Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
Reece woke with Delainey in his arms. It wasn’t the first time, nor the second.
He almost tightened them on instinct before she could pull away. He wanted her with a kind of fierceness that scared him a little. After last night, he had no idea how he could walk away and pretend he didn’t want more.
His wolf was satisfied with himself, as if he had done something to get her into his bed, rather than her tripping in the dark and taking that final step.
When she opened her eyes, was he going to see rejection?
Maybe he should get out of bed first and push her away before she could take that step. But her body was soft, and she smelled so good, and so right, and so his that nothing short of a physical attack could have dragged him away from her.
There was a word hovering on the edge of his mind that he was too afraid to think, especially when it came to Delainey.
She couldn’t be, not for him, not a witch.
But his wolf was getting restless.
The air smelled of them, and of the heavy moisture that came after the storm.
Light broke through the windows and highlighted Delainey’s rich brown skin and the purple bonnet on her head.
He hadn’t seen her put it on last night, which meant she had gotten up and then chosen to get back into bed with him.
That was a good sign, wasn’t it? But where else would she sleep?
Delainey blinked her eyes open and looked at him. He braced himself for her walls to come back up, for her to shove him away and pretend nothing happened, that it had been a storm-induced wave of lust they could both ignore forever.
But her eyes were surprisingly soft, and she gave him a sleepy grin. She looked over his shoulder and must have seen the clock blinking on the nightstand.
“When did the power come back on?” She asked, her voice still rough with sleep, one hand tucked beneath the pillow under her head.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been up for long.” He propped himself up on one elbow, his red hair swooping forward over his forehead, the wave in it looser and wilder than usual from sleep.
He was still braced for rejection, his whole body tight. It would come any second now. Instead, he felt Delainey’s fingers trail along his cheekbone and up, circling his eye.
She dragged her hand across his forehead to his other cheek, then down over his chin, like she was physically memorizing the feel of his face. The sheet covering them had fallen down.
Her breasts were just sitting there, all perfect, with more sunlight falling over her warm brown skin, tempting him to take another taste. He tried not to stare, but he was only a man.
Delainey’s fingers trailed down his arm but didn’t stop moving.
“I’ve been thinking,” she started, in a careful tone.
“That’s dangerous.” He aimed for light. He could take this, whatever she was going to say, whatever rejection she handed him. He had to take it. There was no other choice. They were stuck together until they could figure out how to break this damn bond and be free of one another.
Inside him his wolf growled, and Reece told him to shut it, because they were going to break this bond. They were going to be free of each other, and he feared Delainey would run from him as far and fast as she could.
“So you’ve been thinking,” he prompted, shifting onto his back so he was staring at the ceiling instead of at her, because looking at her made it harder to keep his voice even.
“We’re pretty good at this,” she said. Her fingers brushed over the pulse point on his wrist.
“That’s one way to put it,” he agreed, turning his head on the pillow to look at her again. His cock twitched, and his lips tingled with the desire to kiss her good morning. He hadn’t tasted her in the sunlight yet, and he wanted to.
“We’re better at this than we have any right to be,” Delainey continued.
“Okay.” Reece wasn’t exactly sure where she was going with this, but she hadn’t kicked him out of bed yet.
It was in his best interest to let her keep talking.
“And Nico doesn’t really have any good streaming channels on his TV, right?”
Reece had been watching a cable channel airing reruns of a show from fifteen years ago.
He really didn’t want to be thinking about Nico while in bed, albeit technically Nico’s bed, with Delainey.
Her excuse was weak, he conceded, but where was she going with this?
He thought he had an idea, but he was almost afraid to hope.
“And we have no idea how long we’re going to be stuck like this.
” Her voice picked up speed as she barreled through what she was planning to say.
“So what if we just kept doing this? Clearly we want each other. That way, when this stupid tether thing is broken, we can walk away with all of this tension out of our systems.”
He was never going to get her out of his system.
He knew it deep in his soul. His wolf was sure of it and was trying to chant a word that Reece had to ignore. But he did want to keep having sex with her, and if this was the excuse she needed—
“I’ve heard of worse ideas,” he lied.
Delainey grinned up at him and kissed him, and it was a long while before they got out of bed.