Chapter Twenty
Espie
My back hits the cool tile when he lifts me, and I gasp.
Cold wall behind me. Hot water hammering down on my shoulders.
I wrap my legs around his waist, pulling him closer.
He's hard against me, sliding through my cleft.
The tip of his cock rubs over my clit and I jolt.
My body floods with more slick, my scent spiking with need.
His cock is as beautiful as he is. Long and not too thick, flushed dark at the head where he leaks his own slick. Smooth, without the bulge at the base of an alpha cock. Perfect. He's perfect.
He shifts his hips, and I feel him pressing at my entrance, and gods, the slide of him through my own slick. I'm not embarrassed. I can't remember what embarrassment feels like right now. My body is doing what I asked it to do. He's the one I picked. He's the one I want.
He slides into me slowly. So slowly. Inch by inch, giving me time to adjust. His eyes never leave my face.
He's watching for me to tell him no. The stretch is unfamiliar in the best possible way.
My hands flex against his shoulders. He fills me deep, deeper, my belly quivering with it, my hips tilting up to take more of him.
The flash comes. Wallace's cold instruments. The exam table. Lights overhead. Hands I couldn't refuse.
“Come back to me Espie. That’s it. Breathe,” Aubrey says.
I blink open my eyes, surprised to find I’d had them clenched.
The flashback doesn't stay. It can't. Aubrey is here. Aubrey is real. Aubrey is warm and trembling and looking at my face like I'm the only thing in the world worth looking at, and the flash burns off in the steam.
“Okay?” he asks. “We can stop if you—”
“Don’t you dare!” I growl and his lips lift.
“As you wish.” He presses forward, his gaze holding mine as he eases into me.
I breathe through the stretch, my hands gripping his shoulders, my legs tightening around his waist. He pauses when he's fully seated, holding himself still, his whole body shaking.
“Talk to me,” he whispers. “Are you okay? Tell me. I can't do this if I'm hurting you.”
“You're not hurting me.” I cup his face in my hands, force him to look at me. “You're not hurting me. This is good. This is so good. I didn't know it could feel like this.”
His voice breaks on the words. “I didn't know anything could feel like this. Like you.”
He moves slow at first. Finding what works.
I clench around him on his next stroke and a soft, broken groan tears out of him against my throat.
He pulls back. Drives in deeper. His breath catches and stays caught for a second too long.
His hands grip my hips and stay there, fingers pressing into the bone. Not pinning me. Holding me. Holding on.
I roll my hips up to meet him on the next thrust. He makes the sound again, louder this time, his forehead dropping to my collarbone. I do it again. He shudders against me. His breath comes apart at my ear.
“Espie.” My name, broken. “Slow. I need slow. Or I'm not going to last.”
The heat gathers low. Pulses where he's seated inside me, then climbs.
He thrusts deeper, and I gasp against his mouth.
The angle is perfect. He drags against a place high inside me I didn't know was there.
White heat. Lightning. Sparks shoot up my spine.
The heat radiates outward through my pelvis, my hips, the backs of my thighs.
“Right there, don't stop, please don't stop,” I breathe.
He shifts his grip on my hips, and drives in again, hitting that same spot. I cry out, the sound echoing off the tile, lost in the rush of water. My inner walls clench around him, pulling him deeper, and his answering groan vibrates through my whole body.
The wet sound of our bodies moving together fills the shower.
Skin against skin. The slap of his hips meeting mine.
Our combined slick coats us, easing every thrust, the musk of my arousal mixing with his cedar and chamomile.
My gardenia rises to meet him, my clover threading through.
Underneath both of us, a third note. Our bond, taking shape in scent before it takes shape in flesh.
“Espie. You feel... gods, you feel incredible.”
He bottoms out inside me and holds there, both of us trembling, both of us breathing hard. Our bond tugs. Hard. Behind my sternum, a tug so deep it pulls toward him. Toward the specific place where his neck meets his shoulder. My teeth ache.
I want him in me. Not just like this. Deeper. Permanent. Under my skin. In my blood.
“Aubrey. I want you to claim me. Please, claim me.”
He goes still. His breath stops against my throat. For one suspended heartbeat, neither of us moves.
“Espie.”
“Bond me.” My fingers clamp in his wet hair, pulling his face up. So he can see me. “I need it. Aubrey. I can't move forward without this. Please.”
His whole body trembles where he's pressed against me, inside me, surrounding me.
“I've never been more sure of anything. I want to be yours. I need it to be true.”
“Espie.” His forehead drops to mine. “Gods. Gods.”
“Tell me you don't want it. Tell me and I'll stop asking.”
His hands cradle my face like I'm something holy.
“I want it,” he whispers. “I want it so much I'm shaking. Can you feel me shaking? I've wanted it since the first moment I scented you. Since before I knew what wanting felt like again.”
“Then take it.” I tilt my head, baring my throat to him. My pulse offered up to him. “Take me. I'm yours. I'm yours.”
“Mine.” The word comes out reverent. “And I'm yours. Say it.”
“You're mine.” Tears slide hot down my face, mixing with the water. “You're mine, Aubrey. Always, forever mine.”
He pulls back and drives forward, setting a rhythm that builds the pressure in my belly with every stroke.
His mouth finds my throat, pressing his lips to my pulse point and breathing me in.
The pressure coils tighter. My thighs start to shake.
My breath comes in short gasps that I can't control, sounds spilling out of me.
He's hitting that spot with every thrust now, relentless, perfect, his rhythm faltering as his own pleasure mounts.
“I'm close,” I manage. “Aubrey, I'm so close.”
“I know.” He presses his forehead to mine, his eyes finding mine through the steam, holding my gaze. “I feel you. Feel how tight you're getting. Come for me, Espie. I want to feel you come.”
My orgasm hits. My back arches off the cold tile.
My inner walls clamp down around him, pulsing, pulling, milking him as I cry out his name.
Heat slams up through my belly and out into my arms and legs until my fingers are tingling.
Each pulse rolls into the next. Each one harder than the last, until I'm sobbing with it, tears mixing with the shower spray.
He follows me over with a broken groan. I feel him throb inside me, feel the heat of his release flooding me, feel his whole body shudder as he buries his face in my neck and comes apart in my arms. My name falls from his lips over and over.
My lips brush over the scars on his neck.
The raised silver lines I traced earlier with my fingers.
Bite marks. Old ones. Whoever they were, they aren't getting him back.
I taste salt and shower water and Aubrey, and possessiveness roars to life in me.
A fierce, animal want. The instinct to claim him I didn't know lived in me.
Mine. Mine. The word rises up and fills my chest until there's no room for anything else.
My mouth moves to the unscarred place at the junction of his neck.
Under my lips I feel the gland there, swollen, thrumming with a heat that wasn't there a minute ago.
My teeth find the shape of it. His pulse hammers against my tongue.
His skin holds for one suspended heartbeat under the pressure of my jaw, taut and warm and alive, and then it gives.
I taste copper and warmth, and his groan vibrates through every bone in my body. His teeth find the gland at the junction of my neck in the same moment, and the world breaks open.
His essence floods through me. Liquid heat, pouring from the bite at my throat into my bloodstream.
It moves with my pulse. Surging where my heart pumps it next, settling into the marrow of my bones.
My vision blurs at the edges. The shower fades.
The tile fades. The water fades. There is only this.
The heat of him spreading through me, finding the cold spots, filling them.
Cedar and chamomile. Grief and tenderness.
All of him, pouring in. A second heartbeat starts up behind my sternum. His. Mine. Both at once.
I sob against his throat. My teeth still locked around his pulse. His arms tight around me. His blood on my tongue and his essence in my blood. I don't know where he ends. I don't know where I am.
A gear clicks into place deep inside me.
A sound only I can hear. My shoulders drop.
The clenched fist I've carried under my sternum for years uncurls and stays open.
The wrongness shifts. The crooked piece of me that has sat askew since forever rights itself.
Wholeness snaps into existence where there was only fracture before.
I unlatch my teeth. He unlatches his. We pull back just enough to look at each other.
His bite on my throat throbs with my heartbeat, sending warm pulses down my collarbone with every beat.
The mark I've left on him is a perfect curve of teeth pressed into the soft flesh where his neck meets his shoulder.
“Oh.” The sound falls out of me. I don't know if it's a laugh or a sob or a prayer. “Oh, Aubrey.”
“I know.” He cups my face, and his thumb traces my cheekbone like he's mapping me. “I feel you in me. Gods, you're in me.”
“You're in me.” A laugh breaks out of me, wet and shocked. “Aubrey, I feel your heartbeat in my chest.”