Chapter 20 - Caitlynn #2
That was new. The other times had been fast—frantic, months of tension unspooling in minutes, hands pulling at fabric with the gracelessness of two people who wanted too much to be patient about the mechanics.
This was different. She took his shirt off slowly.
Touched the scar along his jaw with her thumb.
Traced the line of his collarbone with her mouth, and the heat of it spread through him like whiskey, slow and deep and everywhere.
He returned the favor. Button by button, watching her face, the way her breath caught when his knuckles brushed her skin.
She was beautiful in a way that made his chest ache—the soft curve of her waist, the new fullness of her breasts, the barely-there swell of her stomach where their daughter slept.
He pressed his mouth to that swell and felt her hands tighten in his hair.
“Kahn.”
His name cracked open in her mouth. No armor on it. No edge, no warning, none of the careful inflections she’d spent months building between them like barricades. Just the raw syllable of him, and the breath that followed it shuddered out of her and landed against the hollow of his throat.
He lowered her onto the bed. Followed her down. Braced one hand beside her head, slid the other beneath the arch of her spine, his palm flat against the small of her back where the heat of her skin burned through.
She pulled at his shirt, and he let her take it, let her drag it over his head with hands that shook—and that undid him, the shaking, because Caitlynn’s hands didn’t shake.
Not when she called fire. Not when she faced down a hostile pack.
They shook now, tugging at his belt, and his blood dropped south so fast the room tilted.
He kissed the hinge of her jaw. The tendon stood taut along the side of her neck.
The dip of her collarbone where her pulse kicked against his lips, rapid and hard.
She tipped her head back, and he dragged his mouth lower, over the swell of her breasts, and her fingers dug into his hair and pulled, and a groan tore out of him that he couldn’t have held back with both hands.
“Off,” she said. Her voice had dropped into the register that made his spine liquid.
She tugged at her own shirt, and he helped her, and then there was nothing between them, and the sight of her spread beneath him—flushed from her chest to her ears, her auburn hair fanned across his pillow, her green eyes almost black—hit him somewhere below language.
He kissed her stomach. Pressed his mouth to the soft curve below her navel and felt her breath hitch, felt her fingers tighten in his hair. He stayed there for a beat. Two. Then he moved lower.
Her thigh tensed against his shoulder. He gripped her hip, angled her, and put his mouth on her, and her whole body jerked.
“Kahn—”
He didn’t stop. She didn’t want him to stop—he knew this because her heel dug into his back and her hips rolled up to meet him, and the sounds she made were specific and escalating and entirely devoid of ambiguity.
She was loud. She’d always been loud. Demanding in bed the same way she was demanding everywhere—direct, precise, unwilling to perform modesty she didn’t feel.
Her hand fisted in the sheets. The other found his shoulder, and her nails bit down hard enough to sting.
“Faster,” she breathed, and he gave it to her, and her thighs clamped against his ears, and her spine curved off the mattress in a long, trembling arc.
She came with a cry that punched out of her chest, and his name wrecked inside it. He worked her through it until her hand found his jaw and pushed him up, oversensitized, gasping.
He kissed his way back up her body. She grabbed his face and pulled him in and kissed him—tasting herself on his mouth and not caring, kissing him harder for it, her tongue against his, her teeth catching his bottom lip. He groaned into her mouth, and she swallowed it.
“Now,” she said. Not a request.
He pushed into her slowly—watched her face, the way her lips parted, the way her eyelids fluttered, and then opened because she wanted to see him while he filled her. Her hand came up to the back of his neck. Her fingers curled into the short hair there and held on.
He moved. She moved with him—hips rising to meet each thrust, her rhythm locking against his like a conversation they’d been having for months and only now found the right words for.
She wrapped her leg around his waist and pulled him deeper, and the sound that ripped out of him was not a sound he recognized.
“There—” Her breath fractured. “There, don’t you dare stop—”
He braced both hands on the mattress and drove into her, and she met every stroke, her nails scoring lines down his back that burned in the best way anything had ever burned.
Her head tipped back, throat exposed, and he pressed his mouth to the column of it and felt the moan vibrate against his lips before he heard it.
She clenched around him. He felt it build in her—the tightening of her thighs, the stutter in her breathing, the way her fingers dug into his shoulders with the desperation of someone gripping the edge of something they were about to go over.
“Look at me,” he said. His voice came out wrecked.
Her eyes opened. Green, blown dark, bottomless. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and he pushed deep and held there, and she shattered.
Her back bowed off the bed. Her mouth opened, and the sound she made was gutted and raw, and it tore through every nerve he had.
He thrust twice more and followed her—buried to the hilt, his forehead dropped against hers, his breath ragged and broken, the pleasure crashing through him in a wave that whited out his vision and left him shaking above her.
Neither of them moved.
His arms trembled. Her chest heaved against his. The room resettled around them—the creak of the bed frame, the distant hum of the wards, their breathing tangling together in the dark.
He rolled to the side before his weight crushed her. She followed, turning into him, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder with the accuracy of someone who’d mapped it. Her hand drifted to her stomach—palm flat, fingers spread—and her breathing slowed by degrees.
His wolf lay quiet at the base of his spine. Still. Not sleeping. Listening to the two heartbeats beneath her hand.
“Elianna,” she said again, into the dark.
He pressed his lips to her hair.
Outside, the compound was silent. The mountains were black against the sky.
The wards hummed, faint and steady, at the edge of his awareness.
The second heartbeat in the bond pulsed between them, and for the space of an evening, there was nothing else—no rogues, no borders, no war gathering in the dark.
Just this. Just them. Just the name of a girl who didn’t exist yet and already had both of them wrapped around her finger.