Epilogue #2
She parted for him without hesitation, and the trust in that small gesture struck him with a force that was almost holy.
His fingers found her folds, slick with wanting, and he stroked her with a deliberateness that made her whimper and clutch at his forearm.
He circled the sensitive pearl of flesh, teasing it with a patience he did not feel, learning the rhythm that made her breath catch and her hips cant forward, chasing his touch.
“Lucien …” His name broke from her lips on a rising note, and he buried his face in her neck and breathed her in as his fingers quickened, circling with increasing urgency until she stiffened against him, her entire body drawn taut as a bowstring, and cried out.
The sound of it, raw, unguarded, wholly surrendered, sent a bolt of heat through him that nearly finished him there and then.
He held her through it, his arms tight around her, his mouth pressed to the frantic pulse beneath her jaw, feeling the tremors pass through her body in waves.
When at last she softened against him, her breath coming in shuddering sighs, he guided her gently forward onto her hands and knees.
She went willingly, her fingers curling into the thick wool of the rug, and he positioned himself behind her, one hand braced against the floor and the other wrapped around the curve of her waist.
He entered her slowly, and the sound she made was not a cry but a sigh of such profound completion that it cracked something open inside his chest. He held himself still for a moment, his throbbing length buried in her warmth, the sensation so overwhelming that he had to close his eyes and breathe through the urge to simply lose himself in her.
Then he began to move.
Each thrust drew a sound from her that built upon the last, a rising tide of pleasure that he could feel in the tightening of her body around him and the way her fingers twisted in the rug.
He matched his rhythm to hers, reading the language of her body with the same instinct that had always guided him through the dark.
When to press deeper, when to slow, when to lean forward and press his mouth to the ridge of her spine and whisper her name against her skin.
His hand at her waist held her steady, anchoring her against the force of his need, and when he felt her begin to tighten around him again, the flutter of her inner muscles signaling her approaching release, he drove into her with a deliberateness that sent them both over the edge together.
He spent himself inside her with a groan that he buried in the curve of her shoulder, his hips stuttering against hers, and for a long, suspended moment, there was nothing in the world but heat and breath and the impossible rightness of being joined to this woman.
They collapsed together onto the rug, a tangle of limbs and sweat-dampened skin, and Verity turned in his arms to settle her cheek against his chest. Her hair had come loose from its pins and spread across his skin in a riot of silky waves.
Their breathing slowed in tandem, the frantic rhythm subsiding into something deep and steady, and the fire crackled beside them, casting its warmth across their cooling bodies like a benediction.
“Well,” Verity said, after a silence that had stretched comfortably toward eternity. “I suppose this means the hearthrug will need laundering.”
Laughter broke from him before he could stop it, startling them both with its force.
He pressed his face into her hair and laughed until his ribs ached, which given the accumulated toll of the past day did not take long.
When he emerged, she was grinning up at him with the satisfied expression of a woman who knew precisely the effect she had produced and intended to produce it again at every opportunity.
“I am going to enjoy this very much,” he said, drawing his thumb along the line of her jaw with a tenderness that belied the wolfish satisfaction in his voice. “Siring my own Northwood cubs with you.”
Verity’s grin widened, and her laugh was warm and bright and full of a joy that he wanted to bottle and keep on a shelf for the dark nights when the moon came calling.
But then the brightness dimmed, as he had known it would, because Verity was too clever and too practical to let happiness pass unexamined.
“What if we have a child like your uncle?” she asked. Her voice was quiet, her fingers tracing idle patterns on his chest. “A child who carries the curse but does not appreciate the responsibility?”
Lucien was silent for a moment. He thought of Alden.
Restless, brooding Alden, who had fathered a child on a village girl and made promises he was never going to keep.
Whatever Max had believed, whatever desperate narrative he had constructed, the truth was plainer.
Alden Northwood had not been on the verge of marrying a commoner.
He had been a Northwood, with all the arrogance that implied, and he had taken his pleasure where he found it.
“Max believed Alden would have married his mother,” Lucien said carefully. “But my father’s journals tell a different tale. He was not a man who defied his rank for the sake of love.” He paused. “For all I know, there were other women. Other children.”
Verity went very still in his arms. He felt the change in her body, the sudden tension that told him her mind had seized upon something.
“Lucien.” She pushed herself up on one elbow.
“Max had his first transformation in December. He was a young man. The curse can lie dormant for years. What if there are others? Other children of Alden’s blood, living ordinary lives with no idea what runs in their veins?
They could begin to change at any time.”
The weight of the possibility settled upon him, but it did not crush him the way it would have even a day ago.
Something had shifted in the hours since Max’s death, some essential recalibration of what he was willing to carry and how he intended to carry it.
He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“If there are others, we will deal with them as they arise,” he said.
“I cannot scour every village in Northumberland for my uncle’s indiscretions, but if another child of Alden’s blood surfaces, they will not be left to face it alone and ignorant the way Max was.
” He paused, letting the weight of that settle between them.
“And as for our own children, we will be truthful with them. We will prepare them for what may come, and we will not shroud it in silence the way my father did. If the moon-madness descends upon them, they will face it knowing what it is and knowing their parents survived it before them.”
Verity’s hand came to rest against his jaw. “And if they resent us for it? For bringing them into a life they did not choose?”