Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
ZAC
Her blonde hair spreads across my pillow, tangled in the white sheets I changed yesterday.
One leg kicks free from the blankets, bare from hip to ankle, the other bent at the knee where my thigh was ten minutes ago.
The left side of the bed is still warm from me.
She rolled into it the second I got up — pressed her face into the dent I left in the pillow and stayed.
I’m standing in the doorway with coffee I forgot I’m holding.
Morning light catches the honey in her hair against the white pillowcase. Her smooth skin against my sheets. She looks like she belongs right here. In my bed. In my cabin. In my life.
She stirs. Stretches her arms above her head, back arching. Her eyes flutter open. When she sees me in the doorway, her smile is lazy, confident. Nothing like the nervous girl who climbed out of a car on shaking legs a week ago.
“Hi,” she says, her voice rough with sleep.
I set the coffee on the dresser. Cross the room. Sit on the edge of the bed, close enough that her knee presses against my hip. Her hand finds my forearm — the scar — and rests there like it’s hers.
“What happens after thirty days?” she asks. Not nervous. Just direct, the way she’s learned to be here.
“You know the answer to that.”
“I want to hear you say it.” She sits up, pulls the sheet around her shoulders, tucks her legs under her.
“Because we’ve been doing a lot of — “ She waves a hand between us. “This. And I love this. But I don’t know what your life looks like. I don’t know what you were like before the cabin.
I don’t know what you want in five years. ”
“I was miserable,” I say. “Before you.” I look at the coffee on the dresser, the one I made without thinking — her mug first, mine second, the way I’ve done it every morning since she got here.
“I told myself the quiet was enough. The business. The mountain. Clients who pay me to keep them alive for a week and then leave.” My hand goes to the back of my neck.
“Nobody stayed. I didn’t let anyone stay. ”
“Why?”
“Because staying means needing. And the last person I needed walked out when I was twelve and never came back.” I say it the way I always say it. Like it happened to someone else. “I decided I’d rather be alone than be the kind of man who needs someone and loses them.”
She’s quiet for a long time. Her fingers move on the scar, slow circles.
“My brothers think they kept me safe,” she says.
“But what they really did was make sure I never learned how to be wanted. I knew how to be watched. How to be managed. How to be someone’s responsibility.
” She looks at me. “I didn’t know what it felt like to be chosen until I walked into this cabin and you looked at me like I was the only thing in the room. ”
“You were.”
“I know that now.” She pulls her knees up. “Five years from now. What do you see?”
I don’t have to think about it. “You. Here. Your pencils everywhere. Your coffee mug next to mine on the counter.” My hand spreads across her belly, thumb tracing the curve.
“I’ll knock out the back wall. Add rooms. One with north light for your work.
The rest for kids. Our kids. As many as you’ll give me.
” My thumb presses harder. “A dog that sheds on everything. You on the porch while I take clients up the mountain and come home to you every single time.”
Her eyes go bright. She blinks hard.
“That’s very specific,” she says, and her voice cracks on the word.
“I’ve had time to think about it.”
She laughs. The snort. “Four years.”
“Four years.”
She moves then. Crosses the bed on her knees and climbs into my lap, her arms around my neck, her face against my jaw. I hold her — one arm around her back, one hand in her hair — and her heartbeat is fast against my chest.
“I love you,” she says. Quiet. Into my neck, where the words land warm against my skin. “I love you, Zac.”
My throat closes. My hand tightens in her hair.
“I love you.” It comes out rough. Like the words have been sitting behind my teeth for years and they’re finally done waiting. “Been loving you since that yellow sundress and the potato salad and the laugh you tried to swallow.”
She pulls back. Her eyes are red and wet and her smile is the real one — beauty mark shifting, eyes squeezed half shut. “The potato salad? Really? That’s your origin story?”
“You had graphite on your fingers.”
“I always have graphite on my fingers.”
“I know.” I press my mouth to her forehead.
She goes quiet against my chest. Then, soft: “Nobody ever noticed that. Nobody cared what was on my hands.”
Her breathing changes. I hold her tighter and don’t say a word, because I don’t need to. She already knows.
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her eyes are wet and bright, and then she’s kissing me.
Hard. Hungry. Both hands on my face, fingers curling into my beard, pulling me in like she can’t get close enough.
Nothing slow about it. She kisses me like she’s been holding back and just stopped.
Her weight shifts in my lap. Her hips press into mine.
I let her take what she wants. My hand grips the back of her neck and she makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight to my cock.
When she pulls back, we’re both breathing hard.
She doesn’t climb off. Stays in my lap, forehead against mine, catching her breath. Her hips shift. Small. Unconscious. She’s rocking against me through the sheet, pressing down where I’m hard, and I don’t think she knows she’s doing it.
But I know.
“Alana.”
“Mm.” Her eyes are half shut. Her hips roll again.
“You’re grinding on my cock right now.”
Her eyes fly open. The blush hits her face fast. She starts to pull back and I hold her hips exactly where they are.
“Don’t stop.” I press her down against me. “I think you need an emergency orgasm.”
She laughs. Shaky, real. “That’s not a thing.”
“It’s a thing. And you’re the most urgent case I’ve seen.”
Her panties are on the floor beside the bed. Pale blue cotton, kicked off last night. I reach down without looking away from her face and pick them up.
I bring them to my face. Breathe her in.
“Zac.” High. Scandalized. Turned on.
“These are mine now.” I hold her gaze. “Arms up.”
She blinks. “What?”
“Arms above your head.”
She raises them. Slow. Watching me. I take both wrists in one hand and wrap the cotton around them. Not tight enough to hurt. Tight enough that she feels held.
“Is this okay?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. Her pupils are blown.
“You can’t touch me. You can’t touch yourself.” I press my mouth to the inside of her wrist, just above the binding. “So if you want something, you have to ask for it. Out loud.”
She swallows. “That’s not fair.”
“I don’t play fair.” I lower her bound wrists to the pillow above her head. “Keep them there.”
I ease the sheet off her. She can’t cover herself. Just watches me with those blown-dark eyes while I look at every inch of her.
“Tell me where.”
Her chest rises and falls. “My neck. Start there.”
I press my mouth to the curve where her shoulder meets her throat. She shivers. My beard drags across her skin and she arches into it.
“Lower,” she says.
Collarbone. The hollow of her throat. My tongue traces the bone.
“Lower.”
Her breathing is ragged. I close my mouth over her nipple and she cries out, back arching off the bed. Her arms jerk against the binding.
“Harder, Zac.”
I bite down. She gasps. Her hips rock up, searching for friction that isn’t there.
“I need your hand. I need you to touch me.”
“Where?” I pull back enough to look at her. “Say it.”
“Between my legs.” Her face is flushed, her voice raw. “Please.”
I slide my hand down her belly, over the curve, between her thighs. She’s soaked. The second my fingers find her she bucks into my hand.
“You’re this wet from grinding on me?”
“I’m this wet from you tying me up with my own underwear.” She laughs and it breaks into a moan when I press her clit. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
“Not stopping.” I keep the pressure steady. “What else?”
“Inside. Your fingers. I want to feel you inside me.”
Two fingers. Slow. She takes them and her whole body tightens around me.
“Don’t go quiet on me,” I say against her breast.
“I can’t think when you do that.” She gasps when I curl my fingers. “There. Keep doing that.”
I keep doing that. Thumb on her clit, two fingers deep, my mouth moving across her chest.
“Zac, I’m close.”
“I know.” I can feel it. Her walls tightening, her thighs starting to shake. “Let go.”
She comes hard. Her bound hands grip the fabric, her back bows off the mattress, and the sound she makes fills the cabin. I work her through it until she’s gasping, pushing at my hand with her thighs because her wrists can’t reach.
I untie her. Kiss the faint marks the cotton left on her skin. She flexes her fingers, looks at me with heavy, satisfied eyes.
Something shifts in her expression. The softness sharpens.
“My turn,” she says.
Before I can respond, she pushes me back against the headboard. She kneels between my legs with my cock already hard. She looks at it like she’s studying it.
“You sure?” I ask, though every cell in my body is begging her to say yes.
“Yeah.” She looks up at me and that’s when I know she’s fully here, fully present. “I want to.”
She licks the tip first—experimental, just the very end, her tongue tasting the pre-come there. I groan and thread my fingers into her hair, not pushing, just holding, grounding myself.
“It’s okay,” she says quietly. “I want to know what you taste like.”
She takes me into her mouth slowly. Careful at first, then braver. She gets about halfway down before she has to pull back. She uses her hand at the base while her mouth works the top, finding a rhythm.
“That’s perfect,” I say, my voice wrecked. “You’re doing so good. Right there. Just like that.”
She looks up at me while she’s taking me in her mouth and the eye contact nearly kills me.
I reach between her legs, voice low. “Touch yourself while you do that. One hand on me, one for you.”
She tries. Her hand slides between her thighs, but the mattress is too soft under her knees. She wobbles, catches herself on my thigh, and pulls back with a frustrated sound.
She doesn’t ask. She pulls off me, slides off the bed, and kneels on the hardwood beside it. Then she looks up at me. Waiting. One hand on my thigh, her mouth level with my hip, and that look on her face that says come here.
I shift to the edge. My feet hit the floor. She settles between my legs, knees on solid ground, and the angle is different now. Better. She’s steady. Grounded.
“There,” she says. Like she just solved a problem.
Her mouth finds me again. One hand wraps around the base, the other slides between her own thighs, and this time nothing wobbles. She’s got the floor under her knees and my cock in her mouth and her fingers on her clit, and she looks up at me like she’s exactly where she wants to be.
“God, I love watching you with my cock in your mouth,” I say, threading my fingers through her honey-blonde hair.
She finds her rhythm again. Slow, deep pulls with her mouth, one hand stroking the base of me in time with every suck, the other working her clit in tight circles. Small desperate sounds vibrate around me.
“That’s it,” I growl, hips starting to twitch. “Look at you, my perfect wife. Sucking me so pretty while you fuck your own fingers. On your knees, mouth full of me, making that greedy little pussy come.”
She whimpers around me. Her hand speeds up between her thighs. I can feel her legs trembling against mine. Her full tits move with every bob of her head and I can’t stop watching.
“Tell me how close you are,” I say, voice raw.
She pulls back just enough to breathe. “So close.” Her voice is wrecked. Her hand doesn’t stop. “Don’t move. Let me do this.”
She takes me deep again and the eye contact nearly ends me.
“Come,” I tell her. “Come for me right now. I want to feel my wife fall apart with my cock in her mouth.”
Her eyes lock on mine and she shatters. A broken moan vibrates around me as her whole body jerks, her legs pressing hard against mine. The sight of her coming undone while her mouth is still on me rips the last of my control away.
I pull back. Barely. Just enough to see her face. “I’m gonna come. You want it?”
She looks up at me. Licks her lips. Slow. Deliberate. Like she’s already tasting it.
“Yes, please.”
Two words. That’s all it takes.
I thrust once, twice, and I’m coming, spilling into her mouth, groaning her name. She takes every drop. Swallows. Pulls back slow, lips swollen, and looks up at me like she just won something.
“Good?” she asks. Her voice is hoarse and she’s smiling.
“You’re going to kill me,” I say. And I mean it.
We collapse together, her curling back against my chest. I pull her hair out of her face and kiss the crown of her head.
“Coffee?” I ask after a while.
“Mm.” She makes a small affirmative sound without opening her eyes.
I get up carefully and retrieve the mug from the dresser. It’s still warm. I bring it back and she sits up slightly, the sheet pooling around her hips, and she takes it with both hands. She sips it and sighs like I’ve just given her the best gift.
“You made this before the whole—” She gestures vaguely at the bed.
“Yeah.”
“Were you planning to?—”
“No. I was going to drink it and you were going to sleep for another hour.” I settle beside her again, my hand finding her hair. “But then you woke up and you smiled at me like that.”
She glances over at me while she’s holding the coffee. “Like what?”
“Like you belong here. Like this is exactly where you want to be.”
She looks back at the coffee cup, taking another sip, but I can see the corners of her mouth lift. “I do want to be here.”