16. The Caretaker’s Cottage #2
Her body was sitting a hand’s breadth from his.
She could smell him, feel his heat. She could feel her body leaning in with or without her permission.
The thrum of what she was beginning to accept as a bond was deepening into an ache, a need.
She wasn’t going to win this argument with her body tonight.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She tightened her fingers around his.
“You think I care where your last name came from?”
Dex’s throat moved once.
“There is power in names for your kind.”
“Dex.”
She waited until he looked at her again.
“You have a name. Don’t matter where it came from. A name is a name, and that technicality won’t stop me from putting a hex on you or anybody.”
She leaned in closer to him. “I’m just that good.”
She scooted closer. “And if you’re that good, I’ll be hollering that name you think you don’t have all fucking night.”
He didn’t speak. He didn’t move his hand. The wolf came up in his eyes when he looked at her then. Banked low. Not full gold. Just enough to see her with.
“Whatever you say, chère,” he growled.
***
She kissed him, exploring every inch of his mouth, his tongue.
That was the thing about the second time. The first kiss had been a question. This kiss was an answer.
Her mouth moved against his, warm and unhurried.
Her hand came up to the side of his face and held his jaw, and he made a sound in the back of his throat that wasn’t the sound he had made against her on the cypress trail the night before.
This one was quieter. More hurt. More grateful.
His hands came up to her shoulders and held there, like he was afraid to do anything else with them yet.
Her hands weren’t afraid. She put one flat against his chest where his pulse was running fast under the skin, and she put the other at the back of his neck and pulled him down to her.
The kiss stopped being gentle. His mouth opened against hers and she tasted whiskey and the dark sweet smell of him she’d been wanting in her mouth since Grandmère’s porch, and his hands came off her shoulders and dragged down her sides to her hips and stayed there, broad and warm and not letting go.
“Take me,” she said.
He undressed her like a man taking inventory of what he was fighting for.
He pulled the t-shirt off over her head, carefully, as if he were unwrapping a present.
His palm spread flat on the curve of her ribs and stayed there, and the heat of his hand traveled up her spine like a slow flooding warmth, and his eyes had gone gold by then, lamplight-gold and the gold of a wolf looking at the woman whose body he was committing to memory in case he never got to see it again.
His mouth came down at the hollow of her throat.
She made a sound.
“Hmm…that wasn’t my name.”
He moved lower. The curve of her breast. The soft underside of it. He took her nipple into his mouth and held it there, and the heat of his mouth and the slow drag of his tongue made her arch off the bed and into him.
His hand slid down between her thighs. She was wet enough that the first knuckle of him went in without resistance, and she made a sound that wasn’t a word, certainly wasn’t his name and wasn’t quiet either, and he stopped the kiss at her breast to watch her face when he added a second.
“Look at me, chère.”
She looked at him.
He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were full gold. His jaw was tight. The wolf was right at the surface of his face, and he was holding it back by sheer will, and she’d never seen a man look at her with that much restraint on a leash for her sake.
“Stop watching me and do something about it,” she said.
He laughed once. Not human.
He didn’t take his fingers out of her. He added a third, and the stretch made her cry out in a register she hadn’t used in bed in years.
She might have mentioned his name, but then his thumb worked the place that mattered.
His teeth grazed her collarbone. She came on his hand with her thighs locked around his wrist and his name fully in her mouth, and he kissed her through every second of it and did not slow his hand once.
She got the rest of her sleep-shorts off without either of them having to interrupt.
He shoved his jeans down his hips. The lamp in the kitchen made a slow yellow pool across the bed, and Dex Fontaine, abandoned pup, road-sign-named, fifteen-year-old in a Broussard holding cell, the man Bodie had walked in for and paid for and brought home, pushed into her slow, all the way, holding her face with both his palms.
He was built proportionally everywhere, as in fucking massive, everywhere.
She had been ready for the stretch of him all fucking day and still the sensation was overwhelming.
Her body bowed at the first inch, then at the second, then at the fifth, the sixth, and by the time he was at the hilt her toes were curled hard against the cottage sheet and she had stopped being able to do anything but breathe.
She screamed his name. He claimed her mouth. Her body trembled from the onslaught of the initial orgasm. As everything about him completely undid her. His thumbs brushed the tears off her cheeks while he moved.
“Hey,” he said. Quiet. Against her mouth. “Hey.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I’m not stopping, chère.”
He moved into her in the slow, steady rhythm of a man who’d decided he wasn’t going to use his body the way he’d used it the night before.
He was going to make her body know, what the thrum in his chest had known since he encountered her on the fucking steps of her grandmother’s house.
He kissed the place at the side of her throat.
He kissed her collarbone. He set his mouth on that tender spot behind her ear.
“Ma chère,” he said. Against the curve of her ear.
Her body answered before she did.
She came on a slow rolling swell that started at the base of her spine. He didn’t stop. He didn’t slow down. He shifted the angle of his hips a half-inch, and the next swell built faster, and she came again with her fingernails in the muscle of his shoulder blades and his name in her mouth.
“Again,” he said. Against her throat.
“Dex.”
“Again, chère.”
He hooked her thigh over his hip and went deeper.
Her hand fisted in his hair. His teeth dragged at the side of her throat.
The third one took her hard, or was it the fourth?
At any rate, she came harder than the previous two, and her hips came up off the bed to meet his of their own accord, and he made a sound against her shoulder that wasn’t a man’s sound at all.
The rhythm broke after that. He stopped being a man holding back.
His hips pumped faster. His hand fisted in her hair.
The slow steady rhythm he had been giving her was gone, and what replaced it was need with no pacing left in it.
The bed creaked. Her nails opened skin on his massive, sexy as fuck lats.
She dug her heels into the small of his back and pulled him deeper, and the orgasms stopped having downtime between them and became one long rolling wave she could not have walked away from if the cottage had been on fire.
His teeth pressed at the place on the side of her throat that a lesser wolf would have laid claim to without asking.
He didn’t lay claim.
He pulled his teeth back the second he realized his wolf was frothing for it. He kissed the place instead, soft, careful, with everything he had not allowed his mouth to do, and she understood without having to be told what he was holding back. He pulled back, breathing hard.
She turned her face into his.
“Come for me, Dex.”
His whole body went tight against her. The muscles in his back locked under her palms. The wolf at the surface of his face pressed its forehead into hers for one held moment before whatever line he had been holding inside him let go.