Bonus Scene The Night After
Thank you for reading Kane and Callie's story. As a thank you, here's the night that came right after the Iron Vault party: the drive home, and what happens when the door closes behind them.
Ivy
***
The driveway is the longest twelve miles I've driven in my life.
She's been quiet since we pulled out of the Iron Vault lot, but her hand is on my thigh just above the knee and it has been getting higher every mile.
I've kept one hand on the wheel and the other one over hers, pinning it in place.
If I let her travel another two inches I'm putting the truck on the shoulder and finishing what she started against the door panel.
She knows that. She's taking the long road on purpose to do exactly that to me.
By the time I kill the engine in my own gravel drive my pulse is in my throat. My jeans aren't built to disguise what she's done to me on the drive home, and tonight I don't care.
She gets out before I do. She's on the porch with her back to the door before I'm at the steps, and when I come up to her she turns into me with both hands on the front of my shirt.
"Get inside, Kane."
"Yes ma'am."
I get the door open and her up against the inside of it before it has finished closing.
Her mouth is hot, the taste of Jaxson's whiskey still on her, and her hand goes to my belt.
Mine go under the hem of her dress, both palms flat up the back of her thighs, lifting until her legs come up around my waist on instinct.
She makes a sound against my mouth I haven't heard in three weeks of practice.
"I've been hard since you laughed at Toby on the mezzanine," I tell her.
"I noticed."
"You noticed, and you sat down on my lap for ten minutes all the same."
"I'm not sorry."
"I know you're not." I have her pinned against the door, my mouth on the line of her jaw, the angle of her neck, the soft place under her ear where she likes to be bitten. "I'm going to make you pay for every one of those ten minutes, starting right here."
"Promises, promises."
I get her dress off her over her head and let it drop. Her bra goes the same direction. Her panties stay, because I want to take them off with my teeth and tonight I'm not denying myself anything.
I walk her three steps to the couch and put her down on her back. Her hair falls across the cushion. The lamp on the side table is already on. I leave it on because I want to see what I'm doing to her.
"Tell me what you want."
"You know what I want."
"Say it for me."
"I want your mouth on me, Kane. I've wanted your mouth on me since Mama Lou put the second slice of pie down in front of you."
"Good girl."
I take her panties off slow, with my teeth, the promise I made myself three hours ago on the mezzanine. Then I get my mouth between her thighs, where she's been wet for me since the drive home, and she tastes how she always tastes after hours of wanting: salt and sweet and entirely mine.
I praise her between strokes of my tongue.
Look at you. Wet for me already. So fucking pretty when you can't keep your hips still.
She has one hand in my hair and the other fisting the back of the couch, and her breath is getting short and sharp.
When I find the angle she likes and stay there, she comes loud and lets me hear it, because there is nobody in this house but us and we have the rest of our lives to be quieter than this if we want to be.
She comes down off it slow, with my mouth still on her, and then she pushes me back with both hands flat on my shoulders and slides off the couch onto her knees in front of me.
"Your turn."
"You don't have to."
"Don't be stupid."
She has my belt open and my jeans down my thighs in three seconds.
She wraps her hand around me with the grip she's learned, careful and hard at the same time, and then her mouth follows.
She's had me on her tongue often enough by now that she knows exactly what to do with me.
She takes me deep, holds me there, hums once around me and watches my eyes roll back, and then she works me in long slow strokes that have me reaching for the back of the couch to keep from coming down her throat too fast.
I last about two minutes of that before I pull her up by her elbows.
"Bed. Now."
She grins at me, slow. She knows what she just did to me.
I walk her down the hall with my hand on the back of her neck. By the time we are inside my room I have the rest of my clothes off and she is bare to the bedside lamp. I sit on the edge of the bed and pull her down onto my lap, her thighs straddling mine, her arms around my neck.
"Slow," I tell her.
"Slow."
I lift her up, hold her over me, and let her come down on me an inch at a time.
Her face goes through every change I've come to know on her, drawn out tonight, taken on purpose, and by the end of it she's sitting on me to the hilt, eyes closed, mouth open, and there isn't a part of me she doesn't have.
"Look at me, Callie."
She opens her eyes.
"Tell me how I feel."
"Hard. Hot. So fucking big inside me."
"Move when you're ready."
She moves. Slow at first, hands braced on my shoulders. Then on my chest, before she finds her rhythm and gives it to me, and the only thing I have to do is hold her hips and let her ride me through it.
I keep talking to her the whole time. That's it. Right there. You take me so well. So fucking pretty on top of me. I'm not going to last long inside you bare. Don't stop. I have learnt she likes the words. Tonight I give her more of them than I ever have.
She gets close fast. I see it in her thighs, in the shortening of her breath, in the flush coming up her chest.
Then she says it.
"I love you, Kane."
She says it on the breath she meant to use to come.
I look at her.
I have been carrying the word for three weeks and have not been able to put my mouth around it. She just set it down between us at the worst possible moment and she meant it.
"Say it again."
"I love you, Kane."
I roll us. She's on her back. I'm above her and inside her, and I keep the rhythm she gave me, slow now, because I have something to say and I need her to hear it.
"I love you too, Callie. I have loved you since you walked into that back room and said you were coming in. Whatever I have left in me that knows how to love anything is yours."
She makes a sound that's part laugh and part sob, and her hands come up to my face.
"Make me come, Kane."
"Yes ma'am."
She comes around me before I do, and I let her have it for as long as it lasts. When her body lets me go I move once more, twice, and then I'm done, into her, with the word she gave me in my ears.
We lie there for a long time.
She finds my hand on the mattress next to her shoulder, laces her fingers through mine.
"It will never be enough," I tell her.
"I know."
The lamp is still on. The house around us is quiet. Her breath goes even against my chest, and after a long while it goes deeper, the breath she takes when she's asleep. Whatever I am to her now, whatever she is to me, the word she gave me first is on both our mouths from tonight on.
That's the only thing I need to know.
Before you say goodbye to Blackwood Falls…
Kane and Callie's story is the end of the Guardians — but it's not the end of the alphas, the small towns, or the men who'd burn the world down for the woman they can't resist.