Chapter 7 #2
He drags the flat of his tongue in one slow, filthy stroke from my entrance all the way up to my swollen clit. The wet heat of it rips a broken cry from my throat. Then he seals his mouth over me and sucks — hard — while his tongue flicks fast and relentless beneath the suction.
“Fuck, you taste like heaven,” he growls right against my slick flesh, the words vibrating through me. “Sweet and warm and dripping for me. Nobody’s ever tasted you before. Nobody’s ever claimed this. Say it, Alana. Say this is mine.”
I can’t form words. My hips jerk, but his hands lock me down, thumbs digging into the soft curve of my belly like he’s marking territory.
“Say it,” he demands, pulling back just enough to look up at me, lips glistening. Three thick fingers slide back inside me, curling hard against that spot that makes stars burst behind my eyes. “Say ‘I’m yours, Zac.’ Right now.”
“I’m — oh God — I’m yours,” I sob, fingers twisting in his silver-streaked hair.
“Louder.” He thrusts his tongue inside me alongside his fingers, fucking me with it while his nose grinds against my clit and his beard rasps every oversensitive inch of me raw. “Louder, baby. Let the whole mountain know.”
“I’m yours!” The words tear out of me as the second orgasm starts to coil deep, heavier than the first, like molten lead pooling in my bones. “Zac — yours — only yours —”
“Damn right.” He sucks my clit back into his mouth, tongue lashing, fingers pumping faster. “Mine to taste. Mine to wreck. Mine to fill the second you’re ready. Come for me, Alana. Give me what’s mine.”
The orgasm hits like a freight train. My back bows off the counter, thighs clamping around his head, heels digging into his broad back as I come with a scream that echoes off the log walls. He doesn’t stop. He licks me through every pulsing wave, greedy and possessive.
“That’s it,” he growls against me, his voice wrecked. “Good girl. Soak my beard.”
I sob his name. He presses deeper.
“Let me taste how much you belong to me.”
I’m shaking, crying, boneless.
When he finally lifts his head, beard drenched, eyes blazing with dark satisfaction, he presses one last open-mouthed kiss to my oversensitive clit and rumbles, “Told you you could. And next time you come, it’s gonna be with my cock buried so deep you feel me for days.”
He stands. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Looks at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
I’m on the counter, shaking, completely wrecked, and he can see it written all over my face.
Not just the physical part. The emotional part.
The part where I realize he just made me come twice in a row and apparently I’m capable of more than I thought.
He cups my face in both hands. His thumbs trace my cheekbones.
“Have you done this before?” His voice is quiet. “All the way?”
I shake my head.
He nods, recalibrating something. “I’m going to run you a bath. You need a break.”
I start to protest. He doesn’t argue — just lifts me off the counter and carries me to the bathroom, and I realize the cabin has old pipes that probably can’t heat water fast enough for a proper soak.
He puts me down on the bathroom floor, kisses my forehead, and heads to the kitchen.
I hear the stove fire roar to life. I hear water running.
He comes back with a kettle of hot water he’s heated himself, adds it to the tub, sprinkles Epsom salts across the surface like this is something he does all the time.
Like caring for someone isn’t a foreign language to him.
“Soak,” he says. “Twenty minutes.”
And then he’s gone.
I sink into the water and the heat finds every place he touched.
The beard burn first. Inside of my thighs, raw and pink, the kind of friction that should hurt but doesn’t — it just reminds me.
Every time I shift in the tub, the warm water stings the scraped skin and my brain flashes back to his face between my legs, his jaw working, the silver in his beard catching the light while he ate me like I was the last thing he’d ever taste.
Then the stretch. I can still feel where three fingers were.
That full, aching openness — not pain, just awareness.
My body remembering the shape of him inside me, the way he curled his fingers and found something I didn’t know was there.
Three fingers, and I took all of them, and the sound I made when he pushed the third one in is something I’m going to think about for the rest of my life.
I liked it. I loved it. I want more.
The thought arrives with a flush that has nothing to do with the bathwater.
His cock. I felt it last night — my hand pressing against the front of his jeans before he caught my wrist, thick and hard and straining against the denim.
I didn’t get to touch him properly. He wouldn’t let me.
But I felt the size of him through the fabric, and if three fingers stretched me like that, opened me up until I couldn’t think, what will he feel like?
How much fuller? How much deeper? Will it hurt in that good way, the way the third finger did — that sharp edge of too much that tipped straight into please don’t stop?
I press my thighs together under the water and the beard burn stings and the emptiness where his fingers were aches and I want him so badly my hands shake.
While I’m soaking, I hear him moving around the cabin.
The bedroom door opens and closes. The fireplace crackles to life.
I hear drawers opening. Sheets snapping.
The crackle of a match, then the low whoosh of a fire catching.
He’s getting the bedroom ready for us, and the sounds of it make my chest tight in a way that has nothing to do with sex.
By the time I get out of the water, my body feels light.
Loose. Like he shook something free that’s been locked up inside me for twenty-two years and now everything flows easier — my limbs, my breathing, my thoughts.
I feel like myself for the first time. The version of me that exists when nobody’s watching, when nobody’s deciding what I’m allowed to want.
He’s changed the sheets. The bed has fresh ones, and there’s a small fire going in the bedroom fireplace, and on the nightstand there’s a plate with crackers, water, sliced fruit.
He didn’t just give me two orgasms on a kitchen counter — he heated bathwater on the stove, sprinkled Epsom salts, changed the sheets, built a fire, and cut fruit.
This man takes care of people the way other people breathe.
It’s not a performance. It’s just who he is.
I put on one of his flannels because my clothes feel too complicated, and when I come out, he’s sitting on the porch with a coffee.
He looks up and goes still. His eyes move over me slow — my bare legs, the flannel hanging off one shoulder where I buttoned it wrong — and something crosses his face that isn’t hunger.
Isn’t the careful distance he hid behind for two days.
Something softer. Like a man seeing exactly where he belongs.
He sets the coffee down. Takes my hand. Pulls me into the chair beside him.
“You changed the sheets,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“And built a fire. And cut fruit.”
He looks out at the treeline. “I like taking care of you. Told you that.”
“I know.” I pull my knees up, tuck my feet under me. His hand finds my ankle and stays there, thumb tracing the bone. “Zac?”
“Mm.”
“Tonight.” I don’t look at him when I say it. I look at the pines. “I want tonight.”
His thumb stops on my ankle. Then starts again, slower.
“Okay,” he says. Quiet. Like the word costs him something and he’d pay it a hundred times over.
I lean my head against his shoulder. He presses his mouth to my hair. His hand is warm around my ankle, and the mountain is quiet, and somewhere inside this cabin there’s a bed with clean sheets and a fire he built, and I just told him what I want out loud for the first time in my life.
This is the safest I’ve ever felt.