Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
Kissing wasn’t the way to solve every emotional problem, but Delainey sure didn’t mind trying.
She clutched Reece close and moaned against his mouth, feeling something different from any of the times they had kissed before. This was more than just convenient kissing at an inconvenient location.
This was real.
And if she didn’t get some kind of control over the situation, she feared her heart was going to do something stupid, like fall in love with the guy.
Too late, a part deep inside her whispered. She did her best to ignore it and surrender to the sensation of Reece’s kisses.
His fingers were light on her skin, almost reverent, and yet the touch burned.
A few curls fell into her face, and he pushed them out of the way before they could cause an issue.
She opened her eyes and saw him looking at her, and it was even more intense, but she didn’t let her eyes close again.
She could feel his heartbeat under her palm. Fast, steady, and all for her.
Delainey kissed him back like she could swallow the hurt and keep it safe where no one else could touch it.
Her hands slid from his cheeks into his hair, fingers tangling in the thick waves at the base of his skull, and she pulled until he groaned into her mouth.
She was still straddling his lap on the couch, her knees pressing into the cushions on either side of his hips, and she could feel the heat of him through every layer of clothing between them.
None of it was enough.
She broke the kiss long enough to pull her shirt over her head. No bra underneath. She’d barely gotten dressed this morning, thrown on the first things she could find while trying to pretend she wasn’t hurt that he’d slept outside. That felt like a lifetime ago.
Reece’s gaze dropped to her bare chest and his hands followed, palms spreading wide over her ribs, thumbs tracing the undersides of her breasts.
His touch was different from every other time.
Slower. Like he was trying to memorize the weight of her in his hands, the way her nipples hardened under the brush of his thumbs.
She felt it in her chest. Right where the tether lived and pulsed. That stupid tether that she was starting to think had nothing to do with why her heart was hammering.
She tugged at his shirt, and he let go of her long enough to yank it over his head.
His chest was broad and pale against her hands, the sparse reddish hair between his pecs coarser than the waves on his head.
The old scar on his left side, that long smooth ridge running from ribs to hip, stood out in a thin white line.
Then she pressed herself against him, skin to skin, and the full contact made her breath stutter.
His heartbeat was fast and hard under her palm.
The heat coming off him was ridiculous. The man ran hot on a normal day, but right now he was practically a furnace, and she pressed closer instead of pulling away.
She pressed her mouth to his collarbone and tasted salt and warmth and that deep green scent of him that she had stopped pretending she didn’t love.
Love.
The word sat in her mind like a lit match, and she didn’t blow it out.
Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.
Reece’s hands slid down her back, fingers finding the notches of her spine, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. He hooked his thumbs under the waistband of her shorts, and she lifted up on her knees to let him push them down.
She kicked them off one leg at a time, graceless and impatient. She nearly kneed him in the ribs on the second one, which would have ruined the moment, but Reece didn’t seem to care. She settled back onto his lap in nothing but her underwear.
Delainey could feel him hard beneath her, the thick ridge of his cock straining against his sweats, and she ground down against him. His fingers dug into her hips and his head fell back against the couch, throat bared, eyes half-shut with gold burning through the brown.
God, that was a good look on him.
She kissed his throat. Ran her tongue along the tendon that stood out when he clenched his jaw, tasted the pulse hammering beneath his skin. She found the hollow below his ear and felt him shiver.
This enormous man, trembling under her mouth.
Delainey had power over him, and it had nothing to do with magic. It was trust. He had given her the ugliest parts of his story, the parts that had broken him and rebuilt him, and he was still here, still looking at her like she was the answer to every question he’d been afraid to ask.
That should have sent her running.
Instead, she slid off his lap and grabbed his hand.
He followed without a word, fingers laced through hers, and she led him into the bedroom. The light coming in through the window fell across the rumpled sheets where she had slept alone last night.
She wasn’t going to sleep alone tonight.
She turned to face him and pushed his sweats down. He stepped out of them. She hooked her thumbs into her own underwear and slid them off. And then they were standing in front of each other in the full light with nothing to hide behind.
She’d seen him naked more times than she could count at this point.
But she looked at him now the way she’d been afraid to before.
Not just his body, though that was worth looking at.
The scar on his side from a life she now understood.
The freckles on his shoulders. The way his red hair fell across his forehead, wrecked from her fingers.
His gold eyes that she had once found unsettling and now couldn’t imagine not seeing.
Reece was looking at her the same way.
Not with the hungry urgency of their other times, not the desperation of the woods or the reckless heat of the power outage.
He was looking at her the way he had that first morning after.
Like she was something he was terrified of losing.
Except this time she recognized the expression for what it was.
She didn’t flinch.
“Get over here,” she said, because if he kept looking at her like that without touching her, she was going to lose it.
He almost smiled. The corner of his mouth twitched, and the gold in his eyes flickered warmer. She yanked him down onto the bed.
He went willingly, settling over her, his weight braced on his forearms, and when he kissed her, it was slow. So slow it ached. His tongue traced her lower lip, and she opened for him, and the kiss deepened into something thorough and unhurried that left her feeling taken apart.
His mouth trailed down her jaw, her throat. He found the spot below her ear that made her arch and lingered there, and the sound he made against her skin, that low wolf rumble, vibrated through her. She’d come to associate that sound with satisfaction. With want.
With him.
He kissed between her breasts and pressed his mouth right over the place where the tether lived.
She felt something pulse between them. Not magic exactly, but the bond responding, warming.
Her magic stirred in her chest, and for once it wasn’t the uncontrolled surges of the past weeks.
It was something gentle, reaching toward him. She was too far gone to fight it.
His mouth found her nipple, tongue circling slowly before he sucked, and the wet heat of it sent a jolt straight between her legs.
She thrust her hips against him, feeling the hard press of his cock against her inner thigh.
His free hand traced down the curve of her waist, over her hip, along the outside of her thigh.
Unhurried. Every touch unhurried, and saying something neither of them was ready to say out loud.
She was hearing it anyway.
She pulled him back up and kissed him, reaching between them to wrap her hand around his cock. He was hot and hard in her palm, and when she stroked him slowly, matching the pace he’d set, he groaned into her mouth and his hips rocked forward.
“Delainey.” Her name was rough in his throat. Not desperate. Something deeper than desperate. She had heard him say her name a hundred different ways. Annoyed, challenging, breathless, wrecked. Never like this.
She wasn’t going to survive this man.
She let go and guided him to her entrance.
The contraception spell was still in place from days ago, woven into her body, as natural as breathing. She felt the blunt press of him and then the slow slide as he pushed inside, and she let her eyes fall shut and her mouth fall open and just felt.
The stretch. The fullness. The deep, satisfying ache of being filled by him. He went slowly, every inch measured, and she felt it in her bones.
When he was fully seated, he stilled.
She opened her eyes and found his face inches from hers.
Gold flickering through brown, sweat beading at his temples, arms trembling with the effort of holding himself still.
She lifted her hand and traced his cheekbone, down to his jaw, over his lips.
He turned his head and pressed a kiss to her palm.
That tiny, impossibly tender thing from a man who could tear someone apart with his bare hands almost broke her.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he began to move.
Long, deep strokes that she felt everywhere.
He buried his face in the curve of her neck, and she held him there, one hand in his hair, the other pressed flat between his shoulder blades where she could feel his heart pounding.
The rhythm built slowly. She met him stroke for stroke, her hips lifting to take him deeper, and each thrust crested and rolled through her and crested again.
There was no urgency. No race toward the end. She didn’t want it to end. She wanted to stay right here in this slow, sweet friction with his breath against her neck and his hands cradling her like she was something precious.
She’d never been precious to anyone. She hadn’t known she wanted to be.
The tether was alive between them. She could feel it vibrating with each point of contact, each shared breath, and her magic flowed through it in a warm current that she didn’t try to control.
For once, her magic wasn’t the problem. Her magic knew exactly what it was doing.
It was the rest of her that needed to catch up.
Reece lifted his head and looked at her.
Open. Completely open. No walls, no wolf bravado, no gruff deflection. Just him. The boy who’d lost everything and the man who’d rebuilt himself from the wreckage, looking at her like she was home.
Oh, fuck.
She felt the pressure building, low and deep, tightening with each roll of his hips. His hand found hers on the pillow, and their fingers laced together. He squeezed. She squeezed back.
His pace quickened, just barely. The angle shifted until each thrust hit the spot that made her vision swim. His thumb found her clit and stroked in time with his movement, and the dual sensation spiraled higher and tighter until she couldn’t hold it.
She came with his name in her mouth.
Reece followed with a shudder she felt through his whole body, his hips pressing flush against hers, a quiet sound pressed into the hollow of her throat. Not a growl. Almost a sigh.
They lay tangled together as the waves receded.
His heartbeat slowed against her own. Two rhythms that had synced somewhere along the way without either of them noticing.
He shifted enough to pull out, then settled beside her, one arm draped heavily across her waist. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. His eyes were brown again. Warm, human brown, with the gold just a flicker at the edges. Present but not in control.
His hair was a disaster. There was a red mark on his neck from her mouth that she didn’t remember making.
He looked wrecked and calm, and content in a way she had never seen on him before.
She traced her finger across his brow, down the bridge of his nose, over his lips. He kissed her fingertip when it reached his mouth.
Something had shifted between them, and they both knew it.
Delainey was breathing hard, her body slicked with sweat, and Reece right there with her. She felt the ever-present annoyance of the tether that bound them together, but now it felt like more. She had the terrifying realization that she might just miss that tether when it was gone.
No, not the tether, she realized. Not the magical leash, but the closeness to him.
The need to stay in this house together, to sleep in this bed together.
She might miss being unable to walk away.
Reece was peppering soft kisses against her shoulders, and she couldn’t stop running her hands over him. She liked a good cuddle, and over the past couple of weeks, Reece hadn’t let her down in that department, but this was different.
Everything about now felt different.
A small part of Delainey thought she should be putting up her walls and turning away from this, to protect herself from whatever was to come in the future.
But Reece had opened up to her, and he was looking at her right now like he was hers.
She wasn’t shocked to realize that was exactly what she wanted.
Oh God, she had it bad.
“I don’t want this to end,” Reece admitted, like the words were being torn out of him.
“When we can finally leave the cottage, I mean.” He spoke with his mouth still close to her shoulder, his breath warm against her skin, one big hand spread flat across her stomach where it rose and fell with her breathing.
“Are you asking to date me?” It came out in a teasing tone, but she was serious, and Reece’s smile was soft.
“Yeah, I am.” He pressed his lips to the curve of her shoulder and lingered there, his stubble scratching lightly against her skin. “You don’t realize how lucky that makes you.”
She scoffed. “Me? Ha! You’re the lucky one.”
His soft smile turned into a grin that she knew was plastered across her face just the same.
The grin turned into a kiss. Delainey realized she could get used to this.