17. Shepherd #2
I touched her everywhere. Her thighs, her hips, the soft slope of her stomach.
I dragged my thumb across the tight peak of one nipple and she shuddered.
I slid my hand down between us, found her where we were joined, pressed the pad of my thumb to her swollen clit and circled.
She bucked above me, a startled motion that drove me deeper into her, and we both groaned at once.
“There,” she said. “There. Just like that. Shepherd, just like that.”
I kept doing it.
She rode me faster as I worked her with my hand.
Her breasts moved with the rhythm of it and I could not stop looking.
I had never been with anyone so unselfconscious, so frank, so present in her own body.
She was using me. She was taking what she needed.
And I was looking up at her like she had hung the moon.
This was what I’d been put on this earth to do, and it was what I’d do to my dying day if she’d let me.
“I'm going to,” she gasped. “I'm going to, Shepherd, I'm...”
She came down hard, locked around me, and the look on her face as she came was something I’d carry with me to my grave.
She arched, mouth open on a soundless cry, her hands gripping my chest hard enough that I thought she might leave bruises.
I felt her clench around me, felt her body milk mine, and the part of me that had been holding on by a thread finally let go.
I came inside her. Hard. Helplessly. With my hands gripping her hips and my hips trying to drive up into hers.
She rode me through it. Slow now. Gentle. Until I was wrung out and shaking under her, until my hands had gone slack on her hips.
The thickening began at the base of my cock without warning, without my will, without anything I could do to stop it even if I had wanted to.
I had thought, in some quiet observed way, that I had walled this off too.
That I had buried the capacity for it along with everything else.
There had been a handful of women in the years since Maya, but I had never been undone enough with anyone to call the knot out of me.
I had been wrong about myself. Noa was proving me wrong about a great many things.
I felt her gasp against me when she felt it.
“Shepherd.”
“I know.”
“Don't move.”
“I won't.”
“I want it. I want you to. Just don't move.”
I didn't move. I lay there and let it happen, let the knot swell inside her, let it catch on the snug entrance of her and lock us together.
I came again when it locked. I couldn't help it.
A long shuddering pulse that drained whatever I had left, that I felt her draw out of me with another shaking climax of her own, smaller this time but no less real.
She was crying.
Not from pain. I knew that even before she said so. Her hand was fisted in my chest hair and she was weeping silently against my throat as her body shook with something I couldn’t name.
“Noa,” I whispered gently, my hand stroking through her hair.
“Just hold me.”
“Did I...”
“No. No. You did everything right.” Her voice was muffled. “Just hold me.”
I held her. I held her with my arms tight around her back and my knot still pulsing inside her and my mouth pressed to the top of her head.
My teeth wanted her shoulder.
I noticed the urge the way I had noticed everything else tonight, with the careful attention I had spent my life refining and could not, even now, switch off.
The bonding spot was right there, exposed at the curve of her throat, the soft hollow where neck met shoulder.
Every alpha instinct in me was telling me to set my teeth there and seal what we had just made.
But I didn’t let my mouth drift toward it. I kept my lips at the crown of her head and counted my breaths, waiting for the urge to pass through me without acting on it. We hadn’t discussed that part. None of us had. I wasn’t going to be the one to make a decision that belonged to all four of us.
So, I held her and breathed her in, and I felt something inside my chest that I hadn’t let myself feel in fourteen years.
I hadn’t been prepared for love.
I had thought, in my analytical way, that I was building toward affection.
Toward a bond. The kind of pack-loyalty that would let me share a life with these people.
I hadn’t understood that love was the operating system underneath all of that.
That love was what would make me get up tomorrow morning and do this again, and the next morning, and every morning after that.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I don't know why I'm crying.”
“You don't have to know.”
“It's just...”
“It's just that you are exhausted and overwhelmed and your body is doing things it has never done before,” I said. “It's just that you have been alone for a long time. It's just that you are not alone right now. You don't have to know why you're crying. You're allowed to cry.”
She let out a long shuddering breath and went limp against me.
I held her. The fire crackled. The storm howled.
Across the cabin, I knew Calder was still in the chair by the door, watching us, his face turned politely away to give us privacy without leaving us alone.
Bo was somewhere just out of sight, by the window or near the fire, pacing the way he paced when one of us was sick or hurt and he wanted to fix it with his hands but couldn’t.
I’d spent my entire life among people who studied themselves at a distance. None of us had been prepared to be loved. Not Calder. Not me. Not Bo. We had each, in our own way, built lives that didn’t require us to risk it.
And then she’d walked out of a snowstorm and put an end to that.
The perfect quote flowed through my head from one of my favourite poems.
“Shepherd.”
“Mm.”
“Did you just quote something at me. Right then. In your head.”
I laughed. A surprised, helpless thing.
“How could you possibly know that.”
“Because you got that look. The one you get when you're trying not to recite at people.”
“All right. Yes.”
“What was it.”
“You won't like it. It's pretentious.”
“Tell me.”
I sighed. I kissed the top of her head. “It was Auden. If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Shepherd.”
“Yes.”
“That's a terrible idea.”
“It's a famous poem.”
“It's a terrible idea. We’re equal. Don't you dare go around being the more loving one in secret. You’re not allowed to keep score on me.”
I tipped her face up so I could see her. She was wet-cheeked and exhausted and looking at me with such fierce honesty that for a second I lost my breath.
“Yes ma'am,” I said.
“Good.”
I kissed her. Slow. Soft. Without any agenda. Just because I was joined to her, locked to her and so full of just her that it was impossible to resist. But most of all, I just wanted to, and there was a freedom in that which I’d never allowed myself to have before.
The third wave was beginning. I could feel it gathering, the same way I had felt the second one rise. We had a few minutes. Maybe more. The knot was easing slower than I thought it would, and the heat seemed to be lengthening the way these things did, intensifying and prolonging at once.
“Bo,” she said quietly. Against my mouth.
“I know.”
“Soon.”
“Whenever you say.”
“Just hold me through this last bit.”
And I did. I’d be at her side until the last second.
When the knot finally eased, when we could disentangle without too much painful sliding, I helped her up and onto her side.
She winced. I pressed a kiss to her shoulder, and I pulled my pants back up.
As I caught my glasses off the floor and slid them back on, her hand came up immediately to take them off again.
“Leave them off,” she said. “When you're with me, leave them off.”
“All right.”
I folded them and set them on the side table before tucking the blanket over her hip.
Bo was at the door already. He’d read the moment the same way he read everything, with that strange wordless attention that bypassed language entirely. He met my eyes. I nodded once.
“She's ready for you,” I said.
Bo looked at the woman on the blankets, his face doing something I had only seen a handful of times in seven years.
“Yeah,” he said. “I'm ready for her too.”