13. Emma
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
emma
We didn’t make it all the way into the manor before he had his hands on me. On my hips. On my breasts. On my waist. We collided like two storm fronts, our groans as loud as thunder. He slammed me against the door, and it clicked closed.
I’d like to say I put up a fight, but fuck that shit. I’d been thinking about this since I’d left Bear Trees, since his note had gone under my pillow, since a week of composting toilets. He was mine, and I was his. We had hours, and we had to make them last.
His mouth found mine. I made a mewling, begging sound I might have been embarrassed by if I’d had a single brain cell left to spare.
He swallowed that sound whole. Then he spun me around and marched me backward into the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind us with a bang that rattled the cocktail glasses from Vixen’s bar.
“A week,” he growled against my throat. His stubble scraped a line of fire down to my collarbone. “You left me here to referee unionizing raccoons for a week.”
“You could’ve…”
His teeth grazed the spot where my pulse hammered, and the sentence fell out of my head entirely. “Could’ve?” he prompted.
“Uhm… Could’ve come to see me.”
“Somebody had to build the fence.” He got his hand in my hair, tipped my head back, and scrutinized me.
The smug alpha mask had dropped away, and something rawer shone beneath.
“You have no idea. Every night that bond turned terrified, I stood at that window and…” He stopped.
When he started over, his voice was rougher.
“Don’t leave the door open when you sleep.
I can feel you dreaming him, and I can’t get in there to fight it. To protect you.”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’ve opened the door, Logan. All the way. I want you in there while you’re in here.” I tapped my head.
I felt his control crack like a dam giving way. His hunger filtered into me; my relief seeped into him, a week of held breath finally let go all at once.
He lifted me off my feet, high enough that we were eye level with one another. I wrapped my legs around him, stroking his dick with the seam between my legs. He moaned.
Every word he wasn’t saying poured across our connection instead: mine, home, missed you, mine, God, Emma, mine.
I pressed kisses to his neck, up and down, devouring each inch, tasting his salty skin. Working my hips brought us torturously almost together. “Logan,” I whimpered.
Then I found his mouth and circled his tongue with mine. The floor creaked as we moved across our bedroom, and I glanced over my shoulder.
The bed had been made. Some shifter—not likely Logan—had made our bed while he was busy and I was gone. They’d tucked the corners. For half a second, I found it humorous. Then Logan eased me down on the luscious comforter and followed me onto the mattress, and nothing was funny at all.
He took his time. That was the thing about Logan that undid me every single time. For all the growling, for all the alpha, when it came down to it, he touched me like I was the last good thing in a burning world. Slow hands. Leisurely mouth.
He mapped his way down me like he’d forgotten the terrain in a week and meant to relearn every cell, the curve of my hip where the rainbow tattoo lived, the soft of my belly, lower, until my back arched off the cover and my hands fisted in his hair, and I stopped being able to tell my thoughts from his.
There, he sent when I gasped. Right there. I remember.
Through our link, I felt him feel my pleasure looping into his, doubling, his satisfaction feeding back into me exponentially until the two of us were a closed circuit with no ground and nowhere for the current to go but up.
“Logan,” I rasped, trembling. “I swear if you make me wait—”
“You’ll what?” His grin shaped his tone. “Cheat?”
“I’ll take what’s mine.”
He laughed.
Then I groped until I got a hold of his shoulders, flipped us with a strength that surprised us both, and straddled him.
The last of the evening light poured in through the westerly window. His view of me slipped into my mind. My rainbow hair fell around my shoulders like a feral aurora.
So sexy, Emma. His hands came to my hips, gripping, and his eyes blazed up at me. “That’s my girl,” he breathed, reverent as a prayer. “Take it. Take everything.”
I splayed my hands on his pecs and tucked my knees on either side of him. Rocking my hips back and forth, I moved against his hardness, twisting until he slipped into me with his own thrust. Fuck, yes, Logan, yes.
He pressed his head into the pillow beneath him and gritted his teeth.
My mouth twisted in a smile, and I brought my hips down on him hard.
It’s been a week, Emma… His warning pleased me. Missed you so much.
A week for me to plan how to make you lose control. Another hard thrust.
He howled in my mind.
But I didn’t stop. Couldn’t.
We found the rhythm we always found, the one that seemed older than either of us. The earth’s heartbeat rose through the manor, the mattress, and the bones of us.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
He let me set the pace exactly long enough to lose himself to it. His wolf came up in him, and he grasped my hips and rolled me under him again. I’m going to show you every way I’ve wanted you since you’ve been gone.
I let him. God, I let him.
His forehead dropped to mine, our breath the same breath, the bond now so open between us there was no telling where I ended and he began.
The manor creaked, and the earth groaned.
Harder and harder. The bed shook. Somewhere far off, I was distantly aware that the window glass had frosted over and a thin line traversed it. Fucked so hard we broke a window.
When I finally shattered, I felt him release with me, both of us at once.
I screamed his name, and he bellowed mine.
Our current had finally found the ground it had been looking for—each other—and the whole room went white at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with him.
After, I lay boneless and steaming across his chest while his heart thundered under my ear and slowly, slowly returned to normal. His fingers traced idle circles on my spine, the same absent hypnotic motion he always fell into, a wordless there-you-are, we’re-both-still-here.
“I required soothing,” he informed the ceiling, his voice hoarse. “I said I’d be a terrible loser. I stand by it.”
“You lost the race and won everything after. That’s not losing. That’s just being obnoxious about it.”
“Alpha’s privilege.” He tugged a strand of my hair, wound it around his finger. Then the teasing disappeared. “Don’t do that to me again. A week. You didn’t even let me come to the conclave.”
“I had a job.”
“I know.” He pressed his mouth to the top of my head.
“I know you did. Doesn’t mean I have to like the bond going muffled while you were in Bear Trees, except for your nightmares.
” His arm tightened around me, all that easy strength gathering me in close like he refused to let go.
“Next time you go, you take me, or you leave the door open, or you don’t go.
Those are the terms. I am the alpha, and I get to make four little words, too. ”
“That was more than four.”
“Sue me.”
I laughed into his skin, and the sound came out more strangled than I meant it to.
Under the joke was the gray hole in the southern map, and Jace’s two dead drones, and Marcus’s blind face tipped toward a dark he swore was digging in and feeding.
We had this. We had right now, the cracked window, the warm bedsheets, and the whole ridiculous, fragile miracle of a camp full of clans who’d stopped trying to kill each other.
We had us for tonight and maybe for a few more.
I decided, lying there in the dark with my mate’s heartbeat under my ear, that I was going to take every hour that the war would let me steal. Starting with the next one.
Tonight, there was only this room, this stubborn man, and the two of us stealing back every single thing the coming war meant to take.
Tomorrow, we’d count what we could lose.
Tonight, we were everything.