30. Emma
CHAPTER THIRTY
emma
Six-Mile Manor
Midnight
“I’m going to get a drink,” Logan growled. “Want anything?”
“Surprise me.”
He left our bedroom without another word.
The casserole dish sat empty in the kitchen sink, and the water-damaged box sat closed on Logan’s desk.
Dr. Wise and my mother had finally gone off to their own tasks, arguing amiably about filing systems. The manor had gone quiet around the single worst piece of good news anyone had ever handed us.
Acheron was a grieving anchor with a monster inside him. The only crack in the fortress was the man underneath. Mend or end. Weeks from now, I was going to walk into a dome and find out which option he would choose.
I should have been studying. I could have poured myself into an all-nighter like I used to do in college, a hundred forms to drill and a price to keep trying to outthink.
Instead, I stood in the middle of the bedroom I shared with Logan and decided that I didn’t want to spend one more hour being the multimorph.
I’d been the multimorph for months without a break, at a conclave, at a beheading, at every significant event in the previous weeks. I’d been offered a crown, and I’d been the multimorph walking back into a camp that had bowed instead of laughed. Exhaustion barely summed it all up.
Tonight, I wanted to be Emma. Just Emma. Sophia’s smart-mouthed kid, the rainbow vet from Willow Creek. I was a woman with weeks left, and a man in the next room fixing a drink like our world wasn’t about to end.
And our bond was open.
God, the bond was open. My brain kept snagging on him being fully in my head again. It nearly undid me even more than being with Logan in our bedroom. I had lived behind a wall of my own making, feeling him only as a warmth on the far side of it.
Tonight, I’d finally shared the cost, and he’d handed me back a refusal to accept it. It mirrored my refusal of the cost. Our connection could finally flow freely again.
I felt him the way I used to. All of him. The exhaustion. The iron. The soul-fire gone quiet under his ribs. And under all of it, running steady as a pilot light, the reality that had never once wavered in the whole disaster of our lives.
He loved me past the edge of sense.
And, shit, he was horny for every part of me. Though he was trying not to show it.
A grin twisted my face. Damn, I want all your inches. So sexy. I pushed the thought toward him, relishing the ability to communicate directly with him. Have you met my mate? He’s the sexiest beast on two legs.
He tripped on the edge of an area rug. What?
You’re sexy as fuck.
You are.
Believe I’ll take my right as your fated mate. Now.
Emma… We don’t have time. We have to prepare.
I’m not taking no for an answer, Logan. Prepare thyself.
His laughter echoed in my head, and I went to find him.
He was crouched at the hearth in the dining room in nothing but a pair of gray sweats slung low, feeding the new flames. The firelight moved over the muscles of his back.
“I thought you were making drinks,” I said.
“You’re cold. I can feel it through the bond.”
“I was hoping you’d warm me up.”
He lifted his head, and his shoulders went still. Through the bond, I felt him register my determined intention, the change in me, the decision I’d made, the way I’d set the multimorph down at the threshold like a coat I was sick of wearing.
Emma. Not a question.
“Don’t,” I commanded. “Don’t ask me if I’m okay, and don’t tell me I should be resting or training, and do not, Logan Blackwood, say one single word about the dome.” I stopped beside him at the hearth, hooked my hand under his arm, and tugged.
He didn’t budge. “What are you doing?”
“I have been the multimorph since September. I’m off the clock. For one night only, I’m nobody’s savior, nobody’s weapon, and nobody’s prophecy. Except yours.” I wagged my eyebrows. “If you’ll have me.”
He slowly rose out of the crouch, unfolding to his full height. The expression on his face made my heart pound. He didn’t wear his smug alpha mask. He wasn’t the war-planner. Just a man looking at the one he’d spent months afraid of losing.
“If I’ll have you,” he repeated, low, and the sound dropped between my legs and lit a fire. “Woman, I have been dying to have you.”
“Then quit poking the fire and come poke me.” I winked at him.
He barked a laugh and bounded across the room. When he reached me, he cupped my face in both his hands.
He brought his mouth down on mine and devoured me.
I gripped the waistband of those gray sweats and dragged him against me, and his growl rolled straight down the open bond and blazed inside me.
There she is, he sent, and his desire exploded across the link. A wildfire burst through, blazing over my skin. There’s my Emma.
All of me, I promised and meant it. Open. No wall. Feel it?
He shoved dozens of images of me through the bond, along with all the desire he felt.
I took three steps backward, caught the hem of my T-shirt, and pulled it over my head. My shorts followed. Then I quirked an eyebrow and shook my breasts at him. They bounced back and forth.
His eyes went dark and dragged down me. His inner wolf howled. What’s that move called?
Scrunching my nose, I thought a moment. Believe that’s breasting boobily.
Definitely boobily. Where’d you learn that one?
Instinct… or maybe I read it somewhere.
Mind showing me that one again?
How ’bout something a little different? I whirled and bent over, pointing my ass directly at him. I was being brazen, wanton, and absolutely reveling in the reaction my teasing caused in our bond.
What are you doing?
I blew him a kiss. Flirting with you.
Making it impossible for me to last.
Oh, you’ll last, Logan, and when we’re done, we’ll go again.
He stalked toward me, and I whirled around and raced back to the bedroom, where neither of us had slept in days. His footsteps sounded heavy behind me. He hooked his arm around my waist before I reached the bed and swung me around to face him.
His eyes flashed, and he pushed his hand through my hair. He made a fist and pulled me close. “My rainbow vet,” he murmured, bringing his mouth close to mine. “My beautiful, lovely mate. Forever mine.”
I dropped my head and pressed my mouth to his scar. It was the reminder of the time I’d almost lost him, and every time I pressed my lips to it, gratitude flooded me. He still had a heartbeat, and my fix still held. Then I dragged my tongue over it.
“Still beating,” he said, his fingers still laced through my hair. “You did good work, Doc.”
“Damn right I did.” I bit him just below the scar, and his breath caught. “Best work I ever did, Logan.”
He pressed kisses down my neck. “So far.”
My lips traced the hard planes of his body, following the line of his chest hair down to the waistband of his gray sweats. I shoved my hands beneath the fabric and forced the sweats to the floor.
He groaned, released my hair, stepped out of his sweats, and then scooped me into his arms. “I’m going to eat you out on the dining room table, Emma, so I can picture it in my head every time we eat in there.”
“What?” I squealed and squirmed, but he didn’t release me from his arms as he carried me back into the dining room. “Not sure I want to see myself with spread legs on the table every time we’re eating in there.”
I do.
Carefully, he laid me down on the tablecloth on the dining room table and took a seat in the chair at the end. Then he buried his face between my legs, lapping at the hidden places of me while the fire threw our shadows over the walls.
I grabbed a fistful of his hair and worked my hips against him. This. This is the thing worth keeping the world ordinary for. This.
He hooked my legs over his shoulders and devoured me until I went flying over the edge of orgasm, colors exploding behind my eyelids.
“Fuck, Logan,” I panted.
“Again,” he said. “But first let me see.”
“Fucking bossy.” I puckered my lips in a pout.
“Better believe it.” He sat back in the dining room chair and studied me through half-closed eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I’m going to see every time I sit in this chair.”
He grabbed my ankles and pulled me off the table into his arms. The tablecloth came with me, and the centerpieces crashed to the floor.
“No way that table was going to hold me without crashing,” he said as he carried me to our bedroom.
“Like the table we killed in the cabin?” I giggled. “Who had to clean that up?”
“Fuck if I know. Could have been any shifter in Six-Mile.”
“Do you think they knew we were the ones who broke it?”
“Olivia sent out a memo when we locked ourselves in the bedroom. Broken tables and beds were to be considered fated mate aftermath with a standing instruction to clean it up.”
“Are you kidding?”
“What do you think?” He deposited me on the bed, climbed onto the mattress, and settled over me. He took his dick in his hand and rubbed it along my center.
I hooked my leg under his and flipped him beneath me. Then I leaned over him in the dim light with my rainbow hair falling around us both.
Like the aurora, he sent. His hands gripped my hips, and his blue eyes blazed up at me, intense and reverent at once. “You’re incredible,” he breathed. “Take whatever you want, Emma. Everything. It’s all yours.”
I took him in hand and sank down onto him slowly, seductively. His jaw clenched, and his iron control slipped. The open, unwalled, wide-flung bond amplified his sensations and mine. Then it looped.
My pleasure spilled into him and came back doubled by his, and his rolled into me and returned tripled, a closed circuit with nothing to do but climb until I didn’t know whose sensations were whose.
He experienced what he did to me, and I shared what he did to me. It was almost too much. It was the opposite of the wall.
“Logan,” I gasped, rolling my hips.
“I’ve got you.” His hands guided me, and his thumbs pressed bruises into my skin. He bucked his hips and surged up under me. “I’ve got you, love. Take your time. We’ve got all night. Alpha’s privilege.”
I’m going to show those off like jewelry. Oh, shit, Logan. Yes!
A rough laugh escaped him, and he rubbed my clit.
Then I lost the thread of the joke entirely. He’d found the angle that turned my spine to water, and he knew it. The smug bastard grinned even as his own breath turned choppy.
I set the pace long enough to drive us both to the edge. The wolf in him came to the fore, and he rolled us over. I let him. God, I let him. Being ravaged by Logan Blackwood was my forever.
Don’t stop, I sent.
Never.
You feel so good.
Mine, he sent through the bond. Still mine.
Still yours, I sent back. Always. Even after. Especially after.
His forehead dropped to mine. Our breath became one breath.
An inferno poured down the open bond into him and back into me. He lit up in silvery light, and our magic linked.
We didn’t flinch away from the blaze. He was there with me, under it, taking the overflow, grounding me even in this. All that power had somewhere to go besides burning down the only thing I’d ever wanted to keep.
The crest took me, sudden and total. It shook loose everything I’d been white-knuckling for months, and I shattered around him, screaming his name. The panes of glass vibrated and cracked in their frames. The bed shook, and the earth quaked beneath the manor.
I came apart, but I stayed whole. The impossible, generous, ordinary miracle was the entire secret of us.
I was the storm.
He anchored me in place.
And we had weeks before Acheron forced us to prove it.