Chapter 19
Conner
I’ve been lying in the dark staring at the ceiling of a house that feels emptier than it should, turning the bracelet on my wrist, thinking about a kid with a backpack and a woman whose scent went cold.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I reach for it without expecting anything worth reaching for.
Are you awake?
Willow.
I sit up. Read it again. Read it a third time, because she’s been pulling away from me, and now, at two in the morning, she’s reaching out.
Yeah. You okay?
I watch the screen. The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Can I see you?
My wolf freezes. The deep, certain quiet of an animal that’s been waiting and has just heard what it was waiting for.
I send her the address. Then: Door’s open.
I get up. Pull on jeans and a T-shirt. Don’t bother with shoes.
The house is small: kitchen, living room, bedroom, a bathroom I renovated myself three years ago.
Not much to look at. I’ve never brought a woman here.
Never wanted to. This place is mine the way the swimming hole is mine…
private, unshared, the space where I don’t have to be the enforcer.
Headlights sweep the window. A truck pulls into the drive behind mine. Engine cuts. Door opens, closes.
Footsteps on the porch. Light, sure.
I’m in the hallway when the door opens. She’s standing on my porch, her face pale in the kitchen light. She looks like she hasn’t slept. She looks like something woke her and sent her driving through the dark to my door, and whatever it was still has its hooks in her.
She looks like the most real version of herself I’ve seen since we met.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I search her face. “What’s going on? You’ve been—”
She steps forward, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me.
The questions I’ve been running through my head—what changed, what did I do, why is she pulling away—fade away.
Her mouth is warm and urgent, and her hands are holding me like she’s afraid I’ll disappear.
My body responds before my brain has time to object.
I pull her inside. The door swings shut.
My arms go around her waist, and her body presses against mine, and the contact—flush against my body, the heat of her through thin cotton—sends a jolt through me that makes the shift ripple under my skin.
“Willow—”
“Don’t talk.” She kisses me again. Harder. Her fingers are in my hair, pulling, and the slight sting of it makes my cock stiffen against her belly. “I don’t want to talk. I just want…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to. I can feel what she wants in the way her hips grind forward, in the small, desperate sound she makes against my mouth, in the way her hands are pulling at my shirt like it’s personally offended her.
I lift her and carry her down the hallway to the bedroom. Her mouth is on my neck, her teeth grazing the skin below my ear. The sensation goes straight through me. I kick the bedroom door open and lower her onto the bed, and she pulls me down on top of her.
For a second, I just look at her. The hallway light falls across the bed in a stripe, catching the fire of her hair spread on my pillow, the flush climbing her throat, her eyes bright.
She’s in my bed. In my house. The place I’ve never shared with anyone.
And looking at her there—on sheets that smell like me, in a room where my books are stacked on the nightstand, and my grandfather’s rifle is mounted on the wall—something slots into place with a certainty so total it scares me.
She belongs here. With me.
“Conner.” Her voice is rough. Impatient. “Stop thinking.”
“I’m not thinking.”
“You are. I can see it.” She sits up, grabs the hem of my shirt, and pulls it over my head.
Her hands spread across my chest, warm palms, strong fingers, tracing the muscles with a deliberateness that makes my lungs forget how to work.
She traces the scar at my collarbone and then leans in and puts her mouth on it, her tongue dragging across the raised skin, and the tenderness of it undoes something I didn’t know was holding me together.
I ease her back. Unbutton her shirt. She lets me…
and that’s different from every other time.
At the Railhead, it was frantic. In the truck, it was desperate.
Here, she lies beneath me and lets me undress her slowly.
Each button reveals more skin. The freckles across her chest, the flat plane of her stomach, the scar at her hip that I’ve felt but never seen. I trace it with my thumb.
“Don’t ask,” she whispers.
“I wasn’t going to.”
I bend and kiss the scar. Then the skin below it. Then lower: the edge of her jeans, the warm hollow of her hip bone. Her breathing stutters, and her fingers find my hair again, not pulling this time. Holding on.
I tug off her boots, then unbutton her jeans.
She lifts her hips, and I slide them down, taking her underwear with them, and she’s bare beneath me.
I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, to the soft skin where her pulse beats close to the surface.
She makes a sound that drives every thought out of my head except “more of that.”
I take my time. Trail my mouth higher to where crisp curls brush my lips.
She’s wet. I can scent it before I taste it, her arousal thick and warm, and when my tongue slides against her pussy she arches off the bed with a gasp that I feel in my chest. I press a hand flat against her stomach, holding her steady, and work her with my mouth…
slow, deliberate, learning what makes her breathe faster and what makes her stop breathing entirely.
“Oh, fuck—” Her thighs tighten around my head. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
I don’t stop. I find the rhythm she’s chasing and hold it, my tongue on her clit, two fingers sliding inside her where she’s slick and hot and clenching around me.
The sounds she’s making are raw, unguarded, nothing like the controlled woman I’ve been coming to know.
This is the version underneath. The one who lets go.
I pick up the pace, tongue flicking in time with the pumping of my fingers. Her inner walls tighten, release, and then spasm. Hard.
“Oh, God! Conner!” She comes against my mouth.
Her whole body locks, her back bowing off the mattress, a strangled cry that she buries by turning her face into the pillow.
I feel the orgasm pulse through her, the rhythmic clench of her muscles around my fingers, the shudder that runs from her thighs through her stomach to her chest. I hold her through it. Don’t rush. Let it ebb.
When she goes slack, I lift my head. She’s breathing hard, eyes unfocused, a flush spreading from her chest to her throat. She looks undone. She looks beautiful.
“Get up here,” she says.
I crawl up her body. Kiss her stomach, her ribs, the swell of her breast. She reaches between us and takes my cock in her hand, stroking with a grip that’s firm and sure and makes my vision flicker at the edges.
“Now,” she says. “I want you inside me.”
I push in. Slowly, the way I couldn’t at the Railhead, the way the truck didn’t allow.
The full length of me sliding into her, inch by inch, her body opening around me with a heat that makes me grit my teeth to keep from losing it immediately.
She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper, and the sound she makes—low, satisfied, a sigh that’s almost a growl—vibrates through my chest.
I move. And this time, I set the pace. Not frantic.
Not desperate. Deep, deliberate strokes that let me feel every inch of her.
The wet grip of her around me. The way her hips rise to meet each thrust. The small sounds she makes on every stroke; not performed, not exaggerated.
Real. The sounds of a woman who’s stopped pretending.
“You feel…” I don’t finish. There’s no word for what she feels like. Like the answer to something. Like a place I didn’t know I was looking for.
She pulls me down. Kisses me while I move inside her.
Her hands are on my back, my shoulders, my face.
The tenderness is back, the same quality as the kiss at the swimming hole, but deeper now, edged with something I can’t describe.
She touches me like she’s memorizing me. Like this is the last time.
I push the thought away. Don’t think about last times.
“Harder,” she whispers. Not demanding. Asking.
I push harder. The pace builds, the restraint dissolving into something more animal.
My hips thrust against hers, and the bed frame hits the wall in a rhythm that I’d care about if I had room in my head for anything except the feel of her and the sounds she’s making and the way her nails dig into my shoulders with an urgency that tells me she’s close again.
I slip a hand between us. Find her clit. She breaks against my mouth, a cry she doesn’t bother to muffle this time because there’s no one to hear, no pack fifty yards away, just the two of us in a house on Sycamore Road with the windows dark and the night holding still around us.
Her orgasm takes me with it. The clench of her pulls me over the edge, and I come with my face buried in her neck, her scent filling my lungs, her name in my mouth, and the world going narrow and bright and absolutely certain.
We lie tangled. My weight on her, her legs still around me, our breathing ragged in the quiet room. The house is silent around us, aside from the creak of old wood, the hum of the fridge in the kitchen, and the distant sound of a coyote calling from the ridge.
She’s running her fingers through my hair. Slow, absent, the way you pet an animal without thinking. The gesture is so gentle that it makes my throat tight.
“Stay,” I say. Not a question. Not quite.
“Okay.”
The word is so small and so simple, and it fills the room.
I pull the covers over us. She turns on her side, and I curve around her, my arm across her waist, my face against her hair. She smells like sex and sweat and herself, the spring-leaf sweetness that I’d know anywhere in the world.
My wolf is quiet. Not the restless silence of the past week, not the heavy silence after the relocation. A different quiet. Full. Complete. The stillness of an animal that has exactly what it needs and isn’t asking for anything more.
I think about the files. The thirty-seven. The questions Garrett won’t answer. I think about the kid with the backpack and the father who asked “have you checked?” About the look on Tate’s face when he talked about the girl he used to know.
And then I think about the woman in my arms, her breathing evening out, her body warm against mine, her fingers going still as sleep takes her.
This woman who came to me in the middle of the night because she needed something she couldn’t explain.
Who kissed me in my hallway with a desperation that felt like the opposite of her recent coldness. Who said okay when I asked her to stay.
I hold her tighter. Close my eyes. Sleep comes faster than it has in weeks, and for the first time in a long time, the dark is warm, and the silence isn’t empty.