Chapter 11 #3
He didn’t have to be told twice. With great care, because this was Bree, after all, he joined them together, surging into her wet core with one long, glorious slide. Then, he stilled, savoring the feel of her around him. She felt as if she’d been made just for him.
“Oh, Lord, Pax! That feels so damned good,” she crooned against his cheek.
“I think that’s my line,” he quipped, chuckling low. Only Bree could make him laugh at a time like this. It felt so natural. So right.
“You’re killing me, Pax,” she whispered, moving against him, wiggling her body, seeming to urge him to move.
“Now, we can’t have that,” he said, kissing her brow, her temple, and then working his way down her neck as he began the slow slide in and out of her tight core. Stars! She was perfect in every way, and they fit together like pieces of a puzzle meant just for them.
Her breathing increased along with his until they were both panting as his thrusts picked up speed and force. She gripped his shoulders as they came together in a conflagration of desire and need. Bree cried out into the night as a first climax overcame her.
Pax took that as a challenge, taking his time to drive her up to another peak before seeking his own pleasure.
He loved her long and hard, making this first encounter as memorable as he possibly could.
He wrung not just one, but two more orgasms out of her before joining her in toppling over the edge of bliss into utter repletion.
The stars wheeled slowly over the truck bed, and the desert held its breath around them.
It was everything a first time between old friends who cared about each other deeply ought to be.
A little laughter. A little wonder. The long, sweet unraveling of years and distance into the perfection of the moment and the two of them together. At last.
Afterward, she lay tucked against his chest with the quilt pulled over them both, her heartbeat slowing against his ribs, and he stared up at the impossible spill of the Milky Way and just held her.
He understood, with the calm certainty of a man who had finally stopped arguing with himself, that he was holding his whole future in his arms, in the bed of his father’s pickup truck.
His jaguar purred. Audibly.
Too soon, he thought. It was too soon to spring the mating thing on her.
She was human. She wouldn’t understand. He had to finesse his way into her heart so that she’d stay with him forever.
This was the beginning of that. But if he started spouting off about purring in human form and how that meant his jaguar recognized her as his one true mate, he was going to blow it. He had to play it cool.
Bree lifted her head. “Was that—”
“Nope.”
“That was you,” she accused, turning her head to look up at him. “You purred.”
“Jaguars don’t purr,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster, which was not much, given the circumstances.
“Mm.” She settled back against his chest, and he could feel her smiling. “Tell that to your chest, sailor.”
They stayed until the cold finally drove them to get dressed again, and then, reluctantly, they got back into the cab of the truck so he could turn on the engine…
and the heat. He drove her home through the dark with her hand in his on the bench seat, the radio playing low, and the town’s lights rising up to meet them.
Neither of them said much. There wasn’t anything that really needed saying.
They were in accord. Or, at least, their bodies were.
He’d work on getting their hearts on the same page as long as he had to.
He walked her to the back door of the hardware store.
The apartment windows upstairs were dark.
Her father wasn’t home yet from Robertson’s, or was already asleep.
Either way the night still belonged to just the two of them for one more minute.
He kissed her at the door, soft and unhurried, a goodnight kiss at the end of a perfect date.
“Lock the door behind me, Breelee,” he said against her hair.
“You and that door.” She shook her head, but she was smiling as she slipped inside, and he waited on the stoop until he heard the bolt slide home.
Bree floated up the stairs. There was no other word for it.
Her boots were on the treads and gravity was presumably still functioning, but she floated, trailing one hand along the rail, her whole body humming like a struck bell.
The clock at the top of the landing said four minutes to midnight.
She stood in the peaceful dark of the apartment she’d grown up in, hugging the memory of the night around herself.
Then she cast her mind back farther to her long friendship with Pax, and let herself relive every bit of it in her mind.
At fifteen years old, she’d stood behind the counter of her father’s store and watched Pax laugh at something his brother said, and she’d thought, with the hopeless crush of a teenager, him.
Now she was a lot older and as she climbed into bed with the smell of the desert still in her hair she thought again, with a clarity that wasn’t hopeless at all, him.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. Pax had texted her and she smiled.
“Sweet dreams, Breelee.”
She was still smiling when she fell asleep.