Chapter 29 #2
His palms were rough against her ribs, callused from years of work and fighting and god knew what else werewolves did with their hands. She could feel every ridge and groove of them as they mapped the curve of her waist and slid up to the band of her bra.
He fumbled with the clasp and she almost laughed—he literally had night vision—but then it gave way and his hands cupped her bare breasts, thumbs dragging over her nipples, and the almost-laugh became a sharp inhale that she couldn’t take back.
His skin was fever-hot. She’d known that from sleeping next to him, from every accidental brush of contact over the past week, but this was different.
His heat sank into her everywhere they touched, soaking through her like she’d stepped into a bath. She ran her hands up his arms and felt the dense muscle under his skin, the coarse hair on his forearms, the cords of his shoulders bunching under her fingers as he pulled her closer.
“Bedroom,” she said against his mouth. He tasted like the beer he’d had earlier and something wild underneath.
He stood with her still wrapped around him, hands gripping her thighs, and carried her through the doorway.
The shift in position pressed her core against the hard ridge of him through his sweats, and she sucked in a breath at the friction. He laid her down and followed, and the mattress dipped under his weight, tilting her toward him.
The bedroom was almost pitch black without the candle they’d abandoned, but there was just enough light that she could make out the planes of his face, the sharp line of his jaw, the way his lips were swollen from kissing her.
He pulled his own shirt over his head, and she let her hands find what her eyes couldn’t fully see.
The broad slab of his chest, the sparse hair between his pectorals that was coarser than the hair on his head.
The ridged landscape of his stomach, muscles twitching under her fingertips as she traced them lower.
A scar on his left side, raised and smooth, that she followed from his ribs to his hip.
His skin was taut and hot everywhere she touched, like touching sun-warmed stone.
She tugged at his waistband, and he kicked the sweats off. She hooked her thumbs into her own shorts and underwear and shoved them down, and he helped drag them the rest of the way off her ankles, his fingers trailing fire along her calves as he did.
Then they were bare against each other and the full shock of skin on skin made her dizzy.
His chest hair rasped against her breasts. His thighs were thick and hard between hers, covered in the same coarse hair, and the weight of his cock pressed hot against her hip, thick and insistent. Delainey could feel him pulse against her skin.
Every point of contact between their bodies felt amplified, like her nerve endings had multiplied overnight.
Reece kissed down her throat, his mouth open and wet, tongue tasting the salt of her skin. She felt the edge of his teeth, careful, always careful with those, scraping along her collarbone, and the tiny sting of it made her arch into him.
He moved. His mouth closed over her left nipple and he sucked, tongue circling the hardened peak. The wet heat of it sent a bolt of sensation straight down through her belly. His hand found her other breast, kneading, his thumb and forefinger rolling the nipple until it ached in the best way.
She grabbed the back of his head and pressed him closer, her fingers sinking into that thick red hair. It was soft at the roots and wilder at the ends, and she twisted her fingers in it and pulled. The groan that vibrated against her breast made her inner muscles clench around nothing.
He kissed lower. Down the soft curve of her stomach, his stubble scratching a path that she’d feel for hours.
He paused at her hip and pressed his face against the crease where her thigh began, breathing deep through his nose, dragging in the scent of her.
His exhale was hot and shaky against her skin.
She could feel how much the smell of her affected him in the tremor of his hands on her thighs, in the low rumble building in his chest.
He spread her open with his thumbs and she felt the cool air hit her, then the flat of his tongue in one broad stroke.
Her hips bucked. He did it again, slower, tasting her like she was something he wanted to savor, and the slick wet sounds of his mouth against her filled the quiet room.
He circled her with the tip of his tongue, light and teasing until she was squirming, then sealed his lips around it and sucked.
Two fingers pushed inside her, thick and rough-skinned, and she felt every callus as he curled them forward and found the spot that made her vision white out at the edges.
The cotton bunched in Delainey’s fists as he worked her with his mouth and his hand, alternating between long slow licks and tight focused pressure, reading every hitch of her breath, every jerk of her hips.
She could feel her own wetness on his chin when he shifted angles, could hear the obscene sounds of his fingers moving inside her, and she was past the point of caring about any of it.
Her thighs trembled. The heat coiled tighter and tighter in her belly until it crested and broke, and she came with her back arched off the mattress and her hand fisted in his hair, her inner walls clenching around his fingers.
Reece gentled but he didn’t stop, lapping at her softly while the aftershocks rolled through, until she was twitching and oversensitive and pushing at his forehead with the heel of her palm.
He kissed the inside of her thigh and moved back up her body.
His mouth found hers and she tasted herself on his tongue and the intimacy of it hit her somewhere behind the ribs.
His cock dragged against her inner thigh, leaving a slick trail of precome on her skin, and she could feel the heat radiating off him, how hard he was, how much he was holding back.
Delainey reached between them and wrapped her hand around him.
He was thick, the skin velvet-soft over rigid hardness, and he pulsed in her grip when she squeezed.
A bead of moisture gathered at the tip. She swept her thumb over it, spreading it down the shaft, and Reece’s arms shook.
The sound he made against her mouth was raw—half groan, half something deeper, something wolfish.
She sent a quick thread of magic through herself.
The birth control spell was second nature, something every witch in the coven had mastered, a ward woven into her own body that protected against everything she didn’t want.
The magic settled into place with a warm pulse and she didn’t give it another thought.
She guided him to her entrance and wrapped her legs around his hips.
He pushed in slowly, and the stretch of him stole the breath from her chest. She felt every inch—the blunt pressure of the head parting her, the thick drag of the shaft, the way her body opened around him until he was fully seated and she was so full it bordered on too much.
The heat of him inside her was extraordinary, hotter than the rest of him, and she clenched involuntarily and watched his eyes blaze brighter gold.
Reece held still. She could feel his heartbeat inside her, or maybe it was her own—they were so close together the distinction didn’t matter.
His arms were braced on either side of her head, muscles corded with the effort of not moving, and sweat had begun to bead at his temples.
She shifted her hips, testing the fullness, and the friction made them both groan.
He moved, a slow withdrawal that dragged against every nerve she had, followed by a deep push back in that punched the air from her lungs. He set a rhythm that was steady, each thrust bottoming out with a pressure that made her toes curl.
She could feel the flex of his ass under her calves, the bunch and release of his back muscles under her hands, the damp slide of his chest against her breasts.
Everything was heat and friction and the slick sounds of their bodies meeting.
She ran her nails down his back and felt the muscles jump under her touch.
When she dug them in harder, raking lines from his shoulders to his lower back, Reece snarled against her throat and his hips snapped forward with a force that shoved her up the bed.
The headboard cracked against the wall, and she felt the vibration of it through the mattress and up through her shoulders.
Delainey did it again because she liked what it did to him, liked the animal it brought closer to the surface, liked the way his control frayed at the edges when she marked him.
He hitched her leg higher, changing the angle, and the next thrust hit something deep inside her that made her vision blur.
She clung to his shoulders and met him stroke for stroke, her hips rocking to match his rhythm, and the friction against her from the grind of his pelvis was building the pressure again, faster than she expected.
His skin was slick with sweat under her hands. She could taste it when she pressed her mouth to his shoulder. She bit down and he groaned so deep she felt it in her own chest through the bond.
It pulsed between them with every thrust, that tether she kept trying to ignore, and she could feel it amplifying everything, every sensation doubled, rebounding between them like an echo.
She could almost feel what he felt, the tight heat of her body around him, and the thought made her clench hard enough that Reece swore and dropped his forehead to hers.
His hand slid between them. His thumb found her center and pressed, circling in tight strokes that matched the pace of his hips, and her magic surged before she could stop it.
It rolled through the bond in a hot wave and she felt Reece jolt, felt something wild and electric rush back from his end—not magic, something more primal, his wolf rising to meet her power.
The two forces crashed together, and the sensation exploded through her body like a current.
She came undone.
Her mouth fell open in a soundless cry, her back bowing, her walls clamping down around him in waves that she felt all the way to her fingertips.
Reece buried his face in her neck and followed, his hips slamming forward one last time, his cock pulsing inside her in thick beats she could feel deep in her belly.
The sound he made against her skin was muffled and broken and had enough wolf in it that she might have teased him about it if she could form words.
He was heavy on top of her. She let him stay, her fingers carding absently through his sweat-damp hair, feeling his breath slow against her throat. His heartbeat thudded against her own, gradually settling from a gallop to something steadier.
He shifted off her eventually, pulling out with a slick drag that made her shiver. He rolled onto his back beside her and the mattress creaked. The rain was still hammering the windows. The power was still out. The candle in the living room was either dead or burning a hole in the coffee table.
Delainey stared at the ceiling she couldn’t see. Her body was buzzing, that pleasant heavy-limbed hum of a good orgasm settling into her muscles.
She rolled onto her side, away from him, and pulled the blanket up to her chin. His warmth radiated across the gap between them, steady as a furnace, and she did not scoot backward into the solid wall of his chest.
And if, sometime in the deep hours of the night, she woke to find herself tucked against him with his arm heavy around her waist and his face buried in her hair and his heartbeat slow and sure against her spine, she let it happened. It was just sleep.
It wasn’t that something in her had gone quiet and settled for the first time in weeks. It wasn’t that she fit against him like she’d been carved to be there.
She was going to stick with that story for as long as she could.