Claimed
FOURTEEN
Jake
I carried my wife over the threshold of our home, and she was crying before I got the door shut behind us. Not the happy kind. I’d learned every one of Autumn’s cries this past year, and this was the one from the pit of her stomach.
“Hey, sweetheart.” I set her down slowly, keeping her in the circle of my arms. Around us the cabin glowed with candles on every safe surface, flowers, the bed visible through the bedroom door turned down with rose petals that one of Ivy’s sisters was going to get thanked for at a much better moment than this one.
My bride stood in the middle of all that romance in her wedding dress and sobbed.
“Oh, God, Jake, I’m so sorry. It’s our wedding night and I’m a mess.” She swiped at her face. “Stetson’s never slept anywhere apart from me. What if he wakes up and I’m not there?”
“Come here.”
I sat us down on the big leather couch facing the cozy fire in the fireplace, and gathered her against my chest. I let her cry it out. Patience with this particular woman I’d taught myself, and I had one more night’s worth in me. Hell, I had a lifetime’s worth. That was the whole vow.
“Listen to me, little Mama.” I tipped her chin up so she could see I meant it.
“Right now, that boy is asleep with my mother and father watching over him. They've raised two babies, hundreds of goats, and never lost a single one of them. He’s not scared—he’s loved.
You built him a world so safe he can sleep anywhere in it.
That’s not you failing him tonight. That’s you succeeding.
” I swiped a tear off her cheek. “We’ll collect him tomorrow morning.
He’ll be so happy to see you. I promise you.
Tonight the two of you are both exactly where you belong. ”
“You can’t know that,” she whispered, still sobbing but she’d stopped shaking.
“I know my mother. She was born to be one, and will be the best grandmother to him, too.”
She laughed, wet and small, into my shirt. I held my wife in the candlelight and asked absolutely nothing of the moment—though my body conducted its own separate meeting about the woman in my lap, and had been since she grabbed my shirt and kissed me like she’d been saving it for years.
But this was Autumn. Firsts mattered. And no first of ours was ever going to start with her crying.
“I’ll do whatever my wife wants. You want to lay here in my arms, I’ll hold you and comfort you all night.
Or do you want me to give you something else to think about?
Like us. My wife. Because I can make you feel better, pumpkin, I promise you.
Everything you’re worried about, we’ll take care of together tomorrow.
Say the word, and I’ll help you forget everything tonight. ”
She stayed there, her breathing evening out against me.
No answer. That was the answer. A man doesn’t survive years of night missions without learning to read a silence. So I did the hardest thing of my life. I pressed a kiss to her hair, and stood with her in my arms. I carried her to the other room.
“Take the bed, sweetheart. It’s been a big day. I’ll take the couch.”
She blinked up at me, lashes wet. “Jake—it’s our wedding night.”
“And we’ve got about ten thousand more nights coming,” I reminded, and I even meant it, which was the remarkable part. “Baby steps. I told you I’d wait, and I don’t say things if I don’t mean them. Go to sleep. I’ll be right here if you need anything.”
I placed her down and kissed her forehead. For certain reasons, I grabbed a pillow to take with me, holding it in front of my groin.
“Goodnight, Mrs. McCall.”
“Jake? Why are you carrying that pillow like that?”
“This?”
“Turn around.”
At the bedroom door, I did as asked. I turned around, the pillow still strategically placed.
Autumn stood in the candlelight in her wedding dress, hair coming loose from its pins, eyes swollen from crying yet fixated on me. A year’s worth of walls came down so fast I swear I heard the dust settle.
“I did it again, not intentionally. You reached for me and I handed you a reason to sleep on the couch, and you took it, because that’s what you do, you take whatever I give you and never ask for more.
” She crossed the room to me. Took the pillow out of my hands and dropped it on the floor like evidence entered and dismissed.
“I’m done being afraid of wanting something good. ”
Her hands slid up my chest, over the buttons of the shirt she’d already grabbed once today, and her eyes came up to mine, wide open, nothing held back for later. “Tell me what you want.”
A man waits a year, he builds up an idea of how a moment like this might feel. My idea had been small compared to the real thing. And she was asking what I wanted. Nobody in my life had ever asked. There had never been an answer this easy.
“I don’t want the couch, or the pillow, and ten thousand nights from now can wait. I want my wife. Now. I want you—I think I’ve wanted you for so long I stopped being able to tell the ache apart from breathing.”
“Then stay.” She led me back to bed.
“Autumn, are you sure? Because slow is still on the table.”
“Jake.” She reached up and took my face in both hands, the way I’d taken hers before. “Kiss your wife.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Nothing between us this time, I kissed her thoroughly, claiming her. She moaned into my mouth, and her fingers went into my hair, and mine went into hers, scattering pins across the floorboards.
I found the top button of her dress, my forehead against hers. “How many buttons?”
“Thirty-five,” she chuckled.
“Couldn’t make it easy on me?”
“Nope. Take your time,” she smiled against my lips.
I turned her around and gave them the full workout, one at a time, my mouth following my fingers—across her shoulders, the curve of her neck, down the warm skin over her spine—until she was trembling for a whole new reason and the dress slid down to her waist. I stood and helped her out of it, and my wife stood in the candlelight and let me look at her.
“First time I’ve seen you,” I said, touring her body and managing my own breathing. “Every curve, Autumn.”
“The candles are being generous—”
“Don’t say that.” I tipped her chin up, held her eyes. “No bad words allowed about my wife on our wedding night. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, whether you’re wrangling a toddler, or a bar crowd. But this body of yours is for me. Mine.”
The last of her shyness left. She stepped out of her boots, closed the distance, and set about my shirt buttons with steady hands, slower than I deserved.
Her palms mapped every inch she uncovered like she was finally being paid back for a year of not touching.
When her fingers traced the scar low on my ribs, she looked up.
“Someday I’ll tell you about every scar on me.”
“Someday,” she agreed. “Tonight I just want to feel them.”
We lay on the bed. I kept my word—every first got its moment, and I narrated them against her skin. “First time I’ve kissed you here.” My lips dipped down between her full breasts, then my mouth across her nipples.
“Mm. Jake.”
“First time you’ve said my name like that.”
She pressed me onto my back. She got brave, then bold, then downright dangerous, wrapping her hands, then her lips, around my aching cock.
The sounds my wife made in the back of her throat rewired me for life.
Nothing in my past prepared me for my wife like this, with a year of patience finally off its leash.
My control had about a second to snap, and I let her hear exactly what she was doing to me.
“First time—Christ, pumpkin—first time you’ve touched me there.” I hissed and pulled her off before she ended me right there. It was my turn to please. I picked her up and planted her wet center on my face.
“Ooh. Jake.” Her nails bit into my scalp, her breath ragged, her whole body pulled taut as new fence wire.
“Ride my face, baby. First time.” If I suffocated the first time between her thighs I’d die happy, too.
Her hips circled, gyrated, ground into me.
I memorized the spot that produced the best moans and didn’t stop flicking and sucking there until she shook and cried out and came on me for the first time.
“Fuck, how’d I get so lucky to have a sweet wife who tastes so good? ”
“Mm. I-I need—”
“I know what you need, Mrs. McCall. Me.” I flipped her onto her back and hovered over her.
Our fingers laced and I pressed them into the pillow beside her head, and waited until her eyes found mine—wide open, wet again, but nothing like before.
“I’ve got you. That’s the vow. Every night, starting now. ”
“Then take me. I’m yours, Jake. I think I always was.”
“I knew the moment I met you, you would be.” I kissed the words onto her mouth, the hard press of my cock teasing her entrance.
But there was another first to be had yet—we had to negotiate that one.
Men I served with never made it home to meet their babies.
I’d carried that weight a long, long time.
I was the one who got to come home—and I intended to live like it.
“Are you on the pill, sweetheart?”
“No insurance. Remember?”
I grinned, assuming so.
“Why the smile?”
“Because I know your ex is less than half the man I am. But there’s one thing he got that I didn’t yet.
Something I’ve dreamed about since you agreed to marry me.
I want to put my baby inside of you.” My cock twitched for emphasis, growing even bigger.
I bucked against her thigh, like a stallion ready to stake his claim.
“Fuck, feel what you do to me? The thought of getting you pregnant, seeing our baby grow inside of you. I want that. If you’re not ready, I understand.
We can use one of these condoms Ivy conveniently supplied on the nightstand. ”
“A baby? You want that?”
“Yeah. I do. We took vows today. We said this would be forever. I’ll work hard.
We’ll raise a little family. We can start tonight or next year.
Your choice.” I hissed and jerked, close to entering her.
I buried my face in her neck, licking and sucking there.
“Condom or not, because I’m about to bust, you got me so excited for my first time inside of you. ”
“Ooh, Jake. No. No condom.”
“No condom?”
She grinned herself. “People will think we’re crazy, but I don’t care anymore. I want Stetson to have a sibling.”
“Just one? Twins run in my family, sweetheart. Every generation.”
“Oh, my God. Last week I thought I could lose Stetson. Now you’re ready to give me more children?”
I could come any second just talking about this. “No condom?” I confirmed it again.
She wrapped her legs around my middle. “Then ride, cowboy.”
“Fuck, yes, baby. Get ready for our first. First of many.”
I reached down between us and notched at her entrance. My hard cock like steel, I entered her heat slowly, savoring every inch. After a year of goodnights on the wrong side of her door, all of it arrived at once, and I had to grit my teeth against the sweet, tight clench of her just to last.
“Oh, make it fit, Jake,” she relaxed into it even more, letting me fully in.
I covered her mouth with mine, our moans swallowed up as I began to move.
In and out, claiming the woman who’d gone from friend to wife to lover at last. Her gasp broke against my lips, her body rising to meet mine like she’d been made to match me.
I set a pace I couldn’t keep for long, every first time with her tonight my undoing—knowing there wouldn’t ever be any last times.
Just my wife, unafraid, wanting something good and taking it from me, her heels locked at my waist, and her nails scraping my back, and her voice cracking apart on my name as she came undone beneath me.
The sight of Autumn McCall letting go at last, finished me too, my face buried in her neck, her name the only word I had left in the world, her body milking every drop of my seed from me.
“My wife,” I moaned. We collapsed as one. After that there were no more words for a while. Just candlelight. A year of patience paid off with interest.
Later, she lay sprawled across my chest, tracing lazy circles through the hair there, both of us wrecked and glowing like the survivors of a storm.
“I liked our firsts,” she said, drowsy and smug in a way I planned to spend my life encouraging. “We’re doing all of that again.”
“Seconds. Thirds. Plenty of time yet before pancakes.” I reminded her, and felt her laugh against my ribs.
I pulled the quilt over my wife and held her while she went boneless into sleep, her ring hand splayed over my heart, right where her son’s little fist used to land back when a couch and a photograph were all I got of this. The candles burned down. The cabin ticked and settled around us.
First night of the rest of our lives. I pressed my lips to her hair.
Turned out we’d been telling Stetson the truth all along. You keep trying—tomorrow, and the day after—until the walking works.
Then one day you stop holding the rail, and you’re home.