Chapter 4
Sam
“Not all things that look sweet will nourish you,” Faelan murmured.
I forgot about the dumb cult.
I forgot I was starving.
I forgot about everything except the way this impossibly huge man made heat rush down between my legs so fast I felt lightheaded with need.
I hadn’t intended to devour him. One minute, I was about to argue that I absolutely knew better than to eat random berries, and the next, I was kissing Faelan as if the entire world depended on it.
It started with the smallest brush of his lips. I tasted wild earth and the faint tang of whatever sweet juice had stained my own mouth. My knees nearly buckled. He caught me around the waist, his fingers pressing into me firmly like an anchor in the dark.
When I finally pulled away, I swallowed hard, trying to piece my wits back together. “You’re not exactly subtle, you know.”
“I never claimed to be.” Faelan’s voice resonated like distant thunder: low, certain, impossible to ignore.
“I’m—Sam, by the way.”
Faelan was entirely unprovoked. “I knew you when our eyes first met. Names don’t matter.”
Sure, a hookup so anonymous I could be anyone.
Except somehow, it didn’t feel like that. Not at all.
He brought his hand up, brushing a thumb over my chin in a way that was surprisingly tender. I couldn’t stop staring at him. For a split second, I forgot all the reasons this was crazy—the fact that I barely knew him, or that we were in the middle of a forest that seemed oddly quiet now.
He backed me into the nearest tree and I winced, expecting the bark to dig into my skin, but then realized it was padded with moss. I hadn’t noticed it before—then again, it was dark. And I was hardly paying attention to the trees, was I?
Faelan leaned in, close enough that his breath fluttered my hair. “Your heart is racing.”
I gave a shaky laugh that sounded nothing like me. “I wonder why.”
His mouth curved, slow and knowing. “You could leave.”
“I could,” I agreed. But I didn’t move.
His gaze flickered over my face, eyes burning feral green in the darkness. “But you won’t. You’re special.”
Heat flared in my cheeks at the way he said it. I felt him shift his weight, and his arm slipped around my waist. My skin tingled wherever he touched, like I was waking up to some new sense of awareness. A flutter of panic mingled with a pulse of excitement, both battling for the upper hand.
He dipped his head, and this time the kiss came slower, deeper. There was a confidence in it that nearly unraveled me. The scent of wet leaves and night air filled my senses as I melted against him. I fought to stay grounded, but he was pulling me under, making me forget how to think straight.
His hands skimmed my waist, slow and deliberate, as he guided me down. “You don’t have to hold yourself up. Let the land take you,” he murmured.
Instead of hard earth, I landed on a bed of leaves, as thick and plush as a pile of cushions. Was I imagining things? The forest floor in this part of the woods had been rough and uneven and littered with stones—I was sure of it.
Yet there I was, sprawled on a carpet of fallen foliage as soft as a mattress, and nowhere near as squeaky. Maybe the dim light was playing tricks on me. Maybe everything felt dreamlike because I was half out of my mind with adrenaline and need.
Either way, I didn’t fight it. My back pressed into the leaves as he lowered himself on top of me.
Faelan's hands were sure as he stripped away my clothes. I should’ve been besieged by mosquitoes and covered in goosebumps. But somehow, I wasn’t.
His gaze dragged over me, slow and deliberate. “You belong like this,” he said in a raw, primal voice.
He rose then, towering over me, his silhouette blocking out the moon. He shrugged out of his rough linen clothes and stood before me, naked and unashamed, and I couldn’t look away. His body was a landscape of muscled planes and shadows, and his cock? It was….
A lot.
Not only was it huge and gloriously hard, but even by the moonlight, I could see it was wound around with veins so thick it was practically ribbed.
Turgid—the word floated to my consciousness from a forbidden romance novel teenage-me had snuck from my aunt’s bookshelf.
A ridiculous word, I’d once thought. But not anymore.
He knelt between my legs, the sheer width of his muscular quads spreading my thighs wide. His fingers trailed up my inner thigh, and I trembled, my body aching with need as he sank a finger inside me. “I could drown in you.”
No one had ever told me something that hot. Never.
His broad finger was slick as he stroked my folds with my own arousal.
Once I was quivering with want, Faelan lowered himself over me and lined up his stiff cock, the thick head pressing against my entrance.
I squirmed eagerly, and my breath hitched in anticipation.
He pushed in, slow and steady, his gaze locked onto mine.
The raw, green earthiness of the forest engulfed us, as if the world itself was urging us on.
He was almost too big, stretching me to the limit, and I felt every last distended vein in his shaft…but I was so turned on it didn’t matter. My body put up a token resistance–but it was hungry with the need to be filled.
Faelan’s gaze locked onto mine, his eyes glowing like green flames in the night.
He pushed deeper, inch by girthy inch, and I gasped as my body stretched to accommodate him.
It was a raw, primal ache that bordered on too much.
But it was glorious too, a fierce pleasure that coursed through every nerve ending.
“Breathe,” he murmured. His voice was a low rumble that vibrated straight through me.
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath. I exhaled slowly, trying to relax into the sensation. He planted his knees harder, splaying my legs wider still as he filled me completely. My nails dug into his shoulders, and I gripped him as if the ground itself might fall away without him.
Our foreheads touched and his eyes blurred. “You feel like the earth after a storm,” he whispered, and his voice was rough with desire. “Wet and warm and alive.”
I couldn’t respond, couldn’t even form words.
All I could do was feel—the hard press of his body against mine, the throb of him inside me, the night air cool against my heated skin.
The forest seemed to hold its breath with us, the rustle of leaves and distant calls of nocturnal creatures fading into a hushed silence.
He pushed into me with purpose, and every movement claimed me as if I had always been his. I met his gaze and couldn’t look away. I could only lose myself in the rhythm he carved into me.
Somehow, eventually, the too-muchness ebbed, replaced by a building pleasure that coiled tight in my core. Each thrust sent waves of sensation through me, and each withdrawal was a sweet torment that left me craving more. I arched into him, urging him deeper, harder.
His eyes never moved from mine, holding me captive in their green depths. There was a feral intensity in his gaze that should have terrified me. But it didn’t. It called to something untamed within me that I hadn’t known existed.
“God, you feel…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My words dissolved into a moan.
Faelan didn’t respond with speech. Instead, he found his rhythm. It built and built until I thought I might shatter.
I clung to him harder. His skin was hot, feverish, and I could feel the muscles shifting beneath my touch. He lowered his lips to mine and claimed me with a fierce, demanding kiss.
The pleasure crested, and I came, crying out into his mouth as my channel convulsed around him.
But Faelan didn’t stop. He kept thrusting, his rhythm unbroken, driving me higher and higher.
It was nearly too much, and I tried to squirm away, but I was pinned under his delicious bulk.
And soon enough, I was squirming for an entirely different reason.
Somehow, I came again, the second orgasm barreling over me like a bulldozer churning up earth.
Still, his rhythm didn’t ebb.
My vision blurred and the forest spun around me.
All I could see, all I could feel, was Faelan—his body, his heat, his relentless thrusts.
I was winding up for yet another peak—or maybe I hadn’t finished cresting the second one.
No idea. I was making sounds like a wild animal now, and my cries echoed through the trees as my body shook with the force of my orgasm.
Only then did Faelan slow, his thrusts going deeper, more deliberate. He rumbled a low, guttural sound that seemed to resonate through the very earth beneath us. His body shuddered, and he came, his cock pulsing inside me.
He dropped his forehead to mine, both of us breathing hard, caught between what had just happened and what it might mean. I felt stripped down—not simply naked, but known. If he had told me to run, I wouldn’t have. I wasn’t sure I could anymore.
For a long while, we lay there, our bodies entwined, our breaths mingling. The forest was silent, as if it was holding its breath. And in that moment, I sensed something—a connection, deep and profound, to the natural world surrounding me. To Faelan. To everything.
The night settled around us. My pulse had slowed, but my skin still hummed with the weight of what we’d done. The forest felt different now—softer, deeper, like it had swallowed me whole.
Faelan lay beside me, one arm bent behind his head, watching the stars. He’d picked up some tiny leaves in his beard and he should have looked ridiculous, but the only thing I found myself thinking was how badly I wished we could stay like this forever.
Then—a buzz.
Not an insect—an electronic device. Faint at first, then another, muffled under the pile of my discarded clothes.
Faelan turned toward me, gaze steady, knowing. “The modern world never lets its hands off its own. No matter how far you run, it finds a way to whisper in your ear.”
I swallowed. “Let it whisper.”
Another buzz.
And then again.
Great. My phone picked that very moment to get a clear signal again? I clenched my jaw and ignored it. Whatever it was, it could wait. But then my ringtone sliced through the quiet…and a warning thudded somewhere deep inside me.
My work ringtone.
Not a text. Not an email. A call. And my boss never called unless the world was burning down. And even then, he’d have someone else make the call for him.
The air around me suddenly felt more fragile. The soft warmth of moments ago—how Faelan had held me, wrecked me, made me forget everything beyond this place—was already slipping away.
Faelan still hadn’t moved, but his presence shifted. He watched me the way the trees did, with the weight of something too old to be surprised, but too knowing to be indifferent.
I let the damn thing ring.
It stopped.
I exhaled, shoulders easing—
Then it rang again.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Ignore it. Just ignore it.
Faelan said, “A bird raised in a cage will always flinch when the door opens.”
I forced a laugh. “It’s just work.”
“And yet you carry its weight, even here.”
I reached for my clothes, snatching my phone just as the call went to voicemail. My screen glowed with texts, stacked one after the other in a relentless stream of urgency.
Boss: Sam, are you seeing this?
Boss: We need you to sign off—it can’t wait.
Boss: Please tell me you’re checking your email.
Boss: Call me. Now.
My chest tightened.
“I just have to mute it,” I said, but my fingertips had already tapped open my messages. The pull of obligation was too strong.
In my peripheral vision, Faelan moved.
Not abruptly, or even angrily. He simply rose, dressing as if this were preordained…and I’d sealed something the moment I touched that screen.
I hesitated. “It’s just one quick text.”
Faelan pulled his shirt over his head, his back to me. “No river flows in two directions. You choose the current, or it chooses for you.”
Something inside me twisted. “That’s dramatic.”
“Only to those who don’t see the turning of the tide.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
But he was already stepping into the trees—back into the wild as if he had never belonged to this moment at all.
And as I sat there, naked in the clearing with my stupid phone in hand and my stomach sinking, I had the feeling that I’d just made a powerful choice…and I’d chosen wrong.