ANNE
Working a long shift in Otho’s clinic after the night I’d had would have exhausted anyone. I didn’t remember coming home or falling asleep. Even stranger, I felt clean, like someone had bathed me while I slept.
Or, possibly, I’d taken a sleepy shower before passing out.
I wasn’t in my bed.
The rest of yesterday flashed through me and I remembered that I didn’t have a bed anymore. Or, rather, I now shared one with Remmen. And we were done keeping secrets.
So where was my massive mate?
His wounds had been superficial, but he’d waited at Otho’s for hours, helping me with menial tasks as I helped anyone I could while Otho kept Mestyn alive, much to Remmen’s consternation.
The bedroom was warm and the light coming through the thin curtains was late morning gold.
His pillow still had the dip of his head in it.
I pressed my face into it and breathed him in, and then I got up because the house smelled like something else too, something that had no business being on this planet.
Coffee.
I pulled on one of his shirts. It hung to my knees and the sleeves covered my hands and I didn’t care. The front room stopped me in the doorway.
My medical kit was on the shelf by the door, next to his lamp.
The quilt from my old apartment was folded over the back of his bench.
My boots were lined up against the wall under a row of hooks, and my jacket was hanging on one of them.
The stack of books I’d brought from Earth sat on the table where he used to eat standing up, and there was a second chair pulled up to it that hadn’t been there before.
It looked like it was ours.
He had claimed the couch in the front room, one arm stretched over its back, his legs crossed at the ankle. He’d been watching the doorway. The second he saw me in his shirt, his whole face went soft and stayed there.
“Morning,” I said.
“Afternoon,” he corrected.
“You went to my apartment?” I asked. Then I breathed deep. “You brought my coffee?”
Remmen smiled. “It’s in the kitchen. I boiled the water, but I wasn’t sure how to make it. Will you show me?”
I went past him and he caught my hand on the way by, just long enough to press his mouth to my knuckles. Then he let go and followed me into the kitchen.
The French press was on the counter next to a pot of water still warm from the stove. My bag of coffee was there too, opened and sniffed at, with the top unrolled, like he’d stuck his nose in and tried to figure out the ratio by smell alone.
“Two scoops,” I told him, spooning the grounds into the press. “Then the water, not quite boiling. Let it sit for four minutes. Push the plunger down slow.”
He stood close behind me and watched over my shoulder like I was performing surgery. His chest was close behind my shoulders, warming my back without touching it.
“Four minutes,” he repeated.
“Don’t rush it. Good coffee is patient coffee.”
“I’m patient.” His voice was low and warm against my hair and I got distracted enough to nearly overfill the press.
The four minutes took about a year. I found a mug and pushed the plunger down and poured, and the smell that came up was so good I almost cried. Again. I’d already cried over this coffee once and I wasn’t doing it twice.
His arms came around me from behind before I could clutch the cup fully. “Good,” he rumbled. “Now I can bring it to you in bed.”
I leaned back into him. “I’d like that.”
“Every morning,” he continued. “Forever.”
Forever didn’t scare me. His arms were warm and enormous around me. The coffee smelled right, and there was a second chair at the table.
He wasn’t going anywhere. He’d chosen me every single day in a hundred ways I hadn’t let myself count until now, and not one of them had been a performance.
He was mine.
Screw the coffee.
I spun around and wrapped my arms around him, then my legs.
He caught me like I weighed nothing, one hand under my thighs and the other spread flat across my back, and I kissed him. Not careful, not testing. I kissed him hard. He made a rough sound into my mouth and met me with enough force to curl my toes.
He tasted like the boiled root he drank every morning and like himself, clean and warm, and his tongue was hot against mine. I got both hands in his hair and pulled, and he groaned, and I felt it vibrate through his whole chest into mine.
He sat me on the counter without breaking the kiss.
The stone was cold on the backs of my bare thighs and I didn’t care because he was between my legs, the solid width of his hips holding my knees apart, his arousal hard against me through his trousers.
I locked my ankles behind his back and pulled him closer.
I got my fingers on the buttons of his shirt.
They were too big for their holes, or my hands were shaking, or both.
I yanked the last two open and shoved the fabric off his shoulders and he let it fall.
All that warm skin, the scars I’d learned by touch in the dark, the muscles jumping under my palms when I ran my hands down his chest.
He pulled my shirt up over my head in one easy motion, and I wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. I hadn’t put on a stitch before I came out to find him. The cool air hit my bare skin and my nipples went tight, and Remmen’s eyes dropped to my breasts and went molten gold.
“Nothing under it,” he said, rough. “The whole time you were standing there making coffee.”
“I was in a hurry.”
He scooped me off the counter so fast I yelped, one arm hooked under my ass and the other banded across my back, and I got my fingers around the base of one horn and held on as he carried me through the front room.
It felt like a threshold. His bedroom and him carrying me into it with my legs wrapped around his waist and my hands on his horns and nothing between us.
A bride being walked into her house, except the house was already mine and the groom was seven feet of scarred minotaur and I’d never wanted anything this badly.
He set me down on the bed so gently it almost undid me. The mattress dipped under my weight and the sheets were cool and smelled like him, like his skin and the soap he used and something underneath that was just Remmen, warm and dark.
He knelt on the bed over me and cupped one breast in his hand, his thumb dragging across the nipple until I arched up into it.
Then his mouth followed, hot and wet, his tongue circling slow, and I fisted my hand in his hair and held him there because I wanted more of it and I was done pretending I didn’t.
“Mine.” His mouth was warm against my breast. He moved to the other and his lips closed around the nipple and he sucked gently, and his hand covered the breast he’d left behind, big enough to hold the whole of it.
“Mine, mine, mine.” Each word pressed into my skin like he was trying to leave it there.
The last one barely made it out, and I pulled him closer.
His mouth trailed lower, down the center of my ribs, and his breath was hot on my stomach, and I could feel his horns dragging cool against my skin on either side, tracing down my body as he went.
The smooth curve of one grazed the inside of my breast and I shivered hard.
He paused there and did it again, deliberate this time, the polished bone warm from my skin now, dragging slow across my nipple, and the sound I made was embarrassing and I didn’t care.
I pulled at his waistband. “Off. Now.”
He stood up long enough to strip his trousers off, and I watched.
I always watched, and I would never get used to it.
The width of his shoulders, the narrow hips, the thick dark hair that trailed down his stomach.
His cock was hard and heavy, flushed dark, jutting away from his body, a drop of slick shining at the head.
I’d had him inside me plenty of times now.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and reached for him. My hand barely closed around the base, and when I stroked up he went perfectly still. Not tense-still. Held-breath still, waiting still, every muscle locked.
I closed my hand around him again and drew it up, smearing the drop at the head with my thumb. His exhale came out shaking. His hands were at his sides, not touching me, letting me have him. The muscles in his thighs were rigid and I could see a vein ticking in his jaw.
I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to his stomach, just above his cock, and licked a line across the warm skin there.
He made a sound like I’d hit him. I did it again, lower, my lips brushing the coarse hair below his navel, my hand still working him slow.
His cock kicked against my palm and his stomach pulled taut.
I wanted to spend a whole day doing this.
Learning exactly what it took to break Remmen’s control, finding every trick that made the composed, patient, steady mayor come apart under my fingers.
The slow stroke that made his jaw go tight.
The thumb across the head that made his hips jerk forward into my hand.
The grip at the base that dragged a sound out of him I’d never heard before, deep and desperate, and I felt it between my legs like a fist closing.
Not today. Today I just wanted him.
“Lie down,” I said.
He blinked. I pushed at his chest and he went, sitting down onto the bed and stretching out on his back, and the whole frame groaned under him. He took up most of the mattress and waited for me to tell him what came next.
I climbed over him. Straddled his hips, my knees wide on either side of him, his cock thick and slick against my inner thigh.
I rocked my hips and he slid through the wet of me without pushing in, the length of him dragging against my clit, and the friction was so good I did it again, grinding slow against him until we were both breathing hard and I was soaked and shaking and done teasing.
I reached between us and took him in my hand and guided him to my entrance, and I sank down slow.
The stretch was enormous. It always was, and I always wanted more of it, the burn and the fullness of my body making room for him, opening up inch by thick inch.
I braced my hands on his chest and panted through it and watched his face while I took him.
His hands came up to my hips and I caught them and pressed them flat to the mattress.
“Let me,” I said.
His fingers dug into the sheets, but he kept his hands where I’d put them. His jaw was tight and his breath came hard through his nose, the iron ring clicking softly. His cock twitched inside me with every beat of his heart. I put my hands on his face and held him there.
“I’ve got you,” I told him.
His expression broke open.
I slid the rest of the way down and we both stopped breathing. He was so deep I could feel him in my spine, in the back of my teeth. I sat there for a moment, just feeling him, full to the point of aching, his heartbeat pulsing inside me.
Then I started to move.
Slow rolling circles of my hips, taking him at my pace.
His hands stayed where I’d put them and his head tipped back and his eyes went molten gold and his mouth fell open.
I watched the composure drain out of him and it was the hottest thing I’d ever seen — this man who held a whole settlement together with his bare hands, flat on his back and obeying because I told him to.
I rode him slow and deep. I braced my hands on his chest and found the angle that hit every nerve I had, and I kept it, rolling my hips down on every thrust until I felt him hit the end of me and we both groaned.
His abs were clenched hard under my palms. I ran my nails down the center of his chest and he hissed, and his hips bucked up into me involuntarily, and the thrust went deep enough that I cried out.
“Do that again,” I panted.
He did. His hips came up to meet mine and the angle changed and he was deeper than I thought I could take and it was perfect, the full thick drag of him on every stroke.
I lost my rhythm, caught it again, and got one hand on his horn.
His whole body shuddered, and a growl tore out of his chest that I felt through my thighs.
I rode him harder. I couldn’t help it. The orgasm was building slow and enormous, tightening low in my belly with every thrust, and his hands were still on the mattress and his eyes were still on me.
His fingers had twisted the sheets into ropes, but he waited for permission, his cock so thick inside me I could feel every thrust before he made it.
I leaned down and kissed him, sloppy and desperate, and his mouth was hot and open under mine. “Let go,” I whispered against his lips.
His hands broke free. They clamped onto my hips hard enough to bruise and he drove up into me, once, and the orgasm hit me so hard I couldn’t see. It tore through me, clenching me tight around him, and I shouted his name and didn’t care who heard while he fucked up into me and held me down on him.
He followed me over three strokes later. He buried himself as deep as he could go and came with a groan that I felt in my teeth, his whole enormous body locked tight under mine, filling me in long shaking pulses while I held his face in my hands and watched his eyes go blind with it.
I collapsed on top of him. His arms closed around me, loose now, spent, and his chest heaved under my cheek.
I could hear his heartbeat hammering, slowing down by degrees.
His cock was still inside me, softening, and I clenched around him just to feel him twitch, and he made a sound that was half laugh and half groan and I grinned against his skin.
“Marry me,” Remmen rumbled in my ear as we settled back down against the bed.
“What?” I asked.
“Marry me,” he said again. “You’re my mate. Be my wife.”
I lay there with his weight half on me and his hand still tangled in my hair and waited.
I knew the feeling that was supposed to come next.
The cold slide of doubt, the memory of another man’s voice making promises he’d break before the ink dried.
Alistair on one knee in that restaurant with the ring he’d spent too much on and the smile I’d believed was real.
Two years on Perren breaking myself apart for a future he was already giving to someone else.
I waited for it to rise up and poison this. For the part of me that had learned the hard way what promises were worth to flinch and pull back and say something careful like let’s not rush.
It didn’t come.
I searched for it. The fear wasn’t there.
Alistair had promised me the world while quietly handing it to someone else.
Remmen had blurted out the most terrifying truth of his life trying to set me free.
He’d fought for me, bled for me, and when I’d told him he was wrong in front of his whole town, he’d backed down.
I smiled. “Name the date and I’ll be at the altar.”