Chapter 5 #2
She reached out and steadied them. Both of her hands wrapped around mine, warm and careful and precise, the way she did everything.
"Is this too fast?" I managed.
She looked at our hands. Looked at my face.
"I've been trying to make this fragrance for eight years," she said quietly. "I didn't know what it was. I thought I was missing a compound. I thought the formula just wasn't finished." She looked up at me. "Nothing about this is too fast, Stellan."
I set the vial very carefully on the workbench beside us.
Then I stepped forward, into the space that had been between us, and it closed, and my wolf went completely still in the way that meant it had exactly what it needed, and I kissed her.
She made a sound against my mouth that was quiet and warm and that did something to my entire nervous system I had no prior reference for.
Her hands were still on mine and I let them guide me — because my hands were still shaking slightly, because this was the most important thing I had ever done and the weight of it was entirely present — and when her fingers turned mine to her waist, I held her with the specific care of someone holding something irreplaceable.
She tasted like bergamot. She smelled like everything.
I backed her gently against the Harley behind her — not the Shovelhead I was working on, the other one, the touring bike, built for long rides and solid ground — and she went with me, her hands coming up to my shoulders.
I lifted her onto the seat in one motion and she let out a small surprised sound and then laughed softly when she registered where she was.
"Tell me you're not about to tell me this bike costs more than my car," she said.
"I'm not about to tell you that," I said.
"Stellan."
"It's fine. The paint's already scratched."
She laughed again — the real laugh, the one that broke free — and I kissed the corner of her mouth and she turned into it.
Her legs wrapped around me and her fingers found the back of my neck and pulled me closer, and the garage settled around us with its smells of oil and old iron and her perfume moving through all of it like a thread of warm light.
I slid my hands up her waist, under the hem of the rust sweater, finding warm skin. She inhaled sharply, then deliberately, like she was cataloguing the sensation the same way she catalogued everything that mattered.
"Cedar," she said softly, her mouth at my jaw. "Smoke. That warm note underneath." Her fingers moved across my chest, mapping, feeling the shift in my heartbeat under her palm. "Right here."
"That one's yours," I said. "You put it there."
She pulled back just enough to look at me, and the gray-green eyes were soft and present and not using any of their usual careful distance.
Then she reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head, and the garage went very specific and warm, and my wolf ran a slow, deep current through my chest that was less like fire than like the way rivers moved — inevitable and total.
I took my time.
That was the decision I made, consciously, in the moment she looked at me like that — that whatever this was, it was not a thing to be rushed through.
She was a woman whose entire professional life was built on the understanding that the best things revealed themselves slowly, in layers, and I was going to give her back what she gave everyone else.
She was the jasmine note. Complex, saturated, requiring patience.
I kissed her throat, her collarbone, the soft skin of her shoulder. She made a low sound and her fingers tightened in my hair.
"The angle on this bike," she said, breathless and laughing at the same time, "is genuinely ridiculous."
"We can stop."
"Don't you dare," she said, and pulled me back to her.
The bike rocked slightly on its kickstand and she went still and we both held for a beat, listening, and then she started laughing again — the helpless kind, the real kind — and I laughed against her neck, and then her hands were on my belt and her laughter had become something else, something warm and deliberate and entirely focused.
I helped her.
The leather seat was cool against the backs of her thighs until it wasn't, until the warmth between us made the temperature irrelevant, until the whole garage had narrowed to the specific coordinates of her body and mine and the particular fragrance she'd built that hung in the air around us, both of us breathing it, our combined scent marking the space.
She wound her arms around my neck and held on.
I pressed my forehead to hers and slowed down, deliberate, because I could feel her response in every place we were in contact and I wanted her to feel mine — wanted her to understand that this was not urgency for urgency's sake, that it was the specific urgency of waiting a long time for a thing you hadn't believed existed and then finding it standing three feet from your booth at a fall festival.
"Stellan," she said, my name in her mouth like a note she'd finally identified.
"I know," I said. "I know."
She tipped her head back.
My wolf ran completely still — not the absence of energy but its absolute concentration, every atom pointed at her, the whole of my nature in alignment for the first time in my life.
Whatever sound she made when it crested, I kept.
Afterward she sagged against me and I held her on the touring bike that cost more than her car, her face at my shoulder, her breathing gradually finding its way back to even.
The garage smelled like the fragrance she'd made and like us and like the specific aftermath of everything that had just become different.
She pressed her mouth to my collarbone.
"Impeccable timing," she said, and her voice was soft and a little wrecked and entirely satisfied.
"My wolf says thank you."
"Your wolf has excellent taste."
"I've been telling it that for years. It's mostly ignored me."
She laughed, soft and close, and didn't move away.
Outside, the October afternoon was going copper-gold on the mountain.
The vial sat on the workbench.
The Shovelhead waited with all its unfinished work.
I didn't think about either of them.