Chapter 6 #4
“That bike is so sick,” Seamus exclaimed as the younger boys burst back into the house in a tangle of arms and legs.
“You figure out what’s wrong with it?” Gary asked.
As the boys spoke over each other, detailing a long list of things they needed to fix to get the dirt bike running again, I tuned them out and watched my mate.
She’d barely made a dent in her soup, even though we’d been sitting there for hours.
Her hand moved absentmindedly, stirring in a circle, but I couldn’t even remember her taking a bite.
I glanced down at my own bowl, which I’d somehow finished as we’d discussed things.
The symptoms of the heat had become manageable the moment I’d touched her outside the bathroom, and I didn’t feel like my head was going to explode anymore, but the fire beneath my skin and the tightness in my chest were still there.
I looked her over, trying to see if she was suffering too.
Her skin was a little pale and clammy—and I’d bet everything in my wallet that her skin was hot to the touch—but beyond that, she looked fine, if a little distracted.
“We’ll see what we’ve got at home, and you can bring it when we come back,” Dalton said, cutting off his youngest sons as he stood from the table. “Thanks for dinner, Gar.”
“Thanks for the company,” Gary replied with a nod.
The Cavendish family said their goodbyes, with the younger boys going in for hugs before Ian shoved them away from Rosemary in warning. Sheepishly, they nodded their heads with apologetic smiles.
“Oh, that’s bullshit,” Rosemary barked, yanking Grant against her. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and loudly kissed the top of his head. “The day you can’t hug me is the day I’m dead, and even after that, you can cuddle my urn, all right?”
“Yeah, okay,” Grant grumbled as he hugged her back.
He didn’t notice the tightness around her eyes as she let him go and reached for Seamus.
“You too, numb-nuts,” she said, doing the same thing to the youngest. “Nothing’s changed. You’re still my best dudes.”
“I’m the best,” Seamus said as he wrapped his arms carefully around her waist. “Ian and Grant are your worst dudes.”
“That’s ’cause you’re my baby,” she crooned, rocking him from side to side for a moment. “Now get out of here before that vein in your dad’s forehead starts pulsing.”
The boys left the house as noisily as they’d come back in. Halle was the only one left when Rosemary leaned down to hug her.
“They understand, Flower,” she chided softly in Rosemary’s ear. The words were meant for my mate, but after twenty years with a Vampire, Halle must’ve known I could hear them. “Don’t hurt yourself just to prove you love them. They already know that.”
“It’s fine,” Rosemary brushed her off. “It was nothing.”
“It’s inconvenient, I know,” Halle continued before Rosemary cut her off.
“This stupid bond is not going to stop me from hugging the only little brothers I’ve ever known,” Rosemary hissed, pulling away. “Fuck that.”
“Love you,” Halle said with a sigh, patting Rosemary’s cheek affectionately. “Call me tomorrow.”
“I will,” Rosemary promised.
“Thanks for dinner, Gar,” Halle said, blowing the man a kiss. She turned her head toward me and nodded, then left.
“Brr,” Gary joked with a dramatic shiver. “She don’t like you.”
“You noticed, huh?” I asked dryly.
Rosemary moved to start cleaning up the table, and I followed to help her.
“She takes a minute to warm up,” Gary explained.
My mate was noticeably quiet.
“Was she like that with you?” I asked Gary, just to keep the conversation going.
“Hell no,” he replied, carefully pushing himself out of his wheelchair. “By the time we met, she’d already had her best friend talkin’ me up for a month at least.”
“Ah, so that was the problem,” I joked. “Rosemary didn’t spend enough time listing my good points.”
I expected Rosemary to make a joke or at least acknowledge what I’d said, but she was silent as she loaded the dishwasher.
“Thunder,” Gary called. The old dog scrambled up loudly from his place in the living room, then slowly made his way into the kitchen.
“Pop, take your chair,” Rosemary scolded as Gary opened the back door for the bulldog.
“You worry about yourself,” Gary replied easily. “I’ve been sitting all day. I can walk out to the porch while Thunder does his business.”
He disappeared outside, closing the door behind him.
Rosemary and I finished cleaning the kitchen in silence, carefully moving around each other. By the time she opened the door and called out a good night to her dad, I was completely confused.
I’d known that she wasn’t happy I left her behind when I’d gone to see my family.
I even understood it. But she wasn’t acting angry.
If I spoke to her, she responded. She said thank you when I wiped down the table with a dishrag.
From the moment I’d gotten back, she hadn’t sent me a dirty or dismissive look.
“I’m exhausted,” she said, walking back toward me. “Want to go to bed?”
Absolutely nothing sounded better than getting into bed with her.
“Yeah.”
I hadn’t noticed—for obvious reasons, she’d been in nothing but a towel—but it looked like Rosemary had spent some time cleaning up while I was gone. The piles of clothes were missing from her chair, and the top of the dresser was neatly organized. She’d even changed the sheets on her bed.
“I don’t have any room in my dresser,” she said, taking off the straps to her overalls as she walked to the opposite side of the bed. “But you brought some clothes, right?”
“I forgot them in the car,” I replied, closing us in for the night. “By the time I got back, I wasn’t thinking about anything but you.”
She smiled, but it didn’t seem to reach her eyes.
“Well, you can use the chair when you bring them in,” she said with a shrug, stepping out of the overalls. “It’s the best I can do.”
“I’m used to living out of my duffel.” Pulling off my shirt, I tossed it onto the offered chair.
“Makes sense,” she replied, contorting her arms so she could slide the sports bra out from beneath her tank top. She dropped it to the floor and reached out to pull the blankets low enough to slide in.
I’d never been someone who stared when I noticed a beautiful woman.
I could remember something in my head just fine without making someone else feel uncomfortable—but I couldn’t take my eyes off her breasts.
They were small and soft and bounced a little with the movement of her body, her nipples tight and pressed against the thin top.
My mouth watered as I kicked off my boots and shoved my jeans down my thighs. By the time I climbed in beside her, I was hard as a rock, and she was already curled on her side facing me, her knees pulled up nearly to her chest.
“I’m going to stay here tomorrow,” I assured her, finding her thigh under the blanket. Her skin was so soft and so hot. Gods, she was like a furnace. “They don’t need me at the house.”
“Okay,” she said easily with a nod. “Everything was okay when you got there?”
“It’s going to take some time,” I replied, propping my head on my bent elbow. “They’re going to have to replace some windows and probably sand the floors. My mom and Lucy will probably sleep for the next couple of days while they heal, but yeah. Everything was okay.”
“Do you think they’ll attack there again?”
“They’d be idiots to try. My brothers won’t leave their mates any time in the near future, and I can’t imagine an entire human army succeeding where the others didn’t.”
“That’s good,” she breathed. My hand paused where I’d been brushing it against her thigh, and she moved just slightly so that I’d start again. “Why didn’t you mention your cousins when you were talking to Dalton?”
I knew she’d noticed. “They’re incredibly private,” I explained. “Paranoid to a fault. They wouldn’t want anyone to know that they’d been involved. One of them has a mate that’s completely off the radar, and I can’t repay them for their help by running my mouth.”
“Gotcha,” she sighed, her eyes growing heavy. “Well, I won’t say anything.”
“Appreciate it.”
“He trusts you, you know?”
“Who? Dalton?”
“Yeah. He told me before you got back that you were one of the best teammates he’d ever had.”
“Aw, he was talking about me?” I joked. “I’m touched.”
Her eyes lost the glassy look. “He was reassuring my aunt, who was pissed when she got here and you weren’t here.”
“Ah, that didn’t win me any points, huh?”
“You’re lucky she’d calmed down by the time you got back, or there’s a good chance you would’ve been buried in the backyard.”
I grimaced.
“It’s all right,” Rosemary said, patting my chest. For a split second, it felt like I was being burned until a rush of cool swept through my veins. “Once she realized I was fine, she mellowed.”
“Were you?” I asked quietly, smoothing my hand up her side. “I wasn’t. I was sweating so much my dad said I smelled like a goat.”
Rosemary let out a choked laugh.
“I nearly puked all over my lap while I was driving,” I continued. “Knowing that I’d be the one who would have to clean it up was the only way I kept that shit down.”
“Sounds terrible.”
“It wasn’t pleasant,” I conceded, wrapping my hand around the side of her neck. Her pulse beat comfortingly against my palm, and my mouth watered. “How bad was it for you?”
Something flashed in her eyes, but she just shrugged. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Did the shower help?” I asked, remembering the beads of water on her shoulders.
“Not really,” she replied. “It felt pretty similar to getting the tattoo on my neck. Lots of little needles hitting everywhere.”
I flinched at the thought.
“A bath would probably be better,” she mused. “Not as violent.”
“Well, I’m here now,” I murmured, leaning forward to brush my lips over hers. “No bath needed.”
“Convenient,” she whispered back, leaning into the touch.
Her hands slid out from beneath the pillows, and I sighed in relief as they smoothed over my bare chest and down my stomach.
They’d cooled a little since we’d been lying there, and each touch felt like a mixture of floating on my back in the middle of a lake and the first seconds of the downward slide of a rollercoaster.
Every molecule in my body stood at attention while my heart seemed to slow its angry pounding.
It didn’t take long before both of us were naked.
We’d kept a small barrier of clothing between us until then, as if it somehow made a difference, and maybe it had.
Because the moment she pressed her bare body against mine, my willpower was toast. Spending those few hours apart had only intensified the instinct to get as close as possible.
We were too hungry for the feel of skin on skin, too impatient.
I moved with her as Rosemary rolled to her back, then froze as my hips settled between her thighs, the underside of my cock pressed against hot, wet skin.
“We’re not leaving here anytime soon,” Rosemary reminded me, her legs wrapping around the backs of my thighs. “Unless you want to ask my pop to leave his own home to give us privacy, we’ll have to do it here.”
I was paying attention to the best of my ability, but it felt like my brain was short-circuiting. She was right there. We were so godsdamned close. My hips moved without conscious thought, and Rosemary let out a little whimper of need.
“It’s supposed to be special,” I replied, focusing on her eyes. The pupils were huge with arousal, and around the edges, her irises had darkened into a thick line of darker green. “It’s the beginning of everything.”
Rosemary lifted her hands to frame my cheeks in her palms. “If you haven’t realized that our beginning started already, you haven’t been paying attention.”
I groaned and pressed our foreheads together as her hips rolled languidly.
“What are you waiting for?” she whispered.
Every euphemism and cliché I’d ever heard felt absolutely correct as I pressed inside her, both of us barely breathing. We fit perfectly, like a lock and key, a pair of puzzle pieces, a glove. She shuddered as I paused, fully inside her.
It was a miracle. The culmination of my entire life. There would never be anything better than that moment, with the light from the lamp illuminating her beautiful face, her nails pressed into my shoulders, and her body welcoming mine.
“Please tell me you’ve done this before,” she said nervously after a moment.
I choked on a laugh. I must’ve been lost in my head for too long. She looked so concerned.
“I’ve done this before,” I confirmed against her lips.
Catching her hands in mine, I tugged them up above her head and braced myself on my elbows. Then, I finally began to move.
It was nearly impossible to keep Rosemary quiet, but I did my best. I caught every sound in my mouth as I memorized what made her gasp or moan or curse.
While I held her hands captive, she used the rest of her body to drive me out of my mind.
Her hips rolled in counterpoint, her knees bent and fell wide, her back arched, and her legs wrapped around my back, holding me to her like a vice.
When it all felt like too much, my skin so sensitive it felt like I might go out of my mind, I found myself suddenly pressing my mouth against the pulse point on her neck.
Rosemary tipped her head back further, urging me on as she whimpered.
I’m not sure what I expected to happen. I’d thought about it a lot during my life—the moment when I would complete the bond with the other half of my soul—but nothing had prepared me for when it actually happened.
As the first taste of her blood hit the back of my throat, I came so hard that the world around me went silent.
It was everything.
Somehow, I had the presence of mind to pull away before I hurt her, and when sound began to make sense again, I realized that Rosemary was making these little gasping noises as she pulled at the hold I had on her hands.
“What?” I asked frantically, letting go of her. “Baby, what?”
“You have to do it,” she said, turning her head to savagely bite my arm. When she pulled away, little lines indented where her teeth had been, but the skin was intact. “I can’t do it. You have to do it.”
“Shhh,” I murmured, understanding the problem. Lifting my hand to my mouth, I quickly bit down to break the skin and offered it to her.
As she pulled the fleshy part of my thumb into her mouth and took a long pull, her body tightened around my cock.
The two sensations were so powerful that another orgasm rolled over me, and by the time her mouth grew slack and her head dropped back to the bed, we were both shaking with exhaustion and maybe a little bit of shock.