Chapter 17 #2
I was across the room in two steps. The eggs and glass of water hit the night stand clumsily.
My knee hit the mattress and the bed dipped and she rolled into me, easy as water finding the low spot, her body fitting against mine like it had been waiting its whole life to land somewhere.
Her face went to my chest, the same place it had been all night, and her fingers fisted in my shirt and pulled.
My scent surged up, cedar, warmer than the sharp territorial thing I’d thrown out in the booth. Deeper. The kind that just means I’m here. Nowhere else I need to be.
Hers came up to meet it. Honey and chamomile and warm cream, blooming off her skin sweet enough to drop straight past every rational system I had and land in the back of my skull. Rich. Alive. An Omega buried in her Alpha’s scent and liking it.
I made the sound again, that low thing under my voice, the one I hadn’t known I could make before last night. It went through my chest into hers and she answered it, a whine so soft it nearly wasn’t there. The two sounds met in the gap between us and clicked.
“Iz.” It came out wrecked. Even though I’d spoken to Cillian and Bram my voice was still rough with sleep and with the rest of it, years of my body trying to say one thing and getting heard at last.
She tilted her face up. Her eyes were huge without the glasses, tired at the rims, soft with half-sleep.
She mouthed a word at me. No sound. I read it off her lips.
Stay.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Her fingers tightened in my shirt. The whine in her chest got stronger, longer, working through notes I felt in my back teeth and my spine and somewhere that had been empty so long I’d stopped noticing it.
I kissed her.
Not careful. Not a decision I’d run through before doing it.
I kissed her the way you breathe after you’ve been under too long, desperate and grateful and with no technique at all.
Her mouth was warm honey and sleep and something under both of those that was just her.
Her hand slid off my chest to the back of my neck, fingers in the short hair at my nape, dragging me down harder than a woman that size should be able to.
The alpha need in me broke open. I felt it go, my scent blowing out in a cedar wave that had nothing to do with choosing and everything to do with years of wanting.
The claiming note I’d been sporadically feeling since the axe-throwing place came up through me like a tide and I let it, this time, let it swell and crest and pour out of me, because she was here and reaching for me and the professional distance I’d kept like a religion was ash.
Her back hit the mattress. I came down over her carefully, some part of me still awake enough not to crush her, and her legs came apart for me so easily that the sound out of me was barely a man’s. A groan dragged up from the base of my spine, dark, finally off the leash.
She arched. Her whine changed, longer, lower, the mate-call from the booth but turned inside out. Not a thing sent to the world. A sound made for me. Private and unbearable and locked into my own like a key going home.
“All this time.” It came out against her throat, into the skin where her pulse was going fast and sure.
“All this time I sat next to you and told myself—” I couldn’t finish it.
My mouth went to her neck, the spot under her ear where her scent went thick, steamed milk and gold honey, warm off her racing blood, thick enough to taste.
I breathed her in and my hips pushed forward and the sound she made whited out the edges of everything.
Her nails went down my back through the thin cotton, sharp and bright and real. A choice. She’d never touched anyone with all of herself, and she was choosing, now, to leave marks.
I pulled back enough to see her face. Her lips were swollen. Her eyes were blown, the green eaten up by black, the same thing that had taken Bram and taken me in the booth, but on her it looked like a door kicked open. Every wall she’d ever built, gone.
She mouthed again. No sound, her voice still refusing words. I read it anyway. Every shape her lips made, I could read.
Yours.
“Yours,” I said, holding her eyes. “But only if you want this. Nod for me.”
Her gaze didn’t waver. She nodded once, fierce and certain, then pulled me back down by the nape of my neck.
The cedar went over. That’s the only way I can put it, my scent burning past warm into something darker, bourbon left too near a flame, dense and caught and carrying a heat that had nothing to do with temperature. Years of it. Finally let off.
My hands found the hem of Bram’s coat and slid it off her shoulders.
The silk hissed away down her skin, and what was under it was nothing I’d ever let myself picture, because picturing it would’ve meant admitting what I wanted, and admitting what I wanted would’ve meant pulling apart every careful story I’d told myself about why Isobel Gretan made me feel like I was standing too close to the sun.
She was pale. Fine-boned. The small frame that surprised the fans who only knew the warrior voices, so slight that the grip of her hands on my shoulders felt like proof of something.
A body that had been punished for years just for being what it was, bare now and reaching for me with nothing left in the way.
I kissed her sternum. The whine hummed against my mouth.
I kissed the hollow of her throat where the honey pooled. Her back came off the bed.
I kissed lower, and the sound she made, voiceless, a rush of breath shaped like my name, hit me like a circuit finishing. Signal received.
There was nothing hesitant about what came after.
It was raw and loud in a way the soundproofed walls of her home studio had never had to deal with, two people who’d spent years denying their own bodies finally letting go of every bit of it at once.
Her hands found my skin. Mine found hers. The clothes came off in pieces, a shirt over my head, fabric shoved aside, too rushed to be graceful. And then nothing between us. Just heat and skin and the plain fact of touching after years of careful, professional, killing distance.
The cedar and bourbon wrapped round the honey and milk. Not fighting it. Not swallowed by it. Fused. One scent out of two that had always been built for each other, finally allowed in the same room with nothing in between.
Her fingers dug into my shoulders as I settled between her thighs. The heat of her branded against my skin, her scent thick enough to taste, sweet enough to drown in.
I’d imagined this. A thousand times. In hotel rooms after conventions, in the back of black cars between studios, in the goddamn booth when her voice wrapped around me like a physical touch.
Always shoved it down. Always told myself it was just chemistry, just admiration, just the professional respect of one artist for another.
Liar.
The first press of her body against mine, no barriers, no excuses, locked every muscle I had.
Her breath hitched, her nails bit deeper, and the sound that tore from her wasn’t a whine, it was a broken, breathless yes that my name had been carved into.
My mouth crashed back to hers, swallowing the sound, swallowing the taste of her, the honey and cream and something darker beneath, something that was only ever for me.
She was small beneath me. Not fragile, never that, but delicate in a way that made the strength in her grip, the way her thighs locked around my hips, feel like a goddamn revelation.
Her body moved with mine like we’d done this a hundred times before, like her muscles remembered the rhythm of me before her mind did.
The first slide of skin against skin, her back arching, my hands gripping her hips, sent a growl ripping up my throat, low and rough and completely beyond my control.
Her eyes flew open. Green and blown, pupils swallowing the iris, her lips parted on a silent gasp as I rolled my hips again, just to feel her take me in.
The cedar in my scent spiked, the bourbon note burning hotter, and her scent answered, thicker, sweeter, the honeyed warmth of her slick coating my skin where we pressed together.
I could feel her, wet and ready and so fucking mine that my vision whited out for a second.