Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
CASSIAN
The next few days passed in a dream of happiness and safety. We kissed when we could. It got heated more often than we thought, and for a brief time I thought if only we could stay right here, cut off from the world, then I could be happy. I spent the longest time holding Asha.
Like right now she’d gone heavy and warm against my chest, out cold two burps in, one fist curled loosely in the collar of my shirt. I kept my hand flat over her back and felt her breathing settle into that slow, even drag that meant she wasn’t coming back for a while.
“You did that on purpose,” I told her, voice low. “Wore yourself out so you wouldn’t have to sit through the rest of story time.” She didn’t answer. A thin line of drool was already soaking into my collar, and I didn’t care.
Soren leaned in the doorway, watching us, arms loose, none of his usual guard up and whatever he’d been chewing on all evening had gone quiet for a minute.
“She’s asleep,” I said.
“We should get her down before she changes her mind.”
He led the way down the hall to the nursery. I laid her in the crib and tugged the blanket up over her shoulders, tucking Wolfie into her side. Soren stood beside me watching her chest rise and fall, one hand resting on the rail, knuckles pale under the night light.
“Can we talk?” he asked, and my pulse picked up before I’d even answered.
“Downstairs?”
He nodded and led the way down the stairs, into the living room, and I followed, my mind already running through everything it could be.
Soren stood by the window working the hem of his sweater between his fingers past his knuckles and letting go, pulling it again.
Light from the fire caught in his hair, silver over white, and for a second he was untouchable.
He hadn’t said a word in minutes. His shoulders had crept inward, making him appear smaller.
“What’s wrong, Soren?”
His chin came up. Green eyes found mine, that flat shine snow leopards carried even in human skin, unnerving no matter how many weeks I’d had to get used to it.
His lips parted, closed, parted again. The sweater hem twisted tighter in his fingers, knuckles white, a tremor running the length of his arm.
I tipped my head and caught it: his scent had changed and under vanilla a sweetness I’d caught in traces around him since Asha had arrived, thickening until it filled the space between us.
Not a heat, but he was turned-on and needy, and God help me, I wanted to take care of him in every way I could.
The idea of him in my bed, in my life—it was such a want it stole my breath.
“I need to ask you something.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat and tried again. “And I totally understand if you don’t want to. I mean, I’m not...” He stopped three feet from the couch, close enough that his scent wrapped around me whole.
“Not what?”
“I’m… I’ve had… I have…” He shook his head.
“This is stupid,” he muttered. “I’ve never—” He stopped.
Swallowed. His fingers had gone still, knuckles bone-white.
“I meant what I said about a knot…your knot…but the only time I’ve been with someone, I didn’t choose it.
I was supposed to get pregnant. That was the whole point of it. ”
“Okay?” My chest locked down hard. Soren’s gaze dropped to the floor, then lifted back to mine.
“Will you make love with me?”
I stood. The couch creaked under me. Soren held his ground, though his weight shifted back onto his heels, instinct more than retreat.
His eyes tracked me as I closed the distance, pupils blown wide, lips parted on a shallow breath, and his scent changed again.
The bitterness dropped away. The sweetness came back richer, and under it something damp and unmistakable.
“Soren.” I kept my voice low, the gravel in it deliberate, meant to steady him. “Look at me.”
He did. His gaze held mine, and I could see what it had cost him to get the words out, not just the offer of his body but the fact that his body had been used, and he was choosing, this time, who got to touch him.
I lifted my hand slowly, giving him time to flinch or retreat.
He didn’t. I brushed the hair off his forehead, the silk of it trailing over my hand, and he let out a breath that trembled against my wrist, eyes half-closing.
His sleeve slid back and I ran my thumb over the inside of his wrist, where his pulse hammered under thin skin.
“Yes,” I said. “So much, yes.” Great, now I’d lost the ability to form coherent sentences.
His whole body let go, and he tipped forward and pressed his face into my chest. I stood still while his fingers found the front of my shirt and held on.
I gathered his hair into my hand. I felt a shudder move through him, felt him lean into my touch as if he’d been waiting a long time for someone to touch him and mean it, then I held him, letting him decide how close he wanted to be.
His scent was everywhere, peaches and sweetness. I pressed my mouth to his hair and breathed him in, letting my own scent rise to meet his, dark and steady, warmth meant as shelter and nothing else.
His fingers tightened in my shirt. His voice came out muffled, fierce despite the tremor in it. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I tipped his chin up with my thumb.
“Right now, neither do I.”
We can’t go… not upstairs… not near Asha.”
“I know.”
“But I want you… before I…” He pressed a kiss to my lips, ran his tongue over mine, sighed into the kiss.
I got my hands under his ass and lifted him, and he wrapped his legs around my hips.
I carried him to the couch, and he wouldn’t let go long enough for me to sit properly, mouth on my jaw the whole way down, until he was straddling my thighs and I was flat to the cushions looking up at him.
“Like this,” he said, more a statement than a question, and I put both hands on his hips and let him feel the answer.
He worked at the buttons of my shirt one by one, unhurried despite the shake still in his fingers, and every inch of skin he uncovered he touched as if it was new information, palms sliding over my chest, my stomach, pausing at the scar above my ribs long enough that I covered his hand with mine.
“Old fight,” I said. “Not important right now.”
That got something close to a laugh from him, and he leaned down to kiss the words off my mouth instead of asking anything else.
I pulled his sweater over his head when he let me, and the sight of him bare above me, moonlight through the window catching every line of him, silver hair loose around his face, put a want in me sharp enough to hurt.
“Tell me if I need to slow down,” I said.
“Please. Don’t.”
Soren rolled his hips—a slow, deliberate grind that pressed his ass down against the hard length of my cock through the friction of denim and worn cotton.
The weight dragged a sound from my throat I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried—something low and rough that scraped through my chest like gravel.
My hands, which had been resting on his thighs, went still.
“I want this,” he whispered, and his gaze held mine.
I watched his throat work around a swallow, the tendons in his neck taut with the effort of saying it.
My hands found his waistband. I didn’t ask again.
I stripped the sweats down his hips in one tug, taking his underwear with them, the fabric bunching at his knees before he kicked them off the rest of the way, then he helped me take off my pants until he was fully bare in my lap, his cock flushed and hard, the tip smeared wet and glistening.
The scent of him hit me like a wall—slick, hot, sweet beneath the peach scent that always clung to his skin.
Omega slick. My jaw clenched so hard my molars ached.
His hole was wet and ready, the soft skin between his cheeks slippery with it, and when I dragged my fingers down to feel, Soren shuddered, his whole body rippling, and pushed back into the touch.
“I’m sorry I’m…” I pressed gently, and he gasped into the kiss. “My body… isn’t perfect anymore…”
I kissed him before he could finish.
“Your body made a gorgeous, healthy baby,” I whispered.
“It’s more than perfect.” His eyes widened, filling with tears.
“Look at me, Soren.” He did, though it was hard for him.
“This body carried Asha.” My hand settled lightly to his side.
“It protected her every second she grew inside you. It brought her safely into the world.”
His lower lip trembled, and I eased my fingers a little inside him to remind him how much I wanted to touch every part of him.
“It survived years of people trying to decide what it should be, what it should do, who it belonged to, and it kept you alive long enough to find me. Do you have any idea how extraordinary that is?”
His breath hitched.
I wiped away the tear that rolled down his cheek with my thumb. “I don’t see something that isn’t enough.” My voice was barely above a whisper. “I see courage when every day you protected the little life inside you when you had every reason to give up.”
“I wouldn’t change Asha for anything,” he said, fiercely.
We kissed some more, and I worked him open slowly despite every instinct screaming at me to take.
One finger, then two, through the slick and into the tight heat of his body.
Soren bit his lip and rocked into it, silent except for the small, broken sounds he couldn’t quite swallow—half-caught breaths and swallowed whimpers that made my cock throb.
By the time I added a third finger, Soren was trembling, his forehead dropped to my shoulder, his fingers digging into the muscle of my arms hard enough to leave crescents.
“Now,” Soren said, the word cracking. “Cassian, now.”