Epilogue #3
It was Dominic who broke first, and only because he chose to. He drew nearly out, his breath gone ragged at my nape, his hand clamping at my hip.
“I am close,” he said.
He pulled out, and pressed himself to the curve of my ass, and came hot across my skin with a sound torn out of the bottom of him, and the feel of it, the sheer wrecked evidence of what I did to him, dragged me over the edge with him. He never lost control. He had lost it.
“Four,” I gasped, before he could even ask.
“Good girl.” His voice was barely his own.
Beneath me Rhain was still hard, still deep, and now he gathered me down against his chest and slowed everything to almost nothing.
The urgency went out of him, and a different tenderness came in, one that had waited all day to have me to himself for even a minute.
He rolled us gently onto our sides and kept himself inside me and moved in me, slow, his forehead against mine, his hand opening and closing over my heart like he needed to keep checking it was still there.
“I wanted this all day,” he said, in English, plain, none of the diplomat’s lacquer on it. “You at the front of everything.”
I felt the knot begin then, the swell of him growing where we were joined, locking him inside me, and the fullness of it carried me back up toward the edge with almost nothing else required of either of us.
He pressed his mouth to my throat, and I understood what my body wanted before my mind caught up to it.
I turned my head and set my teeth to the claim I had left on his shoulder a year ago, the mark that made him mine the way his made me his.
I bit down.
He came apart. He groaned, ragged and helpless, the sound of a careful man with nothing careful left in him, and the knot pulsed and locked and he spilled into me hard, his whole body shaking through it, his hand fisting in the sheet beside my head.
The bond rang so bright at the bite that I went over with him, softer this time, and deeper, a long rolling wave instead of a break.
“Five,” I breathed into his shoulder, into the mark.
“Min,” he said into my hair, wrecked, holding me to him while the knot held us together. Mine. He had never once meant it the way his father had meant things. He meant it as an address. A place he had decided to live.
Somewhere in it I felt Dominic leave the bed. I heard water in the next room, briefly. Even that far gone, I understood what he was doing and why, and I loved him for the plain practical care of it, the same care that had once arrived as coffee and a croissant.
He came back to us while Rhain’s knot was still holding me, and he lay down along my back and waited, his hand moving slow over my hip, in no hurry at all, until the swell of Rhain eased and faded and Rhain slipped from me with a last soft sound against my throat.
Then Dominic turned me to face him.
He gathered me in against his chest, settled me over him, and slid up into me slow, and the fullness of him after everything pulled a fresh wave up out of nowhere, immediate and shaking.
“Six,” I told him before he could ask, my forehead dropping against his.
“I know.” He held still inside me, both hands spread wide over my back. His voice dropped to nothing. “You are the best thing I will ever do. Mine. Say it back to me.”
“Yours.” I was crying and did not care to stop it.
The knot began. He swelled inside me and locked us together and his breath caught hard, and I felt how close he was, how long he had held it. I put my mouth to his throat, to the claim I had set there a year ago, the one that made the enforcer of Ashenmere mine.
I bit down.
He came with a groan that started somewhere I had never heard him reach, rough and broken and entirely without discipline, his arms crushing me to his chest, the knot pulsing as he spilled into me, every wall the man had ever built coming down at once into my hands.
I went over a final time with him, the two of us locked together and shaking.
“Seven,” I said, when I could. I said it into his throat, into the bite, the last number, the one neither of us would have believed a year ago.
Rhain came up behind me then, fit his chest to my back, and put his mouth to the corner of mine and kissed me, slow and unhurried, while Dominic stayed knotted deep inside me and held me through all of it, the three of us locked into the one shape we had spent a year learning how to make.
For a moment none of us moved. Nobody asked to.
The bond settled.
Rhain’s mouth came to the right of my throat. Dominic’s to the left. The two of them brought me down, Rhain’s hand stroking slow at my hip, Dominic’s palm flat over my heart from behind. A warm cloth, at some point. I had heard the water and still could not have said when he fetched it.
The room held quiet.
Dominic laid me sideways at the center of the bed. He came down behind me, arm under my head. Rhain came in front, chest against mine, his palm flat over my heart between us.
I lay between them in the small lamp-light and listened to the building.
I closed my eyes.
Mine.