Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
They did the dishes together, the way they had every night since she’d moved in.
Axel washed, and Reese dried beside him.
A record played on the turntable across the room.
Out the window, Main Street was going dark, the shop signs blinking off one block at a time.
Her jar of green onions sat on the windowsill by the table, the cut ends having grown back green over the rim.
She’d started it on her own sill months ago and carried it here after they’d survived that night at the cabin.
When the last dish was put away, they got ready for bed.
She slid under the covers and settled against his chest. Her new pregnancy book sat on the nightstand on her side.
Her clothes hung in the closet next to his.
She let herself relax against him in the dim lamplight.
This was the kind of night she had never had before coming to Fate Mountain.
In the quiet warmth, she was no longer braced to run.
His hand moved along her back, tracing lazy lines.
“It’s strange to think about,” she said. “That out of everyone in the world, it was always going to be you.”
“For years I waited for that hundred percent. Turns out, I was just waiting for you to show up.” He pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “I’d have waited a lot longer.”
“It scared me,” she said. “The whole idea of the bond. That it was permanent. It felt like one more thing that could just happen to me. Whether I agreed to it or not.”
“I know.” His voice was low above her. “I understood that then. I understand it better now. All I ever wanted was to make it something you got to choose.”
She lay quiet for a moment, listening to his heart.
“I’m ready,” she said. “After everything... I know what I want now. It’s you. I want the bond.”
He shifted so he could see her face. “Before I bite you,” he said, “I want you to know exactly what it does. The bite makes the bond permanent. Once it’s done, it can’t be undone.
” His thumb caressed her hip. “But it’s more than that.
It opens us all the way up to each other.
You’ll feel what I feel. I’ll feel what you feel.
We’ll be able to read each other’s thoughts.
There won’t be anything hidden between us, not on either side. ”
Reese lay still, thinking it over. Her marriage to Wade had taught her to hide what she felt, to give nothing away that could be turned into a weapon against her.
What Axel was describing was the opposite of that.
To be known all the way down to her core, by someone she trusted to know her that deeply.
That was the part she wanted most.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “There’s a second bite, one that would turn you into a wolf. I’m telling you because you should have the whole picture. But it’s not on the table. You’re pregnant. I wouldn’t change you right now, even if you wanted me to.”
She nodded. “That’s something we can talk about again after Elsie is born.”
His hand settled low on her belly. “If I claim you tonight, it reaches her. I’ll bond with her too.” He held Reese’s eyes. “Not as a stepfather. Not as a man who’s bonded to her mother. As her true father. And she’ll feel it too.”
Reese went still against him.
“I grew up belonging to no one,” he said, quieter now. He looked at his hand where it rested over the baby. “After I claim you, I’ll belong to both of you.”
Her eyes stung. She hadn’t known, until he said it, that this was the thing she’d wanted most.
“I want that,” she said, her voice thick. “I want us to be a family. I want to be bonded to you for life.”
He kissed her, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head.
When she opened for him, his tongue slid against hers.
He tasted like mouthwash and Axel. He kissed her deeply until her breath went ragged and her fingers curled in his shirt.
Heat bloomed low in her belly, and her nipples tightened.
Desire flooded between her legs, and she ached to be touched.
When he drew back, the look on his face made her chest hurt.
She sat up and pulled her shirt over her head.
He watched her do it, and then he undressed himself too, dropping it all off the side of the bed.
He lay back down, his naked body hot against her bare skin.
He kissed her mouth, her jaw, the soft place under her ear, and she ran her fingers through his dark hair.
He gently took a nipple into his mouth, working it with his tongue while his hand cupped and kneaded the other.
The pull of it sent a flood straight between her legs.
He moved from one nipple to the other and back until she was breathing hard and pushing up toward his mouth.
Then he kissed down her chest and along the curve of her belly.
His hands then slid down to open her thighs.
She had spent four years making herself small and unreadable so no one could use what she felt against her. Now she lay open under a man who wanted to feel everything she felt, and it was everything she wanted. Forever.
His mouth closed over her clit, and she stopped thinking.
He licked her in firm, even strokes, flattening his tongue against her and then circling tight.
When her hips jerked, he did it again, and again, responding to what made her gasp.
He slid a finger into her, then a second, curling them against her G-spot while his tongue kept working her clit.
The two sensations lit her up from the inside.
The pressure built, coiling hot and tight, until it was almost too much to bear. When it broke, pleasure rolled through her in waves. Her thighs clamped around his head, and her fingers fisted in his hair.
He pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh while the last aftershocks of her orgasm moved through her. He then climbed back up the bed and sat with his back against the headboard, pulling her up to him. She climbed up and settled on his lap so his weight would stay off her bump.
She braced one hand on his shoulder, reached down between them, and wrapped her hand around his stiff cock. He made a low sound at that, the first crack in all his patience. She was so wet that when she dragged the head of him through her folds it slid through without any friction at all.
Axel held her with both hands loose on her hips, his jaw tight and his eyes half shut. His cock jerked as she pressed the head of him into her entrance. Once she found the perfect angle, she sank down onto him.
The stretch pulled the breath right out of her. She took him a little at a time, easing down, giving herself to the burn of it, until he was buried in her to the hilt. She was seated flush in his lap, full of his cock, his hands spread warm across her hips.
She threw her head back, Axel’s cock deep inside her, her heart slamming against her breasts.
He started rolling his hips up into her while he held her.
She let him fuck her like that, slow and deep.
She didn’t have to do anything but wind her arms around his neck and take him, every stroke dragging through her exactly where she needed it.
She let him move her in a shared rhythm. She didn’t have to think about anything as sweat ran between her breasts. She was soaked around him, so wet she could hear it. The ache of another orgasm had wound up tight and low in her belly.
He rocked into her and the tension coiled tighter and tighter until she couldn’t take it anymore.
He thrust up into her hard and fast, and she came again.
The orgasm rolled through her in a long wave, clenching around his cock.
She rode every second of it with her head thrown back and her arms locked around his shoulders.
In the aftershocks, she went still against him, breathing heavily, her thighs trembling. He stayed buried deep, one hand stroking up her spine. After a moment, she rolled her hips again, and the drag of his cock lit her up all over again. He moved with her, matching her movements.
She looked into his eyes. His gaze was steady and focused on her.
“I love you.” She’d made him wait weeks before the first time she’d said it tonight, and now she couldn’t hold it back. “I love you. I love you so much, Axel.”
“I love you, too, my beautiful mate.” His hands slid up to her breasts, his thumbs dragging over her nipples until she gasped. While he kissed along her jaw and the side of her neck.
The pressure was building again, tighter this time, and she felt it coming, felt herself starting to crest on his cock with his mouth at her throat. She knew what she wanted. She tipped her head to the side and gave him the bare line of her neck.
He went still. “Are you ready for my bite?” His voice was low and rough. “My love. My mate.”
“Yes.” It came out breathy. “Please. Claim me.”
His mouth settled over the place where her pulse beat hardest. She felt his breath go uneven against her skin, felt the muscles in his shoulders draw tight under her hands as he gathered himself.
Then his teeth pressed into her skin and broke through.
It was a bright, sharp shock, pain and pleasure fused into one white instant, and it landed exactly as she came.
She shattered around his cock, clenching down on him in hard pulses.
It dragged him over the edge with her. He came with a groan she felt in her own chest, buried deep, spilling into her while she rode wave after wave of it, the two of them locked so tight there was no telling where she ended and he began.
With her breath cut off, the mating venom poured into her, filling every part of her at once.
The bedroom was gone. There were no walls around her, no lamp, no streetlight through the glass, no bed beneath her. There was only dark and, scattered through it in every direction, stars — above her, below her, on every side, as though she stood in the middle of the whole night sky.
A massive grey wolf stood across the distance from her, its coat drinking the starlight.
She knew its eyes to the very depths of her soul.
She had looked into those eyes over a conference table, across a dinner table, from the other side of a rowboat.
She went to him, and he came to her. When they met, his life poured into her.
All of his memories flooded her mind, filling her with everything that was Axel.
She saw the fire station where he’d been left as an infant and felt the silence of never being claimed.
She saw a boy who learned to keep everything he owned somewhere he could grab it fast, because no place he was sent ever lasted.
She saw him light up when the first computer made sense to him in the second grade.
The first jazz record that undid him at fifteen, and the turntable he carried out of a shop in Denver like a treasure.
Dom and Siren finding him and giving him a pack.
Then the years of checking mate.com every night, looking for her.
And then her profile, the match, instantly falling in love with her.
The morning he found her gone. The bullet he took without a half-second of doubt.
And under all of it, running through every year of him, the same thing she felt in her own chest right now.
The absolute exhilaration of finally being fully chosen.
She felt her own life flooding into him at the same time.
The years of being the extra one in her family.
Then Priest Lake with her friend and the sweet of ripe peaches in the August heat.
The dark, and Wade in it. The test she took in a pharmacy bathroom.
Stella, who hired her and asked nothing.
The cash rolled up inside a hollowed-out paperback.
The green onions coming back and back from their own cut ends.
The night his kind eyes looked out at her from the screen.
The skillet coming off the stove. And after all of it, at the end of all of it, being his.
His answer moved through her, not in words exactly, but she heard it as clearly as a voice at her ear. I choose you. I claim you. My beloved. Forever.
You found me when I was trying to hide, she told him and felt him receive it. I promise you, I’ll never run again. I’m yours, and you’re mine.
The stars thinned and went out, and the room came back around them.
The low light of the lamp, the glow of Main Street through the window, the weight of her own body again, his heart beating hard under her hands.
They were still wound around each other, still joined, his face still pressed into her throat where his teeth had gone in.
He eased them free and licked the small wound to close it.
Then he lifted his head and looked into her eyes.
His own eyes were wet. The pain he’d spent his whole life holding wasn’t there anymore.
There was nothing guarded left in either of them.
They had been all the way inside each other.
Every locked thing was open now, every private thing shared, and he was looking at her the way a man looks when he has finally been seen down to the bone. And fully, totally accepted.
He took her face in both his hands and kissed her — her cheeks, her brow, the corner of her mouth — and between the kisses he told her, out loud, what she was to him.
His mate. His family. The one he’d waited his whole life for and never once let himself believe he would get to have.
He’d already given her all of it through the bond, but he said it anyway, in his own low voice, because he wanted her to hear it in words too.
Then they came apart and lay down, holding each other.
Wrapped up with him like that, she felt the last of their bond settle into place, something steady and permanent, something that wasn’t going to ever change.
She was home. For the first time in the whole of her life she had been chosen, completely, with nothing held back — and she had chosen him too.