Chapter 31 Maeve
MAEVE
My heart practically stuttered to a stop. “You’re… what?”
Of all the things I might have expected him to say, that was at the bottom of the list.
He nodded, his gaze burning into mine. “I love you, Maeve. I’ve never said those words to anyone who wasn’t family before, but I know now that you’re my family. Remy and Poe and Cassie… and yes, you. I didn’t realize how incomplete my life — how incomplete I was — until I met you.”
I looked down at our joined hands. “I just… I don’t want you to feel like you have to say it.”
“Look at me, Maeve.” I met his gaze. “I think I’ve loved you since the minute I laid eyes on you before that first fucking Hunt.” He laughed a little. “Since the minute Titus told me you’d tried to bring in a gun.”
“I was just trying to protect myself.”
“Of course you were, and that’s why I love you, but only one of a million reasons.
I love you because you spend hours making nice food for the people you love even when that food disappears in 2.
3 seconds and I love you because you feed every stray animal that darkens our door, even that fucking demon cat who hates me.
I love the way you look when you sleep and the way you make our beds smell like strawberries.
I love the way you call me on my shit and give me shit right back.
” He shook his head. “For so long, I was afraid to love, afraid to feel anything, to want anything. But you love so fucking hard, Maeve. That’s why you’re working so hard for June.
I never even knew it was possible to love that hard, but you do, and you prove that loving that hard doesn’t kill you, it’s what makes life worth living. ”
“Bram…” My throat was clogged with emotion, tears stinging my eyes, because of all the ways this giant, scarred man had surprised me, this one was the biggest of all.
“For a long time I didn’t know why I’d survived the crash with my parents,” he continued. “…Why it had been them instead of me who’d died when Cassie still needed them so damn much. But now I know. I survived to find you. I survived to love you.”
“Maybe I survived for the same reason,” I said.
“Maybe all those months when I felt like I was dying after June’s murder, all those months when it seemed like life was pointless, because if someone like June could be taken away so quickly, so fucking mercilessly, what was the point?
Maybe I survived just to sit here right now and tell you that I love you too. ”
He shook his head. “I don’t deserve your love.”
“I’m starting to think we get that wrong about love. It’s not a trophy we earn. It’s not something we have to deserve. When it’s right, when it’s true, it just is, like the air we breathe.”
“That’s what you are to me, Maeve. You’re the air I breathe, the fucking blood in my veins.”
The moment sat heavy between us, but it wasn’t the heaviness of tension or dread. It was the heaviness of meaning, like the earth had shifted under both of our feet in the moments we’d been sitting on the concrete platform.
And maybe it had.
He laid his hand against my face, our gazes locked. But when he leaned in to kiss me, it wasn’t with the raw hunger I was used to, the hurricane that knocked me off my feet.
It was with an unfamiliar tenderness.
His lips lingered on mine in the moment before his tongue teased the seam of my lips. I opened for him and his tongue stroked mine, tangling in a sensuous dance. Waves of heat swept through my body, swells of warmth that slowly built as he stroked my cheek with his thumb.
But the simmering of our passion couldn’t last. Not between Bram and me.
The strokes of his tongue became more urgent as the heat built between us, the hot coals at my center erupting into a fire that couldn’t be denied.
His tongue dove deeper into my mouth, and he pushed his thumb roughly between our lips, like he couldn’t get enough, like he wanted to touch me and kiss me at the same time.
I tasted the salt of his skin and took his thumb all the way into my mouth. He broke our kiss, pulling back to watch me suck, my pussy throbbing with desire.
His eyes were dark pools of hunger, and he withdrew his thumb, wet with my saliva, and rubbed it along my lower lip.
Then he leaned in to kiss me again and this time there was no restraint, no slow and lazy sweeps of his tongue.
This time his tongue was an invasion, and I met every stroke of it with fevered strokes of my own.
My cunt was on fire, and a moan escaped my lips as his tongue dove deep into my mouth.
I slid my hand down his chest and pressed against the bulge in his jeans, my body screaming for him.
He broke the kiss with a growl and spoke against my lips. “Fuck… I’ll never stop wanting you, Maeve.” He reached under my coat for the snap on my jeans. “Lay back. I want to fuck you with my fingers.”
I lay back on the concrete platform without a whisper of complaint. My pussy was slick with need, my body humming with the desire to come.
“Are you warm enough?” He unzipped my pants and slipped his hand into my underwear.
“I am now,” I gasped as he stroked through the folds of my cunt.
“Jesus fuck, you’re wet.” He touched his lips to mine, sliding his tongue into my mouth, and I cried out as he pushed two fingers inside me.
I didn’t care that it was cold or that the concrete platform was hard under my back. I didn’t care that we were outside, in the middle of the woods, that if someone happened to be out for a winter walk they would find Bram finger-fucking me in broad daylight.
I cared only about his tongue sliding against mine, about the tunneling of his fingers through the channel of my throbbing pussy. It felt right that we were outside in the wilderness, our surroundings as wild as what had grown between us.
I fumbled for the zipper on his jeans and wrapped my hand around his engorged shaft. He was so big, so long and thick, that my cunt clamored to be filled by him.
He groaned into my mouth and broke our kiss, then dropped his head to my shoulder. “Fuck, Maeve… Fuck. I love the way your hand feels around my cock.”
We were stretched out side by side, Bram’s jacket a meager defense against the cold concrete, but I might as well have been surrounded by a blazing fire. All I felt was hunger, need, lust.
Love.
He slipped a third finger into my pussy and stroked my clit with his thumb.
“Oh god…” I moaned. “That feels so good.”
“Not as good as it feels for me,” he said against my neck. “I fucking love feeling your pussy around my fingers, around my dick.”
He made circles on my clit, his fingers picking up a rhythm through my cunt, and I stroked his shaft faster, loving the way he got bigger and harder in my palm.
He pulled back to look down at me and I met his gaze as I rode the heel of his hand, moving my hips to get maximum friction, maximum penetration.
“You look so beautiful when you’re about to come, Maeve. And you are about to come, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t look away as the pressure built at my center. “I want you to come too.”
“Oh, I’m going to come,” he said. “How could I resist with your sweet hand jerking me off? But this isn’t it, because after I come with you here I’m going to take you home, strip you naked and keep you to myself for the day, bury my face in that sweet cunt, drink you dry, pound into you until you come so hard you can’t walk for a week. ”
I didn’t know whether it was the promise of what was to come or the way he drove his fingers into me or the frantic stroke of his thumb on my clit or the feel of his huge cock swelling under my control — maybe all of the above — but I fell apart all at once, my body quaking with the force of the orgasm that tore through me.
I didn’t care that I made noise, my cries echoing through the woods around us as Bram’s semen spilled onto my hand.
He groaned, jerking into my hand while he shoved his fingers roughly inside me, the strokes of his thumb on my clit extending the orgasm until I felt like I’d never stop falling through space.
We were both gasping when it was over, and he dropped his head to my chest, his fingers still hot against my pussy while we tried to catch our breath.
I didn’t know how much time had passed when I was finally coherent enough to speak.
To remember what he’d said.
“You really love me?”
He lifted his head to look into my eyes. “I really love you.”
“I really love you too.”
“Good. Now let’s go home and fuck for real before I lose my mind.”