Epilogue - Lucy #2
“I’ve spent fifteen years thinking home was something I had to get back to. I was wrong. Home is wherever you are. I choose you. I choose Earth. I choose this.”
I kissed him.
He made a sound against my mouth. It was low, rough, the rumble of the tiger and the exhale of the man layered together.
His arms came around me. I grabbed the front of his shirt and walked him backward until his legs hit the mattress.
He sat down. Looked up at me. I stood between his knees with my hands on his shoulders, and his face tilted up toward mine.
Something about the angle, the reversal of every interaction we’d ever had where he was the big one, the dangerous one, the one who took up all the space in the room, sent a flush of heat through me so sharp my hands shook.
“My turn,” I said.
I pulled his shirt over his head, ran my hands across his chest, and along the hard planes of him.
The bullet wound in his shoulder was already healing.
He let me push him back onto the bed. Then I stripped off my own shirt and bra.
His eyes tracked every movement. His hands came up to my waist, and I watched his fingers spread across my bare skin, thumbs tracing circles on my hipbones.
The restraint in his grip, in how carefully he held me when I knew what those hands could do, made my breath come faster.
I climbed onto him, straddling his hips. The hard length of him pressed against me through his jeans, and I rolled my hips, once, deliberate, and the sound he made was rough and low. His head dropped back. His hands tightened on my waist.
“Lucy—”
“Shh.”
I undid his jeans. He lifted his hips to help me get them off, and I took my time about it, which was petty and deliberate.
I didn’t care because watching Warrick Kassar lose his composure one inch at a time was the most satisfying thing I’d done.
When I wrapped my hand around him, his whole body went taut.
I stroked him, slow at first, firm, my thumb dragging across the head.
A growl tore out of him, subsonic, vibrating through the room.
I rose up, watching his eye widen as I did so. Then I positioned him and sank down.
The stretch hit me first. It was full, deep, every inch of him filling me until there was nowhere left to go.
I braced my hands on his chest and took a breath, savoring the feel of him inside me.
I moved, controlling the depth, the speed, the way I rolled my hips to drag him against the spot inside me that turned my vision white at the edges.
His hands gripped my ass. His eyes were full amber, the vertical slits blown wide, and he was watching me ride him with an expression I’d never seen on his face before: absolute awe.
“Fuck!” he breathed. “Lucy, you feel—”
I rolled my hips harder, and his sentence died.
His hands slid up my thighs to my hips, and he gripped, tight, his fingers digging in, and the bruising pressure of it lit up every nerve I had.
I leaned back, changing the angle. The new position drove him deeper, and I heard myself moan, loud, shameless, a sound I couldn’t have held back even if I’d wanted to.
Then he sat up. One fluid motion; his abs contracting, his body folding up into mine, and suddenly we were face to face, my legs wrapped around his waist, his arms locked around my back.
The shift drove him impossibly deeper. I gasped, and his mouth found my throat, the mark, his teeth grazing the crescent he’d left, and the bond hummed between us.
“I want to feel what you feel,” I whispered. “Open it. Let me in.”
He did.
The bond split wide, and I was inside his body with him, the heat of me from his side, the tight, wet grip of me around him, the scent of my skin filling his lungs with every breath.
His pleasure layered over mine, doubling it, feeding it back, and the sensation of feeling myself through him while he moved inside me was so intense my arms locked around his neck, and I buried my face against his shoulder and just held on.
He moved us. His hands gripping my hips, as he thrust up into me from below, deep, rolling strokes that I felt in places I didn’t have names for.
I matched him, my hips grinding down as he drove up.
The friction and the fullness and the feedback loop of the bond built into something enormous, something I could feel gathering at the base of my spine.
“Don’t stop,” I said. “Warrick, right there, please—”
His hand slid between us, his fingers finding where we were joined, circling, pressing, and the sensations of him inside me and his fingers on me and his pleasure burning along the bond, cracked me open.
My body clenched around him, and I heard myself saying his name, over and over, and through the bond I felt his control shatter.
He slammed into me again and again. Then his whole body went rigid, a sound tearing from his chest that sounded like a roar.
I felt him come inside me, the hot pulse of it as his arms crushed me against his chest, and my body came apart again.
We stayed like that for a long time. Wrapped around each other, still connected, his forehead against my shoulder, both of us breathing like we’d been underwater.
His thumb found the mark at my throat. Pressed against it. Gentle.
Home, came through the bond. His voice. Clear and calm and certain.
Home.
I woke up with Warrick’s arm across my ribs and Felony on my feet, purring like a small engine that had no off switch and no intention of developing one.
Warrick was still asleep. I watched him for a minute. The hard lines of his face had gone soft, the scar on his forearm pale against the sheets. He looked lighter when he slept. Younger.
I slid out of bed, stole his shirt off the armchair, and padded to the kitchen. I made coffee and opened my laptop. The browser was still open on the Illinois University vet program.
Warrick appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and nothing else.
Oh my.
My heart skipped, and my clit quivered.
“Is that my shirt?” he asked.
“No. It’s my shirt now. There was a transfer of ownership. Unfortunately for you, you slept through it.”
He glanced at my laptop screen. “How long have you been thinking about this?”
“A while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Since before I met you. I keep opening the page, and then I close it, and then I open it again. It’s a very productive cycle.”
He sat down across from me. “What’s stopping you?”
“Nothing. Everything.” I pulled the laptop toward me. “I want to finish the vet tech course first, but then the tuition—”
“How much?”
“More than I’ve got.”
“How much, Lucy?”
I told him. He didn’t blink.
“I’ve got that.”
“Warrick—”
“Twelve years of PI work. I live in a cabin. I drive a truck that I bought cash. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t take holidays. I’ve had nothing to spend money on for fifteen years.” He looked at me. “I do now.”
“I can’t let you pay for my—”
“You finish vet tech. You get the qualification. You go back to the shelter, and you’re the best-qualified person in the building, and it’s good, but it’s not what you want. You want to be a vet. So go to actual vet school. The full degree. No more giving up things you want.”
“Vet school is six years.”
“So?”
“I’d be thirty by the time I qualified.”
“You’ll be thirty anyway.”
I looked at him across the table, and through the bond I felt it: his certainty.
Not hope, not encouragement, not the careful optimism of someone who wanted to be supportive.
Certainty. Absolute, immovable, bedrock-deep.
He believed I could do this the way he believed the sun would come up, and he wasn’t even slightly interested in entertaining the possibility that he was wrong.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay to finishing vet tech first, or okay to vet school?”
“Both. All of it. The whole thing.” I took a breath. “But if I fail—”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Felony jumped onto the table and sat on the laptop.
“You have the worst timing of any living creature,” I told her.
She closed her eyes.
I moved her, pulled up the application page, and started filling in my name.