CHAPTER SIX #3
"My turn," he said against her mouth, low and ragged, and there was a smile somewhere in the ruin of his voice.
The decision in him hadn't changed — he still moved like a man who'd made up his mind and found peace in it — but now there was heat poured through the certainty, and she felt the shift of it in his hands as he gathered her up off the bed.
He lifted her like she weighed nothing and set her on the edge of the kitchen counter, and the cool laminate under her bare thighs was a shock after all that heat, the herbs in their coffee cans close enough to smell, green and bright over the salt of the two of them, the whole spare honest little room wrapped around them in the last of the gold light.
He knelt on the hard floor without a word about the hardness of it and hooked her knees over his shoulders and put his mouth on her, and where she'd been thorough and teasing he was something else — focused, relentless, a man who'd decided this was the only task in the world and meant to be very good at it.
His tongue worked her open in slow flat strokes and then tight quick ones, learning her the same way she'd learned him, and his thumbs held her spread for him, and his eyes kept flicking up the length of her body to catch her face, to watch what he was doing land.
She watched him watch her and that was almost the thing that finished her.
She came fast, faster than she'd have admitted to anyone, her heels digging into his back and one hand flying out to grip the counter's edge and the other fisting in his hair, and her flailing hand knocked a coffee can so a little dark dirt spilled across the laminate, and neither of them spared it a glance.
He worked her through it and past it, greedy, until she was shaking and oversensitive and hauling him up off his knees by the hair because she'd had enough of being the only one taken care of.
"Inside me," she said. "Now. I didn't come up here to be gentle with."
His mouth curved against her throat. "No, ma'am."
He dragged her hips to the very edge of the counter and pushed into her standing, her perched on the edge and him stepping in between her open thighs, and the stretch and the fullness of it tore a sound out of her she didn't plan.
They both went still at the joining, his forehead dropping to hers, the two of them breathing one shared ragged breath in the dark while her body learned the size of him all over again.
Then he drew back and pushed in slow, watching her face, and she rolled her hips up to meet him, and it was nothing on God's earth like a man taking and a woman lying still to be taken.
It was two people who'd both decided. Both reaching.
Her ankles hooked at the small of his back and dragging him deeper, her hands hauling him in by the shoulders, his forearm wrapped low under her hips to hold her at the exact angle that made her see white.
The counter was never built for two people deciding this hard; it knocked the wall on every stroke, rhythmic, loud in the quiet apartment, and she laughed once against his mouth at the sheer reckless noise of it and he caught the laugh off her lips and turned it into a groan and drove in harder, and the laugh died into something with no humor in it at all.
When the counter's edge bit too hard into the backs of her thighs he lifted her clean off it, still joined, and turned and walked her the two steps to the window and set her back against the cool glass.
The low last light of the city came up from the street below and laid itself along the side of her, and he held her there pinned between the cold pane and the heat of him, her legs locked around his waist and her arms around his neck, and at this angle every slow drive of his hips hit something that made her breath stutter and her head drop back against the glass.
She could feel the whole hard tremble of effort in him, holding her up, holding back, giving her the pace she'd set instead of the one his body was screaming for.
A man who controlled everything, choosing, over and over with every stroke, to let her run it.
"Say it," she breathed against his ear. "What you wouldn't say to him. Say it to me."
"Mine." It came out of him like something torn loose.
He drove into her deeper, his hand splaying wide and warm at the base of her spine.
"You're mine. Not his to keep, not the club's, not anybody's.
Mine. I'm choosing it. Right now, with my whole life on the line, I'm choosing you, and I'm not — " his breath broke " — I'm not sorry, and I'm never gonna be. "
"Again." Her head dropped back. She was close, the pressure building bright and tight low in her belly. "Say it again."
"Mine." He got a hand between them, found her where she needed it, circled. "Say you're mine back. I need to hear it. Just once, just for me, before the whole world gets a vote."
"Yours." It broke out of her on a sob she didn't feel coming until it was already out.
"I'm yours. I've been yours since I was twenty and didn't have the sense to know what the feeling was, I've been yours through every one of those years you spent guarding the door — " her voice went to pieces as the pressure crested " — there.
Right there, don't you dare stop, right — "
She came apart around him with her whole body bowing up off the counter, her cry filling the small room, her nails dragging down his back, and the feel of her clenching around him tipped him straight over after her.
His arms crushed her in against his chest and his face went into her neck and his hips stuttered and lost their rhythm as he emptied himself into her, and he was talking the whole time, broken, into her skin — her name, and mine, and yours, and her name again — until the words ran dry and there was nothing left in the room but the two of them shaking in the last gray of the daylight, in a spare clean home that smelled of basil and salt and sweat and the choice they had just made out loud where it could never be unmade.
After, he carried her the four steps to the bed and lay down with her tucked against him, and the herbs threw long shadows across the ceiling, and his palm traveled slow over her bare back, and for a while neither of them said anything because there wasn't a thing left that needed saying.
For a while she lay there boneless and listened to his heart come down out of its sprint, and let her eyes wander the spare ceiling and the long shadows the herbs threw across it, and felt, in a way she had nowhere else in her whole carefully-guarded life, completely at ease.
No alarm panel. No guard on the stair. No rules on a legal pad.
Just a clean square room and a dangerous man whose hands rested easy on her bare back and a row of green things on a windowsill reaching for a light that had already gone.
"That basil's a Beaumont now," she said finally, sleepy, watching the shadow of it move on the ceiling. "You knocked half a can of good dirt on the floor on my account. That's practically a marriage proposal where I come from. My grandmama would already be planning the dress."
His chest moved under her cheek, a laugh he didn't quite let all the way out. "I'll sweep it up."
"You will not sweep it up. It stays right where it spilled.
" She pressed her mouth to the warm skin over his collarbone.
"And so does this. Whatever it ends up costing the both of us.
You said it out loud, with the whole world on the line, and there is no putting a thing like that back in the ground once it's been said. "
"I know." His arm tightened around her, his hand spreading warm and easy at the small of her back, the dangerous hand that had stopped, somewhere in the last hour, being a thing either of them had to think about. He was quiet a moment. "I have to tell him. Bishop. To his face."
She stilled against him. "Knox—"
"Not yet. Not mid-war, not with the leak open.
" His voice was low and certain in the dark, the voice of a man who'd finally finished his math and gotten a different answer.
"But I'm not gonna spend the next year sneaking around behind the man who raised me like you're something I'm ashamed of.
You're the opposite of that. So when there's air to do it in, I'm gonna stand in front of Bishop and I'm gonna tell him I love his daughter and I'm not sorry, and he can do whatever he wants with it.
" A pause. "It might be the last thing I ever do as a Saint. "
"Not yet," she agreed quietly. "But promise me it's not never. I can live in the dark for a while. I can't live in it forever. I've done forever in the dark; that was my whole childhood."
"Not never." His mouth found her hair. "I swear it.
The day there's air to do it in, I do it.
I stand up in front of him and I tell him I love his daughter and I'm not sorry, and whatever he does with that, he does.
You have my word, and you're the first person I ever gave it to that the club didn't make me give. "
She turned that over — the first person — and felt it settle somewhere under her ribs and stay.
"It might be the last thing you ever do as a Saint," she said softly, giving him back his own fear so he'd know she'd heard it and wasn't pretending it away.
"Or it might be the first honest thing anybody in this family's done in twenty-five years," she added, before he could answer, and she felt the surprised breath go out of him at that — at the whole shape of a thing he hadn't let himself see, that the silence he was raised inside might be the sickness and not the cure.
She felt him hold her tighter. And she lay there in the spare honest little room with the basil throwing its shadow on the ceiling and let herself believe, for one more night, that two people loving each other out loud might be a thing they actually got to keep.
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