Chapter 18
Chosen POV
Her fingers stayed locked in the bicep of my left arm, her knuckles pale against the black cotton of my shirt.
The silence between us was heavy, thick with the scent of burning birch, black tea, and the clean rain in her damp hair.
Outside, sixty-mile-an-hour gusts slammed against the panoramic glass of the carriage house, but inside the perimeter of the stone hearth, the air had turned thin and scorchingly hot.
My right hand cupped her jaw, my thumb resting on the swollen crest of her lower lip. Her pulse was jumping against my palm, a frantic, rhythmic hammering that matched the heavy, uneven ache behind my own ribs.
"Marie," I rasped.
The gravel in my voice was rough, stripped of every piece of the enforcer armor I had used to keep the world at bay.
"Look at me."
She lifted her face, her dark eyes wide, dilated until the black drowned the brown irises. Her eyelashes fluttered, but she didn't look away. There was no clinical distance left in the set of her shoulders, no defensive sarcasm waiting to deflect the heat between us.
"I'm looking," she whispered, her lips brushing my thumb.
"If we do this," I murmured, my face dropping another fraction of an inch until my mouth hovered beside her ear, "there’s no going back to clipboards and five-minute check-ins. There’s no pretending we’re just an athletic department compliance file.
You belong to me, Marie. In the light, in the dark, on the ice, off it. All of you."
Her chest rose on a sharp, ragged inhale.
Her hands shifted, sliding up from my bicep to cup the back of my neck, her small, warm fingers tangling into the short hair at the base of my skull.
She pulled me down until our foreheads pressed together, her breath washing over my cheek in broken, fevered bursts.
"I haven't belonged to anyone in my life, Chosen," she breathed, her voice shaking with an honesty so raw it hit me like a physical blow to the sternum. "Don't you dare stop now."
A shudder ran through my broad shoulders.
I didn't answer with words. I slid my right arm behind her knees and my left arm around her back, scooping her off the leather sofa in a single, fluid motion.
Her frame was impossibly light against my chest, swallowed by the thick gray fleece of my team hoodie. She let out a soft, surprised gasp, her arms tightening around my neck, her face burying into the hollow beneath my jaw as I turned away from the fire.
I carried her down the short timber-paneled hallway, the wide pine floorboards quiet beneath my bare feet.
The bedroom sat at the rear of the carriage house, walled in raw cedar and dark plaster.
The wide corner windows looked out over the frozen expanse of the lake, where the blizzard hurled sheets of white against the night, but the only illumination in the room was the faint, amber wash spilling from the hall and the pale, silver glow reflecting off the snowdrifts outside.
I set her down on the edge of the low platform bed.
The mattress dipped under her weight, the dark charcoal linen cool against the back of her legs.
She sat there with her hands resting on the edge of the mattress, her dark hair falling in disheveled waves over the green embroidery of my number fourteen sweater, her eyes tracking me with an unblinking, breathless focus.
* * *
I didn't climb onto the bed.
I dropped to my knees on the hardwood floor between her parted thighs.
The physical shift changed the room entirely. At six feet four inches and two hundred and twenty-eight pounds, I had spent my entire life looking down at people, using my mass to intimidate, to crowd, to control.
Now, kneeling between her knees on the floor of my own bedroom, I looked up at her, my hands resting flat on the charcoal sheets beside her hips.
Her breath hitched in a soft, fractured sound. Her knees fell open half an inch wider, accepting the space I took up between her legs.
"Chosen," she whispered, her voice tight with wonder.
"Quiet," I rumbled, the command low, velvet-rough, and absolute.
I reached forward with both hands, catching the rolled cuffs of the black flannel sweatpants she wore. Slow. Deliberate. I unrolled the thick fabric, my calloused palms sliding beneath the cuffs, making direct contact with the bare skin of her ankles.
Her skin was hot, smooth as river stones.
A sharp, violent tremor ran through her limbs at my touch. I smoothed my hands upward, over the swell of her calves, over the delicate bone of her shins, my thumbs pressing into the muscle with firm, grounding grip pressure.
"Breathe, Marie," I murmured, my eyes holding hers as I gently pulled the flannel down, sliding the fabric off her legs and letting it fall to the floor.
She sat before me in only the gray fleece hoodie, the heavy cotton hem falling to her upper thighs, her long, pale legs exposed to the silver snowlight.
I rose up on my knees, my chest looming over hers, the heat pouring off my skin filling the space between our bodies. I reached for the bottom hem of the hoodie, my knuckles brushing the sensitive, bare skin of her outer thighs.
Her breath trapped in her throat. Her small hands came down, her fingers resting over mine on the fabric, a brief, instinctive hesitation flaring in her dark eyes.
"Look at me, Marie," I said, my baritone dropping into a quiet, gravelly register that seemed to vibrate directly through her sternum.
She looked up, her lower lip trembling slightly, her pupils wide and dark.
"I’m going to take this off you," I murmured, my thumbs stroking the delicate skin of her hips over the fleece. "And you're going to let me see every single inch of you. Understand?"
A ragged swallow dragged the pale line of her throat tight. Her fingers loosened their grip on the hem, sliding away to grip the sheets beside her hips.
"Yes," she breathed.
"Good girl," I rasped, the praise torn from deep in my chest.
I gathered the heavy cotton in my hands, sliding the gray sweater up her torso with agonizing, unhurried care.
The fabric lifted over her stomach, over the delicate cage of her ribs, over the soft swell of her breasts, until I pulled it over her head and tossed it onto the floor beside the sweatpants.
Her breath shuddered in a sharp, gasping inhale.
A dark, fevered flush rushed up from her collarbone, staining the pale silk of her skin in the silver light. For a fraction of a second, her arms started to cross over her chest in an instinct of self-protection.
"Don't," I commanded, catching her wrists with my hands before she could hide.
I didn't squeeze. I held her wrists gently, lifting them, pressing a lingering, reverent kiss to the rapid, hammering pulse point inside her left wrist, then her right.
"Don't you dare hide from me, Marie," I whispered against her skin, my dark eyes sweeping over the curve of her waist, the soft slope of her hips, the perfection of her bare body in the shadows. "You are the most beautiful thing that has ever been in this room."
A soft, broken cry slipped past her lips, her head tilting back as her eyes drifted shut, her body softening beneath my hold as the praise dismantled the last shred of her resistance.
* * *
I stood up from the floor.
My hands caught the hem of my black compression shirt, peeling the dark fabric over my head and dropping it to the floor.
The cold Adirondack draft from the glass brushed my bare torso, but the heat burning behind my ribs kept the chill at bay.
The compass rose tattooed over my left ribs stretched as my chest expanded on a deep, unsteady inhale; the jagged three-inch surgical scar on my collarbone gleamed dull white in the snowlight.
Marie’s eyes fluttered open.
Her gaze dropped over the thick cords of muscle across my shoulders, the broad expanse of my chest, down to the heavy ridges of my abdomen. Her lips parted, dry and swollen, her chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow bursts that betrayed the racing cadence of her heart.
I climbed onto the platform bed.
The dark linen rustled, the wooden frame taking my two hundred and twenty-eight pounds without a sound.
I moved over her, settling between her parted thighs, bracing my forearms on the mattress on either side of her shoulders. The sheer physical mass of my body blotted out the ceiling, trapping her against the charcoal sheets in a private universe of heat, cedarwood, and unyielding gravity.
She didn't shrink back.
Her small, bare hands came up to rest flat against my chest, her palms scorching my skin right over my hammering heart. Her fingers curled slightly, her nails pressing into the hard muscle over my sternum, anchoring me to her.
"Chosen," she whispered, her voice a fragile, breathless thread in the gloom.
"I'm right here," I rasped.
I lowered my head until my mouth was millimeters from hers. My rough jaw scraped against her smooth cheek, my breath hot and ragged as it mingled with hers.
My right hand left the mattress, my thick, calloused fingers curling around the delicate line of her jaw, tilting her face until her dark, dazed eyes were locked with mine.
"Tell me what you want, Marie," I growled, testing her agency, demanding the words that would burn the rest of the world to the ground. "Say it out loud."
Her dark eyes flashed with an unyielding, breathless fire. She arched her back slightly off the dark linen, her hips pressing upward against the heavy, unmoving weight of my thighs, her lips brushing mine with fierce, desperate hunger.
"You," she breathed against my mouth, her small hands sliding up to grip the nape of my neck, pulling me down to meet her. "I want you, Chosen. All of you."
A low, guttural sound tore from deep in my chest.
"Good girl," I rasped against her lips, my mouth crashing down over hers in a bruising, claiming kiss that stole the last breath from her lungs.
My body covered hers, heavy and warm and final, as the blizzard howled against the glass and the last boundary between our lives shattered into the dark.