11. The Cottage Past the Herb Garden
Chapter eleven
The Cottage Past the Herb Garden
Tara left through the screen door without looking back.
The new charm was still in her hand, fingers wrapped tight enough around the braided cord to leave marks.
The kitchen had gotten too crowded. Too loud. Too full of Serena. Marcus. Missing women. A pack called Beaumont she was going to learn more about than she wanted to.
She needed air before she climbed out of her own skin.
She walked past the wrought-iron at the front gate without slowing. The sigils caught the last of the porch light and let it go again, brightness running through them in a slow seam her witch-eye picked up. Old work. Clean. Carefully laid for a very long time.
The realization brushed past her and disappeared beneath the seventy other things crowding her head tonight.
The preserve that ran along the back of the property was cypress, live oak and Spanish moss gone purple-blue in the dusk. Fifty yards past the little gate she heard him.
“Chère.”
She didn’t turn around.
He stayed about ten feet behind her. Never crowding. Never falling back. Patient as hell.
Which somehow annoyed her even more.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m walking.”
“You’re walking behind me.”
“That’s where the path is, chère.”
She stopped. Turned.
Dex stopped a few feet away and shoved his hands into his pockets when Tara finally turned around.
He didn’t crowd her. Didn’t try to touch her.
Which somehow made everything worse.
Tara laughed once under her breath and scrubbed a hand across her face.
“I already know how this is going to go,” she said.
Dex stayed quiet.
“An order will come down from Thornwood that’s gonna say I should stay behind with Delphine, Rowena and my grandmère while you and the boys go charging into whatever nightmare Marcus has built down there.”
Her grip tightened around the new charm.
“That’s not happening.”
Dex opened his mouth.
“No,” Tara snapped immediately. “Let me finish.”
He shut it again.
The anger came easier now that she’d started. Easier than the panic waiting underneath it.
“I came down here for her. She’s family. Her family is all gone, Dex. She’s my pack. Get it?” Her voice cracked hard on the last word and she hated herself for it immediately. “I’m all she has left outside that room.”
Dex’s expression changed slightly at that. Softer. Worse.
“I don't take orders and I am not sitting safely in somebody’s kitchen while the rest of you go after her.”
Silence stretched between them for a second.
Then Dex nodded once.
“Okay.”
Tara blinked.
“Okay,” he said.
“That’s it.”
“That’s it.”
“You don’t get to just say okay, Dex.”
“Why not.”
“Because that is not how this works. You don’t get to just placate me. I know how pack hierarchy works…”
“We fall outside the norm.”
“How so?”
“We’re not Thornwood pack, or Beaumont, or Devereaux.
We’re the rejects. Rowena’s the closest thing to an alpha for us, Callum probably would be, but he’d never move against his mom.
Besides, the trips function as one, and somehow I’ve been blessed enough to be counted as a brother too. There’s no competition here.”
He took two steps closer. Ten feet became six.
“Besides, Rowena raised me not to argue with women braver than I am,” he said. “And you’re braver than I am. You made it clear you’re not afraid of the big bad wolf.”
His little corner smirk was gone. Replaced by something that felt all too real.
“Tara.”
“What.”
“You are not going to lose her.”
She stopped moving. He had stopped moving, too.
“Dex.”
“I am telling you. We are getting her back. I am telling you as a man who has hunted three Beaumonts on dark roads and is going to hunt many more on darker ones. You are not going to lose her.”
Her hand came up to her own throat without her telling it to.
“I’ve been saying that to myself on repeat since I left Nashville. Hearing it from somebody...”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t be fucking…” She waved her hand to indicate all of him.
“All what?” He waved his hand back at her.
He took another step. And another. Cypress at his back became cypress at her back without her remembering having stepped backward. Bark rough through her thin shirt. His hand came up to rest flat against the trunk above her shoulder.
He didn’t touch her.
His eyes were full gold. Not flecked. Not catching the light. Gold.
“Tell me to stop,” he said.
She didn’t.
She said, “Make me.”
***
Dex kissed her hard enough to shut the rest of the world off for a second.
Tara grabbed the front of his shirt in both fists and kissed him back like she’d been angry about wanting to do it all day.
His mouth was hot. His hand came off the cypress and into her hair. The other was already inside her shirt at the small of her back, palm flat against bare skin.
She bit his lower lip on purpose.
He made a sound in the back of his throat that wasn’t human at all.
He pulled his mouth off hers half an inch.
“Cottage.”
“What.”
“Past the herb garden. C’mon.”
She didn’t answer with words.
They both moved at the same time.
***
The walk to the cottage wasn’t a walk. It was a series of stops they hadn’t agreed on making. Against a tree trunk. The side of a smokehouse. The herb garden gate, where he had her up against the iron with his teeth at her throat, grazing, and her hand inside the front of his jeans.
The cottage came up at the end of the path. Small. White-painted. A porch and a screen door.
Dex got the door open with one hand without taking his mouth off her neck.
They went in.
The inside smelled of cedar and old leather. A sagging couch under the window. A weight bench in the corner. A foosball table somebody had been winning at for thirty years. Paperbacks two-deep on a shelf. An armchair well broken in. A turntable with a decent stock of vinyl.
A boys' clubhouse aged into a man cave.
Dex had her up against the wall just inside the door before she’d finished taking it in.
Her shirt was up at her ribs. Both his hands hot on her skin. She bit the inside of his lip. He growled low. Hands at jeans buttons, both of them fumbling and laughing and breathing too fast for either.
She shoved his hand out of the way and did her own.
His palm came right back up the inside of her thigh.
She made a sound she’d been holding back since the gas station.
“Tell me what you want, Tara.”
“I want you to fuck me. Against this wall. Hard. Right now. Before either of us gets any smarter about this.”
“Whatever you say, chère.”
He took her at her word.
The plaster was rough. Her shoulder blades were going to feel it tomorrow. She didn’t give a single goddamn fuck.
He had her thigh hooked over his hip. One of her hands fisted in his hair. The other flat against the wall. He held her there for a moment, his face inches from her face, and she understood without being told that he wanted her looking at him when he did it.
She looked back.
When he pushed into her, she made a sound that didn’t come close to being a word and yet said everything, and he made one to match.
He wasn’t gentle. She hadn’t asked for gentle.
His hand under her thigh tightened to a grip that was going to leave a mark. She leaned into it. His mouth came down on her throat, teeth at her pulse, challenging every ounce of his restraint, breath hot against the line of her jaw.
She wrapped both arms around his neck.
He set a rhythm and she met it, and the cypress-rough plaster was scraping her shoulder blades and his other hand was up under her shirt now, callused thumb at her nipple through the cotton of her bra.
She bit the lobe of his ear.
He laughed once into her throat. Not at all human in its sound.
When she came, she came hard; shoulders pressed against the wall, toes curled into the back of his thigh, hips pressed hard against his. His name came out of her mouth in a register she had not ever used in her life.
“Mm,” Dex said in a velvet voice at her ear. “Say it again, chère.”
She did.
He kept going.
The second one took her half off the wall.
He caught her at the waist and hauled her with him backward toward the bed in the corner without taking himself out of her.
Her knees hit the mattress and she sat down hard and pulled him with her.
They half-fell. He laughed once, low and growly. She laughed with him.
She got him on his back.
Her brain might still have been catching up, but the rest of her had made this decision miles ago. She straddled him and put her hands flat on his chest through the shirt he hadn’t bothered to fully unbutton. Rolled her hips once.
His eyes went a shade deeper into wolf.
She rolled them again.
His hands came up to her hips. Tight. Not guiding. Just holding her there like he was afraid she was going to leave.
“Slow,” she said. “I want it slow.”
“Hmmm… yep, I'm good with that.”
She rode him slowly at first. His eyes stayed on her face. His thumbs at the points of her hipbones. Every time she lifted off him, he made a sound at the back of his throat that was wolf, and every time she sank back down he made a smaller one that was just a man.
Then, not slow at all.
His hands moved to her thighs. Eyes fully gold. Lip caught between two of his teeth, jaw locked, the wolf right there at the surface and being held back by something he was clearly not going to explain to her.
She watched him choose.
The choosing was hotter than anything else he had done yet.
“Come on, chère,” he said, voice gravel. “I want to feel you again.”
She bent forward and put her mouth on his, and he met it, and his thumb came up between them and found her clit.
The spine she had been holding deliberately straight gave up the pretense.
The third one took her before she had any input on it, hard enough that she went forward over him, her hands flat on his chest and her forehead against his collarbone, and he came under her with a sound that was a little too rough to belong entirely to a man.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
His palm was flat against her chest, thumb and forefinger cupping a breast over the place where the thrum had been all day. Steady. Like he’d known exactly where to put his hand.
She found her underwear and her jeans.
Some time later she was sitting on the cottage floor against the foot of the bed with Dex’s denim jacket over her shoulders. He’d put it there without being asked.
He was on the bed. One boot off. One boot on. Watching her.
“Don’t make this mean something,” Tara said.
He paused.
“Too late, mon chère.”
Something crossed his face when she said it.
Not hurt. Something closer to frustration kept on a short leash.
He knew what the thrum was. She could see that he knew, that he’d known since the steps of her grandmother’s house, and that watching her talk around it like a pothole in the road was costing him more than he was going to let her watch.
His jaw worked once. He breathed out through his nose and said nothing else, and he did not reach for her, and the not-reaching was somehow the most aggravating thing he could have done.
He was going to let her get there on her own.
He was a wolf who had already had the floor drop out from under him, standing there patient as a fence post, waiting on a woman who kept insisting out loud that the ground was perfectly level.
She wanted to throw the boot at him.
She wanted to put both her hands on his face and kiss him again.
She did neither.
She let herself, for one breath, acknowledge the thing she’d been refusing to look at since the gas station.
The thrum was still there.
Low. Steady.
Hers and his.
Tara closed her eyes briefly.
Well. That was not on her bingo card. Fate's a bitch.