Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
WILLA
After the choosing comes the tide, and the tide does not ask.
I want to be clear, even here, even now, telling it after, that the tide never once took my choosing from me.
That is the thing the pamphlets get wrong and the thing this family got right.
The heat is a current, the deepest water there is, and a current will carry you, but I had spent the whole long climb to it deciding the direction, planting my flag, saying their names in daylight at a kitchen table, so that when the water finally closed over my head I was not swept anywhere I had not already chosen to go.
Jonah first, in the clear water—his mouth between my thighs for long, patient hours until I was trembling and open and ready.
And then the current, and the current’s names were Beau and Sam, and my body had been saying them since Christmas, and now, at last, in the honeysuckle dark of the nest I built, my body got to be answered.
I have ridden out heats alone in a shaded room and called it weather.
This is not weather. This is the whole sky coming down.
It rises in me in long slow swells, each one taller than the last, the warmth that started days ago at my wrists and my collar gone to a deep tidal pull through the center of me, my skin a single asked question, the whole of me turned to one long reaching.
And the mercy of it, the thing that takes me apart even as the water closes over my head, is that there are hands in the water.
I am not riding it out alone in the dark this time.
I am being met. Every swell that lifts me, somebody is there at the top of it, somebody chosen, somebody mine.
Beau comes to me the way he does everything, with his whole face, except the act is gone, the act has been gone since Christmas Eve when the dam broke, and what is left is the man under the charm.
He braces over me and he is not making a single joke.
That is how I know it is real. Beau Mercer looks down at me in the lamplight with nothing on his face but the truth of how much he wants this, how long he has wanted it, and he says, low, wrecked, “Tell me again I’m allowed to be in the picture. ”
“You’re in the picture,” I tell him, and I pull his mouth down to mine. “You’re in the middle of the picture, you reckless beautiful man. Now quit holding the door and come through it.”
The tide is in me by then, the deep alpha-and-omega tide my body has been saying his name into since Christmas, and Beau answers it.
He is hard against my thigh, thick and heavy, the head of his cock already slick and leaking with want.
When I wrap my fingers around him and stroke, slow and firm, he groans into my mouth like the breath has been punched out of him.
His hips jerk, pushing into my grip, and I love the way he feels—hot velvet over steel, pulsing against my palm.
“Easy,” he says, but it is not a no. “Easy, sweetheart, I have wanted this since you walked up in that red coat and I am not going to last a minute if you keep—” I keep, thumb sweeping over the wet slit, and he laughs, ruined and desperate, against my throat.
I am slick and open and aching for him, my pussy flushed and dripping with heat. When he settles between my thighs he still stops, even now, and looks at me. “Yes?” he asks, plain and honest. “Tell me yes, Willa. I need the word.”
“Yes,” I say. “All of it. Don’t you dare be careful with me now.”
He pushes into me in one long, sure stroke, stretching me open around his thick cock until I take every inch.
We both go still at the sheer fact of it—the fullness, the perfect fit, the orange-blossom scent of him flooding the room.
Then he moves, deep and rolling, giving me his full weight, his want, his honest face.
He fucks me like he sells: all in, nothing held in reserve.
Each thrust drags perfectly against that spot inside me, his hips snapping harder when I claw at his back and beg for more.
The wet slap of skin, the rhythmic push-pull of his cock filling me, the way my walls flutter and grip around him—it all melts into one bright gold thing at the center of me.
When I crest, I come hard around him, clenching tight, my pussy pulsing and milking his length.
That is when his knot begins to swell, thick and hot at the base, catching at my entrance.
He gasps my name, half question, and I moan, “Yes, that, all of it—knot me, Beau.” He drives deep and the knot locks us together, stretching me full, and he comes with a broken sound, pulsing long and hard inside me, flooding me with heat while the bond flares bright as orange-blossom honey between us.
I hold the unguarded whole of him, knotted and shaking, as the last of the performance leaves his body for good.
His scent locks into mine. Orange blossom and cut grass, written permanent into my body, and Beau presses his forehead to mine and laughs, wet and delighted. “Sold,” he says, and I love him so much I could break in half.
Sam does not brace over me. Sam gathers me up.
He holds me like a thing he has decided, finally, to simply have.
His hands are sure now, steady and home.
He kisses me slow and deep, then turns us so I am over him, so I can set the pace.
“Tell me what you want,” he says, looking up at me with his whole open face.
“Anything. I just want to give it to you.”
“I want you inside me,” I tell him, “and I want you to stay right here and let me have you.” I reach down, wrap my hand around his cock—hard, slick at the tip, beautifully thick—and sink down onto him inch by inch.
The stretch is exquisite, my slick heat swallowing every ridge until I am seated fully, filled and aching in the best way.
Sam’s breath goes ragged, his hands resting on my hips, steadying me.
I ride him slow in the lamplight, rolling my hips, grinding so his cock rubs deep against that sensitive place inside.
His clover-and-chamomile scent rises soft and green around us.
He watches me like I am a miracle, thumb finding my clit and circling with the perfect pressure I show him, learning me even now.
I move faster, chasing the swell, my breasts bouncing with each downward stroke, my pussy clenching around his length.
When I come it is long and rolling, my walls fluttering hard around him as I cry out his name. He holds me through every wave.
Then his knot begins to swell. Sam goes still, asking even now, “Is that—do you want—” I press down and take it, the thick knot stretching me open and locking us tight.
He comes with a sound like a year of held breath finally released, pulsing deep inside me while the bond rises gentle and complete—clover honey and chamomile, soft as a quiet afternoon.
Beau is a blaze. Sam is a banked and steady warmth. And between them, through the long waves of the heat, they love me without caution.
The heat crests in waves all through that first long night and into the next day.
When a swell takes me, they are there. Beau fucks me through the fierce crests—hard, deep thrusts, his knot locking us while Sam kisses me and murmurs how beautiful I am, how loved, his fingers sometimes joining to tease my clit or pinch my nipples until I shatter again.
Then Sam takes me slow and astonished, filling me so completely while Beau whispers filthy encouragement at my ear, calling me his good girl, his brave one.
Jonah stays, the still point. He gives me water and cool cloths, holds me between swells, and when I need it he slides into me with that quiet, perfect control—his cock stroking deep and steady while the others touch and kiss and hold me open for him.
“Tell us what you need,” Beau says into the dark, and I tell them without shame: more, slower, there, both of you.
They give it—Beau’s cock in my pussy while Sam’s fingers work my clit, Sam buried inside me while Beau sucks marks into my breasts, all of us tangled and slick and honest in the honeysuckle dark.
There is not one careful inch left between any of us.
By the second day the swells soften. They bring me down gentle, feeding me, touching me, loving me in the afterglow until the nest smells only of honey and home and us.
Three bonds now, sealed and singing. Jonah’s quiet strength, Beau’s gold blaze, Sam’s soft green warmth. A family wrapped around me in the deep of the oldest thing my body knows how to do.
And still the heat is not done. Because there is a hole.
Three bonds bright and sealed, and under them my body keeps reaching.
A pull, low and deep and undeniable—an empty place that aches with every heartbeat.
The strongest match. Beeswax and woodsmoke.
Asa. Even sated, even wrapped in love, my pussy still flutters sometimes with phantom need for the fourth, the one my body craves hardest. The incomplete bond is a real ache, a physical protest, a door left open to cold air.
I can feel him out there, the match running both ways, tearing at him too, and still he refuses.
I surface from my heat two days later into the gray light of a spring morning, wrapped in three men I am bonded to for the rest of my life, the most loved woman in the county.
And there is a wound in me the exact shape of the man who would not come.
I lie there with Beau’s arm heavy across me, Sam’s hand in mine, Jonah watching, and I take the measure of it square and unflinching. I have three bonds and one wound. An empty chair that aches in my actual body. The courting is over. The gentle part is over.
“It’s time,” I say to Jonah. My voice is rough from two days of crying out their names. “The third time up. It’s time.”
And Jonah Boone looks at me, then at the recipe box on the windowsill, and says, quiet, “It’s time. God help him, it’s time. Let me get dressed.”