Chapter 1 #2
He raised his eyes, staring at her with such hope, such tenderness that her breath caught in her throat.
He reached up with one finger and traced the outline of her bottom lip, making her insides flood with heat.
His finger trailed down over her chin, down her neck to rest on her pulse.
The first place he’d ever touched her, twenty years before.
He breathed deeply, and the flames in his eyes jumped and brightened with arousal.
“One step at a time. If I can tolerate it? Then we’ll talk about…about…”
She hated that he couldn’t even say it. “Turning me.”
Instead of repeating her words, he skimmed his hands down the sides of her body, his palms landing on the swell of her hips to flip her onto her back.
He lay on his side beside her, leaning over her, his fingers trailing softly inward, slipping over the triangular thatch of soft, pink curly hair, insistently seeking their target through her damp, quivering flesh.
Darcy’s breathing changed as her eyes grew heavy and half-masted. The tips of his fingers brushed lightly over the hidden, sensitive nub, teasing her, and she moaned lightly, arching against his hand, letting her eyes fall closed. “We have to…we have to talk, Jaaaack…”
His fingers moved away as he rolled on top of her, bracing his weight, positioning himself, teasing her opening with the head of his rigid sex.
She skimmed her fingers down his back until they rested on his hips.
She clenched her fingers into the hard muscles under his skin, trying to push him forward, finally opening her eyes when he hovered motionless above her.
His eyes burned, snapping and sparking like flames, licking higher, devouring everything in their path. His lips tilted up.
We’ll talk, baby. After this.
His lips melted into hers as he pushed his entire body forward, his swollen length driving into her body in one possessive motion, filling her to the hilt. Darcy cried out, thrusting her body upward, curving into his as her nails bit into his hips.
“Darcy,” he breathed.
She opened her eyes.
Tell me.
She smiled at him dreamily, holding his eyes.
After a lifetime of waiting to hear the words, she knew they still felt raw to Jack.
He told her that, almost as much as wanting to join his body to hers, he’d wanted to hear those words, lying awake at night for two decades, imagining how they’d sound coming from her mouth.
She knew how he’d hungered for them. For the simple, perfect reassurance they offered him.
I love you, Jack.
He trembled, and she felt his sex pulse inside of her. And then he moved rhythmically, slowly, caressing her wet heat, claiming her lips, swirling his tongue around hers as the pressure built between her legs.
He leaned his head back, the message in his wild, glowing eyes clear in her head.
I will still be loving you the last second I breathe.
And it was the truth. He would never, ever be free of her. His binding to her was forever, no matter what, while hers could be compromised if he turned her. She knew it was the reason he was so anxious not to discuss it.
She reached up to hold his face between her hands, seizing his eyes and forcing him to hear her.
So will I. No matter what.
His lips crashed down on hers again, and she tasted his fears as he thrust into her again and again.
She rose to meet him, arching her back into a vibrating bow until she finally exploded beneath him, bucking and shuddering as he howled her name and buried his face in her neck, the aftershocks making his arms flex and relax around her until they both calmed and fell asleep, sated.
Darcy took a trembling breath, wishing she still had a bracing sip of coffee left in her broken cup. No matter how much solace and fulfillment they’d found in one another’s arms, the fact remained that he hadn’t agreed to do the only thing that would save him, and Darcy was running out of time.
Her phone buzzed beside her, snapping her out of her troubling thoughts.
“Hey, Will.”
“Hey, kid. We on for tomorrow?”
“It’s as close as I’m going to get it,” Darcy said, shuffling her notes to find the formula written in a black Sharpie on a piece of yellow notebook paper. “You got the phosphoryl chloride?”
“I got it.”
“The alpha-pinene? Just in case?”
“I’ve got everything. Everything’s just waiting for you. I would have synthesized it last week and tested it out on him.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered if it suppressed a common shift, Will. It has to work at the full moon. He won’t trust it any other time. He has to know it works. He has—”
“To know how it feels before he considers ever letting you try it.”
“Yes,” breathed Darcy quietly.
“Is that the final plan, then? He tries it this weekend during the full moon, and if he stays in human form, he’ll turn you?”
“He’ll barely even talk about it. Whenever I bring it up, he…He distracts me.”
Willow chuckled lightly. “You two are like rabbits.”
Darcy’s mouth quirked up in a grin. She couldn’t argue there. But she could give it right back. “And I suppose you and Amory are living in a state of chaste friendship.”
“You want details? About your brother?”
Darcy made a gagging noise like she was sticking her finger down her throat. “What? I couldn’t hear you. I was too busy throwing up in my mouth.”
“Anyway, Amory and I aren’t living together. Technically.”
“Neither are Jack and I. Technically.”
And yet, Darcy knew that Amory spent every night at Willow’s old Victorian on Main Street, and although Darcy had good intentions about keeping up appearances, she hadn’t spent a night outside of Jack’s bed since Julien and Lela’s binding.
There were moments when she tried to reason with herself, when she tried to tell herself to hold back some small, obscure part of her heart, just in case she lost him, but such moments were overwhelmed by the force of her love for him, by her desperate desire to spend every possible moment near him until the equinox.
“Hey!” exclaimed Willow. “You evaded the question.”
Darcy sighed. “That’s my final plan, Will. If the potion can suppress Jack’s Pleine Lune shift, I want him to turn me.”
“And if he won’t?”
“Then I’ll have to find someone who will.” The words tumbled out of Darcy’s mouth before she could decide whether or not to share them with Willow. She hadn’t shared this part of her plan with anyone, not even Jack. “I won’t lose him. I can’t.”
Willow was silent on the other end of the line, and Darcy wondered what her friend was thinking.
She wondered if she’d try to talk her out of it, or if she remembered Lela’s attack on Amory, the fear she must have felt seeing him lying there in a pool of blood, a long, vicious slash across his chest.
“I get it, kid. Can’t say I like it, though.”
“Not all of us are born different, like Jack…or you.”
Over the past few weeks, since discovering her nature, Willow’s skills and abilities had exploded into a full cache of spells and powers, sometimes surprising the heck out of Willow and whoever she was with.
“It’s a hard life.”
“Yeah,” Darcy deadpanned. “You seem very oppressed by it.”
“That’s not a fair comparison. I’m not a shapeshifter. For me, it’s like freeing something I always knew was inside of me.”
“Maybe it’ll be like that for me too, Will. I’ve been bound to Jack for longer than I ever lived my life without him. Maybe in a weird way, it’ll feel familiar to me too.”
Darcy waited for Willow to come back with a snappy retort, but she spoke thoughtfully, softly when she replied. “If you can even convince him. It has to be him, Darce.”
No, it doesn’t, Darcy disagreed in her head. If Jack won’t, I will convince Julien or Lela.
“Right,” she answered, unwilling to get into the matter further with Willow.
“Tomorrow at ten? We’ll play chemistry?”
“I’ll be there. You bring the magic.”
“I’ll do what I can. Night, kid.”
“Night, Will.”
Darcy pressed the red end button on her iPhone and looked up through the window at Jack’s house. She saw him in the living room, sitting on the couch where they’d made love for the first time one month ago. He looked up at her, his eyes catching hers, his face softening with love for her.
Dinner’s almost ready. Coming in soon?
She smiled at him and nodded. Ten minutes. Coq au Vin?
Tourtiére, he told her, referring to a typical Quebecois meat pie. But that’s the second course.
What’s the first?
His eyes ignited. Copper coils of burning light held hers from across the driveway.
You’ll just have to come down here to find out.
Her heart skipped a beat, and her sex clenched involuntarily with need. His lips twitched, and his tongue darted out to lick them. Damn him for knowing her so well.
Two minutes, she amended, forcing herself to turn in her chair, away from the window.
She straightened up her desk, placing the books into neat piles and the notes into a tidy stack with the formula on top.
She looked down at the trash can and stared at the two halves of her broken coffee cup sitting forlornly.
She picked them up and placed them, side by side, on top of the formula, like a paperweight.
I belong to you, and you belong to me, she thought. No matter what, I will be there beside you at the re-binding. No matter what, you won’t go alone.
For what is bound cannot be broken.