Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Axel stopped at the Fate Mountain Lodge on his way to Reese’s apartment.
He didn’t know what she’d want, so he bought several options.
Braised beef over mashed potatoes, roast chicken with herbs and pan gravy, trout in lemon butter, mushroom risotto, smoked salmon chowder, roasted vegetables, fresh bread, a mixed salad, a berry tart, lemon bars, and a slice of German chocolate cake filled three bags on the passenger seat.
She opened the door when he knocked, and he carried the food inside.
The apartment was small, clean, with sparse furniture. A brown couch stood against one wall beside a floor lamp. A framed lighthouse hung above it. A short hallway had two doors to what must be the bedroom and bathroom. The small round table was set for two.
Axel put the bags on the counter. “That’s a lot of food,” Reese said as he unpacked the bags.
“You’re eating for two.”
“It’s a good excuse.” She smiled as she opened the beef dish. “You bought enough food for six people.”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d want.”
They sat and shared the food, their knees brushing under the table.
For a while they ate in comfortable silence. The open window let in the sounds of evening traffic. A truck rolled past. Someone laughed on the sidewalk. Axel nodded toward the onion jar.
“You doing some window gardening?”
“It’s an old trick I learned from my mom before she remarried. You can cut green onions to nothing, and they grow back. It was my answer on the mate.com vegetable question. What was yours?”
“Asparagus. You plant it and wait three years before it gives you anything. After that, it comes back every season for decades.”
She looked across the table at him. “Makes sense why the algorithm matched us.”
When they finished eating, they put the leftovers in her fridge.
When everything was cleared away, she grabbed a composition notebook from the bedroom.
She shuffled through the pages. Axel noticed that they mostly contained to-do lists, notes, and budgets.
She opened to a page with names written in a column. All were crossed off but three.
Jane. Maeve. Elsie.
“This is my list of possible baby names. Since I know she’s a girl now, it’s much easier to narrow down.”
“What was your reasoning behind these?”
“Jane was for my first landlady in Spokane. She watered her porch plants with a measuring cup.”
“That sounds very precise.”
“She measured everything in her garden. Fertilizer. Compost. Water for every plant.” Reese smiled. “She once told me most problems start when people stop measuring.”
“Did she know she was dispensing wisdom?”
“No. She thought she was talking about petunias.”
“That’s usually where wisdom comes from.”
She laughed softly.
“I actually like the name a lot,” she said. “I just can’t hear it without seeing her muttering to her flowers.”
She tapped the next name. “I like Maeve.”
“Maeve sounds like a warlord.”
“That’s a point in Maeve’s favor.”
“It sounds like she’d conquer a neighboring kingdom before lunch.”
Reese grinned and looked down at the list again. “See, that’s the problem. Jane feels too much like a real person. Maeve feels like she’d arrive carrying a sword.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“True.” They both looked at the third name.
“Elsie?” Axel asked.
Reese ran her finger over the ink on the page. “I keep coming back to that one.”
“It suits her.”
“What do you think an Elsie looks like?”
Axel considered it. “I know she’s small.”
“She’s currently eighteen weeks old.” She laughed. “But... I don’t know. Elsie just feels right.”
“It does.”
She nodded. “Elsie,” she said again. The moment lingered between them, and then Reese closed the notebook.
“Come with me,” she said, taking his hand.
She led him through the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Two packed bags sat at the foot of her bed. Axel recognized what they meant.
He had kept his own belongings packed for years as a child because every foster placement could end at any moment. He stepped around the bags without a word. Reese would unpack when she was ready.
They undressed each other in the lamplight. Reese worked his shirt up his stomach and over his head, and there was no hesitation, no careful checking of his face, no waiting to be sure.
She dropped the shirt on the chair and went for his belt like she’d already decided how the night would go. Then he helped her out of her clothes.
She climbed onto the bed and drew him down after her.
He kissed her mouth, then her throat, her collarbone, the soft weight of one breast. She hissed when he closed his lips over the nipple, and he eased off at once, kneading the other in his palm, careful of the soreness the pregnancy had caused.
She arched into him then, asking for more, and he gave as much as she could take.
Then he moved lower, kissing her belly and easing her thighs open. He looked at her spread out for him and had to hold still a moment. He wanted her so much it hurt.
The first stroke of his tongue pulled a sound out of her that wrecked him.
He found her clit and worked it in tight circles, listening to every catch of her breath, chasing whatever made her hips lift.
When he slid two fingers into her and curled them, she fisted a hand in his hair and held him where she wanted him.
He kept going, relentless, until she came against his mouth, her thighs shaking on either side of his head.
He was still bringing her down when she pushed at his shoulder.
“Lie down,” she said. “On your back.”
He went. She came up over him, flushed, sure of herself, and closed her hand around his cock. He’d been hard so long it ached, and the first slow pull of her fist dragged a groan out of him. Then she bent and took him in her mouth.
The wet heat of it went straight up his spine. She took him slowly at first, just the head, her tongue working the underside while her hand stroked what her mouth didn’t reach.
Then she sank down and took more, hollowing her cheeks, setting an unhurried rhythm that had him fisting the sheets.
He watched her, unable to look away — his cock disappearing between her lips, her eyes flicking up to his, the way she hummed when he swore and did it again just to feel him twitch against her tongue.
She had him right at the edge of too much, wringing every reaction out of him she could get.
“Reese.” He got a hand in her hair, easing her off him. “I can’t take any more of that.”
She lifted her mouth from him, lips wet, and gave him a slow smile that said she knew exactly what she’d been doing to him. Then she climbed up over his hips and knelt astride him. He gripped her thighs to steady her.
She reached down and guided his cock to her entrance and lowered herself onto him by inches.
She took him in a little at a time until he was buried all the way inside her.
The heat of her closed around him, and he swore under his breath.
She stayed there a moment, seated on his cock, catching her breath.
Then she braced her hands on his chest and started to move.
She rode him at her own pace, taking what she wanted.
He’d never in his life seen anything so magnificent.
She’d sunk down onto him and started to move, and now she had her head tipped back, her hands splayed on his chest, the round curve of her belly and the sway of her breasts caught in the lamplight every time she rose and fell.
“Oh, Reese,” he got out. “You’re so beautiful.”
She was flushed and open and completely unguarded, more beautiful than he had words for. He could feel every inch of her gripping him, the slick heat of her working him, and it took everything in him not to come.
She was taking exactly what she wanted from him, chasing her own pleasure like she had every right to it, and she did. That she wanted him this openly was almost more than he could stand.
He kept his hands loose on her hips. She found the angle she wanted and chased it, her breath breaking. When she came, she folded forward over him with a cry, her hips still moving through it.
She stayed there after, her forehead dropped to his shoulder, breathing hard. He felt her thighs trembling with effort. Her balance had started to go, the weight of the baby pulling at her. She was spent.
“Come here,” he said, and eased her off him and down onto her side.
He fit himself against her back, one arm sliding under her. She arched her ass back against him, and he pushed into her slowly. She moaned, and he held still for a moment, his forehead against her hair.
“I love you,” he murmured in her ear. “So much.”
“Yes.”
He set a slow rhythm, deep and unhurried, his mouth against the back of her neck and the curve of her shoulder.
His arm under her held her close against his chest. She gripped his thigh, and every sound she made he could feel in his chest. He brought his other hand between her legs to work her clit.
Sweat slickened their skin where their bodies pressed together.
His mouth was at the back of her neck when the wolf surged.
It wanted her marked. It wanted his teeth in that soft place where her pulse ran, wanted her his, tonight, for good.
He held it down and kissed the spot instead.
She hadn’t asked him for that. She didn’t know yet what it was. He wasn’t going to decide it for her.
“Right there,” she said, breaking. “Don’t stop?—”
He kept the angle and the pressure of his fingers until she clamped down around him. She came apart as she screamed his name. He lost his rhythm to it, groaning into the back of her neck.
The wolf lunged again when he was right at the edge of his own release, demanding he claim her.
His sharpening teeth were a breath from her skin.
He turned his face into her hair and let his own release come, refusing to give in to his wolf’s demands.
He buried himself deep, and his cock erupted inside her.
For a while neither of them moved.
Then they shifted apart, and she turned over and settled against him, her head on his chest, her breath still uneven. He could feel his own heart slamming under her ear. He drew slow lines down her damp shoulder while the sweat cooled between them.
“I didn’t know it could be like that,” she said.
“Me either.”
She huffed a small laugh against his chest. The wolf was pacing inside him, the claim he hadn’t taken still humming under his ribs. He stayed awake a while after her breathing evened out, Reese warm and heavy against his chest, and then he slept too.