”
“I know.” Thoughtfully, he used the back of a knuckle to gently trace the slope of my cheek all the way to the edge of my jaw. There he paused for another swipe to dry my damp skin once more before his finger followed the line of my pounding pulse from my ear to the base of my throat.
“Your heart is beating so fast,” he murmured with a faint smile.
I flattened my hand on the mat of soft hair nested between his small nipples. Under my palm, I felt the surge of his blood. “Yours, too.”
My mate cupped my face. Eyes serious, face taut. He examined me—my nose, my hair, my lips, the curve of my jaw. Then he angled his head and touched his lips to mine. Softly. His mouth was slightly open, his breath mingled with mine.
It was a different type of kiss than what he’d given me downstairs when his wolf was still upon him, and his restraint was thread-thin. Gentler. A tad strained, as if he knew me to be someone very soft, and very round, and prone to injury.
But desire streaked through me—that fast. One touch, one intimate exchange of spit and breath, and my core dampened, my breasts swelled. I needed to be closer. Instinct told me to hug his thighs tighter, to curl an arm possessively around his neck, to press myself against him until my breasts were flattened against his chest.
Trowbridge, Trowbridge.
This was what my body had been made for—his touch, his scent, his hands.
Heat built inside me as my guy’s firm lips moved over mine, skillfully stoking the fire within me. His clever tongue lightly traced my full upper lip, teasing for a response. I opened my mouth, and touched the tip of his tongue with mine. With that, his hand slid up the nape of my neck and our kiss deepened.
The soft rasp of his tongue against mine, warm and wet.
Oh sweet heavens.
My heart hammered as I slid my fingers to the nape of his neck. Short bristles instead of long locks. I tested the steely sinew of his neck, the rounded bulk of his shoulder, the little knob of his spine, the hollow behind his ear—oh, he liked that. This I stroked again, emboldened by the sudden tension in his body.
Goose bumps as he turned my head to nuzzle my ear.
Eyes hot, he slid his hand under the gaping neck of my T-shirt. This, he pushed aside, so that it sat low on my shoulder, baring the skin above the shadow of my collarbone. Head tilted, he ran his palm over the place where his teeth had torn my flesh the night we’d exchanged the mate vows.
“There’s no scar,” he said, his brows drawing together.
No. The bite mark had healed. Slower than usual, considering I was half Fae and half Were, but like most wounds, it had healed. I’d worried about that—in the back of my mind echoed a fragment of conversation overheard in St. Hubert’s cloakroom about mate bonds and teeth marks.
“Do you have one?” I asked, feeling a tightness in my chest.
My One True Thing arched his neck to the side so I could examine the place where I’d bitten him. His trapezoid muscle was as unmarred as mine. My gaze flicked downward to his hard abdomen, which bore a jagged silver line—a permanent memento from the wound he’d received on the dark night when the scent of sweet peas had mixed with the raw perfume of the wild and the woods.
“Should there be a scar?”
“Sometimes the act leaves one on the woman.” Pensively, he touched the place that had no spot to mark something so precious and wonderful. “But it’s good. It would be a crime to ruin your skin.”
He stroked my shoulder softly, his downcast gaze shielding his thoughts. My skin looked very white, and very smooth, in contrast to his tanned, scarred hand.
“It’s soft as a baby’s,” he said. “I’ll need to be careful or I’ll bruise you.”
I don’t want careful. I want God-I’m-dying-for-you passion.
That’s when it occurred to me—right at that moment when I was astride his lap wearing nothing but a pair of damp cotton panties and his well-worn T-shirt—that the gap between our ages and experiences was in danger of becoming a freakin’ fjord. And if I didn’t find a way to span it—if I let him point to someplace up ahead where presumably a rope bridge swung—all would be lost.
Soft as a baby? Tender as a chick? Is that how he saw me now?
Probably. He’d carried me to this bed, and wiped my eyes dry of tears. To him, I was still Hedi, not much changed. Impossibly young. While he’d evolved into the savior of the Raha’ells and the Creemore pack’s returned hero.
Talk about a disparity.
Suddenly his gentleness felt less worshipful than cautious. His kisses practiced and controlled.
He was holding himself back.
No. No. No.
The guy I’d shoved through the gates had been an eager, impetuous lover. That is where we’d communicated. That is when I’d known that his passion matched mine.
I’d felt his equal when we lay skin to skin.
I’m not giving that up.
With a sigh, I cradled my mate’s face between my hands.
“What?” he said, his eyes narrowing.
So this was my new lover?
This complicated man with all his new complex angles, and unexpected hollows, and thin, tight skin? Given to command. Tempered to the role of leader?
Yes, mine.
If I was willing to dig for the Robbie Trowbridge buried deep. If I didn’t let him relegate me to the fragile and breakable category. If I believed that he meant what he said before he’d carried me to this ancestral bed. That it didn’t matter that he was one thing, and I was another. That all the other stuff really amounted to shit that we’d figure out later.
Well, here was Part I of the later shit.
His face had grown shuttered under my silent inspection.
I brooded over his mouth. Upper lip sharply defined, lower lip wide and firm. It used to be mobile and prone to ironic grins but now, more often than not, it was taut and tense. No longer the mouth of a man rebelliously clinging to his rogue status. This mouth belonged to a man who’d seen too much. Lost more than he’d owned. Thinned his lips and clamped down on private suffering too many times.
I can’t make love to the Son of Lukynae.
Not with this reservoir of guilt ceaselessly circling inside me like a dirty whirlpool.
Within days of pushing him through the gates, self-loathing and reproach had started twining itself around my battered self-esteem. How could I not remember the words to bring the portal back? I couldn’t reconcile myself to the enormity of that stupidity, any more than I could dismiss the fact that the mantle of leadership did not fit me.
And now, I’d seen the whole measure of my crime.
Remorse could drown me if I let it.
Yes, I could tell him “I’m sorry” again—hoping he’d give me some get-out-of-jail pass that would make me feel better—but even if I did, and cried another monsoon of tears, it still wouldn’t change one damn thing. Because my “sorry” was both a truth and a lie, all at the same time.
I’d known that, too. Whenever the whirlpool had dragged me down to the choking mire of self-hatred, I kept on finding the skeleton of the truth lying at the bottom.
Because I was sorry, and yet I was not.
I opened my mouth and out popped the truth. “You should know that this ‘kid’ would do it again.”
He tilted his head, his brows drawn together.
I hardened my voice. “Even knowing what world I was sending you to. As long as there was a chance that we could be here together—that I could see your face, smell your scent wrapping around me—I would do it again. I’d shove you through a thousand portals, over and over again, if I could save your life. I’d close my ears to the sound of the whiplash just so that I could bargain for another hour with you.”
In this bed, let there be no lies.
“I’m not a noble person. I’ll never be one. I don’t want to be. Not if it means I have to lose what I have. I have too little left, and what I have, I value too much.”
A flush tinted his high cheekbones as I cocked my hip, so that the soft folds of my sex eased to fit against his erection.
Yes. This is the way to find him again. Through words and action.
Blue eyes fixed on me.
And me alone.
I pulled his chin down—so slowly, so deliberately—and placed a hard kiss on the corner of his tense mouth. “I value you too much.” Then I forced his head back so that our mouths were aligned to my satisfaction and comfort and kissed him over and over again, with tongue and little tugs on his lower lip, and sneaky little rocking motions of my hip, until his arms were hard urgent bands around me, and I felt a deep tremor rack through him.
That’s when I flattened my hands on his hard chest.
He lifted a brow—his only outward comment on the ludicrous notion that I could overpower him—but he let me slowly push him flat.
There he lay, all parts of him rigid with desire, his body laid out for me to feast on. Face of a warrior. Hard belly, so much definition in his muscles that they looked like they’d been carved from a piece of marble. Light scattering of dark hair between those two slabs of pectoral muscles. A thinner trail leading south from his tight navel to his heavy cock.
“This is new,” he said huskily, his lids at half-mast, his head tilted back.
“I want to make love to the guy who stalked across the living room,” I informed him as I crossed my arms and took hold of my T-shirt’s hem. And then very slowly, I lifted my arms and the shirt rose, exposing for both our pleasure the rounded curve of my hip, the white skin of my soft belly, the rib cage within which my heart pounded, the undercurve of my heavy breast, and finally, the hollow of my tender throat.
The woman in me preened as his lips parted.
For another taunting second, I held my arms above my head, slightly canted back, knowing that it lifted my breasts up in a seize-me salute, before letting the T-shirt fall to the bed.
I gazed down at my lover.
A blue comet spun in a lazy circuit around a dark dilated pupil.
My eyes began to burn, a prelude to my own flare. I removed the hand that seemed intent on working its way to my pussy, and splayed open his fingers. A hard callus sat at the base of what was left of each digit, testament to the harshness that he’d endured.
“I’m so sorry you suffered.” His brows slanted downward in an expression almost akin to pain as I brought his palm to my mouth and pressed a kiss to that callus, then
did it again, and once more, following the rough line of them all the way to that rounded nub of that pinkie—all the time watching the skin sink in the hollows of his cheeks as he fought to hold on to his emotions.
“But you have to understand, Trowbridge. I’m no kid.”
He sucked in a sharp, quick breath through his teeth as I moved his hand to my breast. The women of the Creemore pack had small, high apples. I’m shapely and bountiful—a veritable harvest of flesh. And my Trowbridge was definitely a boob man. Without any urging his other paw reached for my breast’s twin. He lifted them so that they plumped, creamy and full, in his palms.
I raised my voice to get his attention. “I am the girl who crept into your motel room. Who tried to steal your amulet. Who killed Dawn Danvers. Who pushed you through the gates to hell.”
His thumb brushed my beaded nipple and I felt the tug of desire all the way to my lady parts.
“And I am no innocent.”
I coaxed his hand to trail down my ribs, to follow the sharp dip of my waist, to slow on the curve of my hip. Cheeks flushed, he rolled his head to the side and gazed down to where my legs were spread and his cock lay curved. Eyes hooded, his palms began to slide toward the temptation of the soft inside crease of my inner thigh.
“Uh-uh. You can explore that later.”
I caught his cock and held him, pulsing, in my tight grip. Silken skin over a hard, hard shaft. Scented of his lust. His knees drew up as I moved my hand along his length. My thumb found that pearl of desire leaking from the slit, and rubbed it in a circle.
“Right now, I’m going to take what I want.”
Swiftly, I rose on my knees, eased aside the leg of my panties, and brought the heat of him to tease the aching, damp core of me. Back and forth I dragged him along the folds of my pussy, wetting his cock with my own moisture. Then with a smile that promised him hell and heaven and everything in between, I guided his length to my entrance. Eyes closed in pleasure, I sank down, slowly, inch by inch, feeling the stretch, the slow hard slide, the wondrous sensation of being filled once more.