9. Anne
ANNE
Remmen was pissed. I didn’t know he had it in him. His fingers curled around the steering wheel and he didn’t look at me, eyes too focused on the road ahead and racing the storm home.
No, that was a lie. I knew very well that he had anger in him. How could he not when his life had started out in nothing but violence and fear? But I hadn’t known he could be angry at me.
Did you think you were special?
I hated the sound of that little voice in my head.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. The silence in the truck might kill me if it went on for much longer. I stared at his forearms, this time in a completely medical capacity and had to suppress a gasp. “Shit, you are. You’re bleeding. Pull over right now.”
“It’s fine.”
“It is not fine. That wrap I did in the yard is soaked through. You’ve popped it open again driving, because you drive like you’re mad at the truck.
” I twisted in the seat to get a real look.
Blood had run down past his wrist and dried in the creases of his knuckles, and there was fresh red welling up under the edge of the dressing. “Pull over.”
“We’re nearly there.”
“You’re bleeding all over the place. Pull. Over.”
He kept driving. And then the sky opened up like somebody’d cut the bottom out of it.
I’d seen rain. The weather on Perren was a personality disorder.
I had never seen anything come down like Ceres-9 came down.
It hit the windshield in one solid sheet and the road just stopped existing.
Remmen said a word I didn’t know in a voice I did, took his foot off the accelerator, and the truck rolled to a crawl and then to nothing, because there was nowhere left to go. You couldn’t see the front of the hood.
He cut the engine. The rain came down on the roof like gravel.
“There,” I said. “The universe agreed that you needed to pull over.”
He huffed. It wasn’t a laugh, but it was in the family.
A minotaur truck was built for a minotaur.
From outside it looked big enough to hold a small marching band.
From the inside, with one seven-foot male taking up his whole seat and half of mine, it held about half what you’d expect.
And now the rain had turned the windows to gray static and shrunk the whole world down to the space between us.
I did the sensible thing and thought about his arm.
“Give it here.” I dug the kit up off the floor by my feet. “Turn the cab light on. And hold still, or I swear.”
He turned the light on. He shifted around to face me as much as the seat let him. His knee ended up against my thigh, one horn nearly took out the little lamp, and he laid his forearm across the gap between us, palm up, like an offering.
I peeled the ruined wrap off.
It was bad, but not as bad as it looked.
The claws had raked him above the wrist, three ragged lines, none of them deep.
The yard-wrap had held the worst of it, but he’d worked it loose being an idiot with the wheel, and the top of it had opened.
I got the light where I wanted it and got my fingers on either side of the worst line to see how deep, and that was when I noticed he’d stopped breathing.
Not a hitch. He just stopped. A male the size of a doorframe, gone to stone the moment I touched him.
I’d laid hands on a lot of people. I knew how a body usually met you: the flinch, the brace, the little apology of a man who didn’t want to be a bother.
I didn’t know what to do with how Remmen met me, which was not at all.
He held that arm out and let me have it and went so quiet I could feel his pulse going hard and slow against my fingertips.
“You can breathe,” I said. “This is the easy part.”
“I know.”
“You’re not breathing.”
He breathed. It came out rough.
I cleaned the wound with the stuff from Otho’s jar, and the whole time I was aware of him watching my hands like they were doing something extraordinary and not just field aftercare I’d done a thousand times.
I told myself it was the light. I told myself he was cold, or in shock, or thinking about the yard.
“This is going to sting,” I said, and pressed the herb pack to the open inch, and he didn’t so much as twitch. He’d been torn open in front of a crowd for money. A sting was nothing.
But his hand turned over while I worked.
Slow. Until his fingers weren’t lying flat anymore.
They’d curled up loose around the side of my wrist, not gripping, not stopping me, just there.
His whole hand could’ve closed around my forearm and then some.
It didn’t. It rested against me like it had wandered off on its own and he hadn’t decided yet whether to call it back.
I should have moved. I taped the fresh dressing down instead, slower than it needed, and I did not pull my wrist out of his hand.
The friendship was a nice idea.
Is that what we are? Friends?
I’d like to be.
“Remmen.” My voice came out wrong.
“Anne.” His came out worse.
I looked up from his arm and he was already looking at me, and his eyes had gone fiendishly hot, and there was nothing careful left in his face. Whatever this was, he wasn’t managing it.
“You scared the hell out of me today,” he said. Low. “I watched a man put his fist in your jacket and I don’t — I can’t.”
“Remmen—”
“That’s what all of it is.” His thumb moved on the inside of my wrist. One pass sent gooseflesh up my arm. “It’s been all of it for weeks.”
I could have made it a joke. I was quick; I had three of them lined up. And I looked at this huge, careful, lonely man holding my wrist in his ruined hand like it might bruise, and every one of them died in my mouth, because I didn’t want to be quick.
“We can’t,” I said.
“I know.”
“My whole life is riding on this. It’s the last good place I’ve got, Remmen. I can’t—”
“I know.” He didn’t move. He’d have sat there and bled quietly and driven me home and never said another word, if I’d pulled back.
I grabbed a handful of his coat and hauled myself up over the gap and the kit and his braced knee, and I kissed him.
For one second he held that terrible stillness, like he didn’t trust it. Then it broke. His hand came up and cupped the back of my head, and he kissed me back, hard, all of it at once.
There was no careful in it.
I’d wondered more than once, in the dark, how a male that size handled someone like me, and I’d figured it would be all restraint and hesitation.
It wasn’t. He kissed me like he’d been starving and I was the first real meal.
One hand splayed so wide it held my whole skull.
The other came around my back, gathered me in, and lifted me clean off my seat and into his lap.
In his lap I could kiss him properly, and I did, deep and greedy, and he met me every time and gave me more, licking into my mouth, catching my bottom lip in his teeth, one huge hand spread warm across my back to hold me right where he wanted me. I was dizzy before he’d done anything but kiss me.
I got a knee on either side of him. It was the only way to fit.
The truck was built for one of him and had no idea what to do with the two of us, and I did not care about a single physical law in the universe.
His hands ran down my sides, huge and hot through my clothes, and every place they landed I felt how careful he was being.
He was shaking with the effort of holding back, and he would not stop holding back, not even now.
I was straddling a male who could have crushed me without half trying, and I felt safe, and wanted, and nowhere close to sensible.
“You won’t break me,” I said against his mouth.
A sound came out of his chest that I felt in my own ribs before I heard it. “You have no idea how easy it would be.”
“Trust me.” I found the smooth curve of a horn and gripped it for balance, and he made that sound again, louder, and his hips came up under me.
His breath punched out of him. His forehead came down against mine. He was fighting for control and losing it, and I put my mouth on his throat where the pulse was hammering and quit helping him hold on.
He got a hand under the hem of my shirt and shoved it up, until it bunched just above my breasts, and then his hands were on bare skin and I forgot how to breathe. His palm was rough and hot and so big it covered half my ribs, and a shiver went chasing after it.
He was so warm. Everywhere he touched lit up and stayed lit, and I wanted his hands everywhere at once.
He palmed one breast and then the other, huge hands all but swallowing me, and even now I could feel the care in it, the restraint strung tight through him, right on the edge of going.
His thumbs dragged over my nipples until they drew up tight and an ache pulled hard and low in my belly and I moaned into his mouth.
Then he bent his head and closed his mouth over one and sucked, the wet heat and the flat of his tongue and the careful scrape of his teeth, and I felt it pull all the way down, a hot wire from his mouth to the throb between my legs.
I arched up into it and made a sound I didn’t know I had in me. I didn’t recognize the woman making it, and I didn’t want to. She was having a far better time than I ever let myself have.
He dragged his mouth to the other breast and gave it the same, slow and thorough, in no hurry at all, his free hand keeping the first, thumb rolling my wet nipple until I was writhing in his lap and digging my nails into his shoulders, already needing more than his mouth could give me.
I couldn’t stay still. I was rocking down against the hard muscle of his thigh, shameless about it, chasing the friction, the seam of my jeans dragging tight over my clit with every roll of my hips and winding the ache tighter and tighter.
Then I shifted higher and felt him underneath me, the heavy length of his cock through his trousers, so much bigger than it had any business being, and I lost my breath over it.
I ground down against that instead, slow, felt him twitch under me, and we both groaned, and I felt his groan go through his chest and into mine.
Something soft-tufted slid warm up the outside of my leg and curled over my thigh.
His tail. One more part of him on me, holding me without holding me down, and I was surrounded on every side and still nowhere near close enough.
I wanted him out of those clothes. I wanted him to quit being careful.
I wanted him, plain and enormous and unmanageable, and I’d stopped being able to keep quiet about a single part of it.
He brought a hand between us and pressed the heel of it against me through my jeans, right where I ached for him, and I bucked into it before I could stop myself.
He did it again, slow, and again, watching what it did to my face, until I was grinding down onto his hand, soaked clean through the denim, chasing it.
“Tell me you want this,” he said against my skin, wrecked.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
He worked his hand down between us, past the waist of my jeans and into my underwear, and when his fingers found me I was drenched, shameless with it.
He groaned like it hurt him. “Stars, Anne,” he breathed against my jaw, and dragged one thick finger through the slick of me, slow, base to clit and back, spreading me open with it until I was slippery and swollen and rocking up into his hand for more.
Every pass over my clit punched a fresh sound out of me.
He circled my entrance with one blunt fingertip, teasing, not giving it to me, until I was pushing down onto his hand trying to take it myself. “Please,” I said, past pride, and I felt him groan against my throat.
Then he pushed one finger into me, and then a second, so much thicker than my own that the stretch of just that had me gasping, my body clenching down around them, greedy, my forehead dropping to his shoulder.
Two fingers and I was already full, already stretched around him, and it only made me want the rest of him, want to be split open and filled up, want things I’d never once said out loud.
He held them there a moment, letting me take the stretch, then started to move, drawing them out slow and pushing back in, deep, over and over, until the stretch quit being too much and turned into pure filthy pleasure.
I could hear how wet I was, the slick of his hand working me in the quiet of the cab, and it should have embarrassed me and instead it only wound me tighter.
He was unhurried and exact and merciless with it, curling those thick fingers up into a place I hadn’t known was there and going back to it every time it made me jerk, the heel of his hand grinding right where I needed him, his mouth hot and open at my throat.
“That’s it,” he growled into my skin. “Let me feel it.” And it built, low and deep and inevitable, winding tighter with every stroke until my hips were riding his hand on their own, past anything I was deciding, my whole body drawn up to the edge.
And then it broke. It tore up through me in waves and I rode his hand and swore and came with a high, keening wail I couldn’t have swallowed if the whole town had been listening.
He worked me through every second of it, wringing it out of me, gentling only when I did, until I was boneless and twitching and still fluttering around his fingers.
I dropped my face into his neck and breathed him in, shaking, wrung out, my heart slamming like it wanted out through my ribs.
He was still rock-hard and enormous under me and he hadn’t asked me for anything back, and somehow that got to me worse than anything he’d done.
I wanted to give it back, all of it. I got a hand between us and fumbled at his belt, clumsy and greedy, wanting my palm around him, wanting to feel him lose it the way I just had.
He made a low rough sound and caught the hem of my shirt and hauled it up, trying to drag it off over my head, and it snagged on my arm and I heard the seam start to tear, a thin sharp sound in the closed cab.
We both went still.
“Fuck,” I breathed.
“Anne.” His voice was ruined.
“I know.” My forehead stayed on his. “I know. We can’t. We really can’t.”
Neither of us moved. I was still in his lap, my shirt shoved up around my ribs, his hand splayed enormous and warm on the bare skin of my back, and he was hard as iron under me and doing nothing about it but breathe.
There was a contract back home that spelled out in plain letters why this couldn’t happen. And I didn’t need fine print to tell me it was a mistake to fool around with the freaking mayor, no matter how good it felt.
But pulling away felt like dragging myself through cement and I wanted just one more minute with him.
“This can’t happen again,” I said, into his neck.
His hand didn’t stop moving on my back. His other one found mine and folded around it, swallowed it whole.
“No,” he agreed. “It can’t.”
Neither of us let go.