Chapter 36
CHAPTER 36
OWEN
I’m trying to come up with the perfect dirty text to send Wyatt to convince her to sneak over sooner rather than later.
For a while there, it felt like Wyatt was the thing that calmed the loud voices in my head. She stilled the low-level vibration that thrummed through me at all times.
But lately it’s starting to feel like she’s her own vibration, and the level is high. I want her all the time. I need her.
And I need to stop pretending this is some casual hookup, because the nights she crawls into my bed, I sleep better than I ever have. I love hearing about her day, watching her toss back the most hideous junk food and sip fountain Cokes the size of her head, listening as she tells me what amazing new thing Eden’s done.
I need it.
I need her .
The knock at my door drags me out of my attempts at creative smut. The room service I ordered must have arrived.
“Coming!” I call as I delete yet another text draft, wondering if I should just give up and type I need you into the little box.
But it’s not my burger, fries, and Caesar salad at the door.
It’s Wyatt.
And her suitcase.
She’s breathing hard like she ran here, but that doesn’t make sense because the room she’s sharing with Carson is just across the hall.
She opens her mouth, then closes it, pressing her pretty pink lips into a firm line. Her gaze drops to the floor, and everything from the flex of her jaw to the set of her shoulders says she’s having a very intense conversation with herself.
I want to take her in my arms, pull her into this room, never let her go. I want her to know that I can be whatever she wants, meet her wherever she is. This doesn’t need to be hard.
But she looks so determined, my beautiful, brash, sassy girl. She looks fierce, and something tells me that the debate she’s having with herself is important.
So I wait.
I watch her breathe. I watch her close her eyes. I watch her clutch the handle of her suitcase.
I watch her.
And when she gives the smallest nod of her head, like she’s finished giving herself a pep talk, she looks up to meet my eyes.
I brace for impact.
“Can I stay with you tonight?” she asks.
“You can stay with me forever,” I tell her, the words rushing out before I can weigh them, filter them, approve them for public use.
But I mean it, every word.
Her eyes grow wide, and for a moment I worry she’s going to run. This is not what we agreed to when we signed that pineapple can. I worry I’m pushing her too far too fast. I don’t want to lose her.
But then she smiles, her teeth catching her full lower lip, and whatever she was struggling with lifts off her right before my eyes.
“You know, everyone thinks you’re a good boy, Owen McBride,” Wyatt says, stepping forward, craning her neck to look up at me. She presses her palms into my chest, urging me backward, and I let her push me. She releases her suitcase inside the room, the door slamming behind her. “But I happen to know that you’ve been very bad.”
“Why is that?” I ask, my heart pounding beneath her touch.
“Because we had a deal,” she says. She marches me backward, this tiny little powerhouse, until the backs of my knees hit the bed. I land with a bounce, unable to take my eyes off her. She climbs up onto the bed, settling her knees on either side of my hips before lowering herself slowly—so slowly—into my lap.
“We had a deal,” she says, ducking to brush her lips gently across mine. “But then you went and made me fall in love with you.”
The words roll over me slowly, then all at once, like a crashing wave. I grab her hips to still her, catching her gaze with mine.
“Wyatt.”
She pauses, a smirk on her lips but a question in her eyes. “Too much?”
I can’t hold back the laugh that claws its way up my throat. “Wyatt, I think I started falling in love with you back in that roadside bar on that freezing night in January,” I tell her. “To hear you say it now is more than enough.”
I kiss her, my lips and tongue sliding across hers.
“It’s everything,” I whisper into her mouth.
“I love you,” she whispers as she presses me back onto the mattress, settling her warm little body over mine.
“I love you,” I whisper back as I thread my fingers through her hair, angling her lips so I can sweep my tongue over hers.
“I love you,” she says as she fumbles with the button of my jeans, as I shimmy out of them, as she sheds her shirt and her denim skirt.
“I love you,” I tell her as I roll her onto her back, wrapping my arms around her and gathering her to me, feeling every inch of her skin pressed against mine.
“I love you,” she tells me as she reaches for the condom I left on the bedside table, ready for what I thought would be a sneaky, late-night hotel hookup but has become so much more.
We don’t rush. We don’t tease. We don’t play games.
We consume one another.
As I push into Wyatt, I feel every molecule of her, every hitch of her breath, every nail digging into my back, every slide of her thighs along my hips, her feet pressing into my ass as she urges me closer. We mutter broken declarations of love between kisses and sighs, only separating to breathe and press our foreheads together and feel . I memorize this woman I love, this woman who loves me. I have her. She’s mine .
I reach for a pillow and lift her hips, placing it beneath her ass so the angle of my cock and the thrust of my pelvis stroke every sensitive part of her, and I’m rewarded by this beautiful woman tipping her head back, lips parted, and letting out my name on a delicious moan.
“Owen,” she cries, and I feel her body approach orgasm, the flood of her heat over my cock and the clench of her muscles around my body.
“Wyatt,” I say, part plea, part prayer.
I don’t even have to ask.
Just as she falls apart in my arms, she tilts her chin up.
Her eyes are open.
She stays with me.
And I follow her over the cliff.