Chapter 4
Brynn
His house surprised me. I'm not sure what I'd expected — something hard and masculine, all dark leather and motorcycle parts, a king's barracks.
Instead Declan pulled up a long gravel drive to a low stone farmhouse set back among old oaks, lamplight warm in the windows, woodsmoke and rosemary in the air.
There was a garden. There were chickens, somewhere out in the dark, settling and clucking. There was a porch swing.
It was the home of a man who had built himself a sanctuary and told no one.
The county imagined the king of the Savage Order in some chrome-and-neon compound, I was sure.
Instead here was rosemary by the door and a porch swing worn smooth by years of someone sitting in it alone.
I'd spent my whole career learning to read a person by the home they made, and his told me everything the rumors couldn't: that underneath the cut and the name and the reputation was a man who'd wanted, very badly and for a very long time, a quiet place and someone to share it with.
"You weren't what I expected either," I said, when he cut the engine and the quiet rushed in.
"Nobody ever is." He swung off the bike and helped me down, his hands sure at my waist, and didn't let go once my feet touched the ground.
We stood there in the dark, his hands spanning the curve of me, his breath warm against my temple.
"Last chance, Brynn," he said softly. "You walk through that door, you're mine.
I don't do this halfway. I never have. So if you've got even one doubt—"
"I don't." I turned in his hands. "I've had two years of doubts. I've used them all up. Open the door, Declan."
He opened the door.
Inside it was warm and lived-in and smelled like him, and he'd barely got it shut behind us before I lost my nerve a little — the lights, the reality of it, the body I'd spent a lifetime hiding now about to be seen. My hand went to the wrap at my waist, defensive, automatic.
He caught it.
"No," he said, low. He drew my hand away from the dress and held it.
"Not in here. In here you don't hide from me.
" He lifted my hand to his mouth, pressed a kiss to my knuckles, my wrist, the soft inside of my forearm, his eyes on mine the whole slow way.
"I've been imagining this for two years," he murmured against my skin.
"You don't get to rob me of seeing all of it now. "
"Declan—"
"Let me look at you." It wasn't a demand. It was almost a plea. His hands came up to frame my face, his thumbs along my cheekbones, and he tilted my head up and just looked, the way he had in the lot, like a man at a window watching the sun come up. "There she is," he breathed. "My queen."
And then he kissed me.
I'd waited two years for that kiss and it was nothing like I'd rehearsed in my weaker moments.
It wasn't hungry, not at first. It was slow — devastatingly, deliberately slow, his mouth moving over mine like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every minute of it.
One hand stayed at my jaw, tilting me where he wanted me; the other slid down to the small of my back and drew me into him until there was no space left, until I could feel the whole heat and weight and wanting of him against me, and a sound came out of my throat that I'd never made before.
He swallowed it like it was something precious.
When he finally broke away we were both breathing hard, and his forehead dropped to mine.
"I'm gonna take my time with you," he said, rough.
"Two years' worth. So if you're impatient, you're gonna have to learn to live disappointed.
" His thumb dragged across my swollen lower lip.
"Because I am not rushing one single second of this. "
He kept that promise.
He kissed me through the dim warm house, walking me backward, his hands learning me — the curve of my waist, the swell of my hip, the line of my spine — pausing every few steps to murmur something against my skin.
Beautiful. Mine. Look how you fit my hands.
He found the tie of the wrap dress at my waist and didn't pull it; he untied it slow, asking permission with his eyes at every inch, and when the emerald fabric finally fell open and I instinctively moved to cover myself, he caught both my wrists, gentle but immovable, and held them at my sides.
He took his time even then. He pressed me back against the cool plaster of the hallway wall and kissed the line of my throat, the hollow beneath my ear, the slope of my shoulder where the dress had slipped, and each kiss was unhurried and deliberate, like he was cataloguing me, like he intended to memorize the exact place that made my breath catch and return to it for the rest of his life.
When his mouth found the sensitive spot below my collarbone and I gasped, he made a low sound of satisfaction against my skin and lingered there until my knees forgot their job and he had to take my weight in one broad hand splayed against my back.
"There," he murmured. "Found one." And then he set out, with terrible patience, to find them all.
"No," he said again. He stepped back just far enough to take all of me in, standing there in his lamplit hallway in nothing but lace and nerve, and the look on his face stopped my heart.
Not the polite appreciation I'd braced for.
Not the I tried. His eyes had gone dark and almost reverent, his jaw tight, and when he spoke his voice had dropped an octave.
"Do you have any idea," he said slowly, "what you do to me?
Do you have any idea how long I've wanted to get you here, like this, so I could show you exactly how a woman like you is supposed to be worshipped? "
"Declan." My eyes stung. "I don't know how to be looked at like that."
"Then I'll teach you." He closed the distance, gathered me up, and the last of my fear dissolved under the heat of his mouth and the unhurried certainty of his hands. "I'll spend as long as it takes."
He carried me to the bedroom — actually carried me, one arm under my knees and one at my back, like I weighed nothing, like I was something to be lifted instead of something to apologize for — and laid me down on a wide bed under a window full of stars, and then he set about keeping every word.
I want to be honest about what that did to me, being carried.
I was a plus-size woman who had spent thirty-five years making herself logistically convenient — taking the aisle seat, the back row, the version of every situation that asked the least of the people around her.
I had a lifetime of bracing for the small flinch, the shifted grip, the here, I've got you that really meant you're heavy.
And there was none of it. He lifted me like the cost was a gift he'd been waiting to pay, and laid me down like I was the most precious cargo he'd ever carried, and something I'd been holding clenched since adolescence simply let go.
He was patient in a way that took me apart.
He kissed his way down my body like he was mapping a country he intended to rule for the rest of his life, lingering everywhere I'd learned to be ashamed, turning every soft place I'd hidden into a place he worshipped out loud.
His mouth closed over the curve of my breast, slow and hot, his tongue tracing until I gasped, and he stayed there, unhurried, learning the exact pressure that made my spine arch off the bed before he moved to the other and did it again.
His hands followed everywhere his mouth had been — the full weight of me filling his rough palms, kneading, claiming, never once tentative.
He told me what he liked as he found it — here, this curve right here, God, Brynn — until the shame had nowhere left to live, until I stopped flinching and started arching, until my hands were fisted in his hair and his name was the only word I had left.
When his mouth found the soft swell of my belly he pressed a kiss there so tender it brought tears to my eyes, and then he moved lower, settling between my thighs, easing them open with the flat of his hands like he had all night and intended to use it.
And then his mouth was on me, and the world narrowed to that single unbearable point of heat.
He took his time even there — slow, deliberate, reading every sound I made and chasing it, one broad hand splayed flat across my stomach to hold me down when my hips tried to lift off the bed.
The pleasure built in long pulling waves, tighter and tighter, his tongue and his fingers working me with that same patient certainty until I was past speech, past shame, past everything but the climb.
When I broke it tore through me so hard I cried out, my thighs trembling around him, his name on my lips and his hands gripping my hips like he was anchoring me to the earth.
He didn't stop until I'd ridden every last shudder of it, and only then did he lift his head, his mouth wet, his eyes blown dark, and crawl up the length of me kissing the tears at the corners of my eyes, murmuring that's it, that's my girl, let me see you, and I had never in my life felt so thoroughly, dangerously seen.
"I need you," I managed, still shaking. "Declan. I need—"
"I know." He shed the last of his clothes, and I had a moment to take him in — broad and powerful and marked with ink and old scars, hard and ready and unmistakably as undone as I was, a man built like the fortress he ruled — before he settled over me, bracing his weight on his forearms, his eyes locked on mine.
He paused there, the blunt heat of him pressed against me, his whole body trembling with the effort of going slow.
"Look at me," he said. "I want your eyes on me when I finally make you mine. "