Chapter 11 #2
I don't know where he's been these last days—but wherever it was, he came back looking like he lost a fight, or went looking for one. What happened to him?
And now he's here, rougher than he left, and my whole body knows it before my head catches up: the newly lit fire in my belly pulling toward him, my feet rooted, the air between us gone thick as the scent of him fills my mouth.
I stop dead in the doorway. Every instinct I've got says back away slow. I try. I take one step back—
Killian’s head comes up.
He goes still. Then he turns, slow, and his eyes land on me, and there's something on his face I've never seen there before. Not the grin. Not the contempt. Something confused and hungry and furious all at once.
His nostrils flare. His jaw works. "The hell," he says, low, "is that?"
I take another step back. "What?"
"You—" He takes a step toward me and his scent spikes, floods the room, and my body answers before I can stop it, a hot pull dragging low through me.
My face goes hot. The coal in my belly breathes.
"You smell like—" He can't finish it. He doesn't have the word—I watch him reach for it and come up empty, and it makes him angrier. "What did you do while I was gone? What is that?"
I swallow, lifting my hands up in surrender. "I didn't do anything—"
"Bullshit." He's across the kitchen too fast, his hand clamping around my arm and hauling me in, and up close it's so much worse.
His scent's everywhere, thick and hot, and my body lurches toward it against every order I give it.
"You didn't smell like this. You were just the problem taking up space in my house." His jaw works, like he's chewing on something that won't go down. "So what changed? What the hell is this?"
He doesn't wait for an answer. I don't think he wants one—I don't think he even knows what he's asking. His eyes drag down me and back up, dark and confused, and whatever he sees only seems to make it worse.
"Killian." I'm shaking. "You're hurting my arm."
"Yeah?" He doesn't let go. He crowds me back into the counter and cages me there, his bruised face close, breathing me in like he can't help it and hating that he can't. "Something's wrong with you.
I come home and the whole place reeks of it, and Dad won't say, and Calder's got you in his clothes playing house—" His hand slides up to my jaw and tips my face up, rough.
"What are you? What did they let into my house. "
His thumb drags across my mouth. His other hand finds my hip and grips, pulls me flush against him—and God help me, my body leaps toward it, the pull going molten, the coal catching air.
My cock hardens, thickens between my legs.
It terrifies me.
This isn't Vincent. This is his wild-card son who makes my life hell. And my body answers it anyway. Leans in a fraction before I catch it. Goes warm and pliant when it should be bracing to run. I have to lock every muscle I’ve got to stay in control.
"Stop." It comes out cracked, barely there. "Killian, please—"
"You don't smell like you want me to stop.
" He says it low, mean, right against my ear—and instead of letting go he leans in and drags his nose up the side of my throat, slow, deliberate, breathing me in from collarbone to jaw.
A shudder rolls through him, and I feel it move through his whole body where he's got me pinned.
"God. You've got no idea what you're doing to me, do you? Standing there smelling like that."
Both his hands drop to my hips and grip, hard, dragging me off the counter's edge and flush against him. I suck in a breath as our bodies meet and my heart kicks up.
He cages me in—one arm braced beside my head on the cabinet, the other splayed low on my hip, his thigh pushing between mine—and he's so close now I can feel all of him. The heat coming off him. The hard line of his erection pressing insistent against my stomach.
Fuck. He's as gone as I am. Whatever this is, it's got both of us by the throat.
"Feel that?" His mouth's at my ear, breath hot, his voice dropped to something crude and coaxing that scares me worse than the shouting did. "That's what you did just by walking in here. You did that."
My mouth waters and I grip the counter behind me. His nose drags along my jaw again. His hips press in, slow, and my whole body lights up traitor-bright, arching toward him before I can catch it.
"What if I took you upstairs. Bent you over something and showed you exactly what you smell like to me. Think that'd get it out of my system?"
"Killian—" My voice cracks in the middle of his name, and I don't even know what I'm asking for anymore—stop, or more—and that's the worst part, that the word won't come out clean, that some molten desperate thing in me is straining toward him against everything I know.
But I finally find the word.“Killian, stop–”
He feels the effect he’s having on me. Of course he does—he goes still against me, his breath catching, his hand flexing on my hip like he's half a second from acting on all of it—
"KILLIAN."
The word cracks across the kitchen and Killian's gone—wrenched off me and thrown back a step, because Calder's there, a fist in his brother's collar, hauling him off me.
"Back off." He puts himself between us, chest to chest with Killian. Nothing calm about him now. "What is wrong with you? He said stop."
"You don't—" Killian's chest is heaving, his eyes wild, still trying to see past his brother to me. "Something's wrong with him, Cal. Can't you—can't you smell that—"
"I smell you acting like an animal in the kitchen. Go cool off." Calder doesn't move. "Now. Before I make you."
For a second I think they'll swing on each other, the two of them squared up and bristling, the air gone thick.
My hand comes up to my chest without me deciding it—my heart's going so hard it hurts, slamming against my ribs like it wants out, and I press my palm flat over it and try to breathe through the racing.
"Make me." Killian's voice drops low and dangerous, and he shoves forward into his brother's space, chest bumping chest. "Move, Cal. This isn't your business."
"It is now." Calder plants a hand flat on his brother's sternum and holds him there, and I've never seen him like this—the calm one, the level one, gone hard as a wall. "You want to get to him, you come through me. That what you want?"
Something cornered and ugly flickers across Killian's face.
For a long second the whole kitchen is nothing but the two of them breathing, squared up and shaking, close enough that one wrong word tips it into fists—and I'm pressed back against the counter, heart slamming, watching two grown men about to tear each other apart over what…
Over… me?
Then Killian's eyes cut to me one more time over his brother's shoulder—confused, furious, wanting—and whatever's on my face seems to gut him worse than anything Calder said.
He rips backward out of reach, drags a hand through his hair, and turns on his heel, slamming out the side door hard enough to rattle the glass.
The kitchen goes quiet.
Calder turns around. "Hey. You okay? Did he—"
He stops.
His eyes drop. Just for a second, down and back up—but I see them do it, see them catch on something below my waist, see his whole face change.
And then I realize…
The thing I've been too panicked to notice until he's looking right at it: I'm hard. Obviously, undeniably hard, tenting the front of his gray sweatpants where anyone can see.
Heat floods my face, my neck, everything. I grab the hem of my shirt and yank it down over myself with both hands, and I can't look at him, I can't—
"I'm sorry," I choke out. "I—I have to—"
I bolt. Past Calder, out the door Killian just left through, into the cold bright morning—but I don't stop at the edge of the lawn.
I keep running, across the frozen grass, all the way to the little shed at the back of the property, and only when I've put the whole yard between me and that house do I let myself stop.
I fall back against the rough wood of the shed wall and slide down it a little, gulping the cold air, both hands pressed flat to my chest. My heart's going like it's trying to kill me, slamming so hard it hurts, and I squeeze my eyes shut and try to slow it, try to breathe, try to be anything other than what I just was in that kitchen.
Stupid. Stupid, traitorous body. Pinned to a counter by the one person in this house who I’m sure wants to hurt me, begging him to stop—and getting hard doing it. Making a fool of myself in front of both of them. Handing Calder proof that some rotten part of me wanted it.
My face burns all over again just thinking about the way his eyes dropped, the way his face changed.
I press my palms harder against my chest and curse the thing waking up in me, the thing that doesn't care who it wants or what it costs me, the thing that's turning my own body into a stranger I can't trust.
It doesn't help. The cold, the running, the shaking—none of it helps. Because I can still feel it, low and banked and breathing, nearer than it was an hour ago.
Rising.
I brace there against the shed and try to breathe, and the dread goes all the way to the bottom of me, because I finally understand: I'm running out of morning.
Whatever's coming, whatever biology in me I thought I could outrun… it's almost here.