Chapter 18
“Mine.”
The word came more naturally to Garrick the second time. It should have concerned him. A great many things should have concerned him.
But Maris was naked beneath him on the rug, her clothing somewhere behind them, and the firelight gilded her body with gold.
His wings were extended so far they nearly brushed the furniture on either side of the hearth, and every instinct he possessed had apparently decided this was precisely where they belonged.
Her hand was wrapped around him, her eyes wide but not afraid. He’d never felt less in control of himself, but he’d never felt more certain of what he was doing.
Her mouth curved. “Say it again.”
He stared down at her.
“Greedy,” he said.
“You started it.”
He had. Since January, although he hadn’t known what it was then.
He’d come out of stone two weeks early with something pulling at him from beyond the boundary wall, and he’d spent eight months refusing to examine it.
Then Maris Calder had walked up to his door with dirt already ground into one knee of her jeans, and the word had arrived fully formed in some primitive part of him.
Mine.
He still didn’t know what the hell he’d meant then. He knew what he meant now, though, with her beneath him and her hands on him and that challenging little smile curving the mouth he’d been thinking about for weeks.
“Mine,” he said again, and the smile disappeared.
Not because she was afraid. He would have stopped if he’d seen fear. He was watching for it even now, vigilant beneath the heat, aware of every difference between them. His weight. His claws. His strength. The hardness of his body against the softness of hers.
But she only looked up at him, hazel eyes dark in the firelight, and reached up to touch his face.
Something inside him went quiet. Not the desire, God, no, but everything else.
The calculations that never stopped. The running lists of work still to be done, problems still to be solved, calls to be returned.
The awareness of the enormous house beyond this room and all the empty rooms inside it.
Even the restless need that had driven him for twenty years—build something, fix something, keep moving—fell silent beneath the simple sweep of her thumb along his jaw.
“You’re thinking,” she murmured.
“I’ve been accused of it.”
“Stop.” His brow rose, and she smiled again. “Just for a little while.”
He caught her hand and turned his head, pressing his mouth into the center of her palm.
“I can try.”
“That sounds suspiciously like something you’d put in a contract.”
“I don’t put things I can only try to do in contracts.”
“Of course you don’t.”
She was laughing at him. He discovered he liked that too. He kissed her before she could do it again. After that, thinking became considerably more difficult.
He took his time despite every instinct urging otherwise.
Patience was easy when there was a wall to rebuild or a foundation to pour.
Stone didn’t shiver when he touched it. Stone didn’t breathe his name against his mouth or run warm hands up to the tips of his ears and discover, with obvious delight, that this made his entire body go rigid.
He pulled back sharply, and she blinked up at him. Then her eyes narrowed with interest.
“No,” he warned.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking something, little thorn.”
“I’m learning things.”
“Maris.”
She stroked his ears again, and he closed his eyes. Her laugh was soft and delighted, and he decided there were worse things in the world than providing a curious female with educational opportunities.
He found a few of his own. He learned that the spot beneath her ear made her catch her breath.
That she liked the roughness of his palms against her skin and didn’t flinch from his claws as long as he was careful.
That the freckles scattered over her shoulders continued farther than he’d known and demanded investigation.
That when he curled one wing around her, shutting out the room on that side, she reached for the membrane with wondering fingers instead of pulling away.
He froze, and her hand stopped immediately. “Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“Do you not like it?”
“No.”
She waited.
He forced the words out. “I like it.”
Her expression changed. It wasn’t teasing now. She ran her fingertips over his wing again, impossibly gentle. The sensation traveled through him like heat through cold stone. He bent his head to her shoulder and breathed.
“Garrick?”
“Keep doing that.”
So she did.
There was trust in it. That was what he hadn’t expected.
Not merely hers, although the weight of that was almost unbearable.
But his trust. He had spent so long controlling every part of himself around other people that he hadn’t realized how exhausting it was.
Wings folded. Claws watched. Strength measured.
Body made smaller wherever possible. Even in Fairhaven, even among Others, there was always some part of him calculating how much space he occupied and how much force he could safely use.
She had looked at seven feet of stone and wings and claws and told him not to fold them away. So he didn’t.
Getting the rest of his clothes off took longer than it should have, because she would not stop touching him and he could not make himself tell her to. Then there was nothing left between them, and he slid his hand between her thighs, and she stopped laughing.
She was wet. Slick and hot against his fingers, her hips lifting to meet him, and the sound she made when he stroked her went straight to his cock.
“Perfect,” he said.
“You’re being careful.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be—” She broke off as he pressed one finger into her, slowly, and her back came up off the rug.
He was careful anyway. He had to be. He worked her open with one finger and then two, his thumb circling her clit, until she was shaking and swearing at him and trying to pull him down by the shoulders.
“Garrick. Now.”
“Not yet.”
“I swear to God—”
“Not yet.” He bent his head and put his mouth on her instead, and whatever she had been going to say turned into a long broken sound he intended to remember for the rest of his life. She came like that, with his mouth on her and her fingers locked in the membrane of his wing.
Then he moved up over her, looked down, and stopped. He was not going to fit. That was not modesty and it was not fear. It was a measurement, and he had been right about measurements since he was a boy.
“Maris—”
“Don’t you dare.” Her eyes were wet and bright and absolutely certain. “Don’t you dare stop now.”
“You’re going to—”
“I’ve had a baby, Garrick.” She reached down between them and took hold of him, and everything in him narrowed to that grip. “Come here. Slowly. I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”
So he did it her way. He pressed against her and pushed, watching her face, and she was so tight that for a moment he thought his measurement had been right after all. Her eyes went wide and startled, her teeth clamping down on her lower lip. Fuck.
He immediately stopped moving. “Am I hurting you?”
“No. God, no. Keep going.”
He kept going. She breathed out and shifted her hips and took another inch of him, and another, the ridges dragging as he went, and she said his name in a voice he had never heard her use.
It took a long time. Neither of them hurried it.
When he was finally seated in her, all of him, her body stretched around his and holding on, he had to stop.
He put his forehead down against hers because his arms were shaking.
“There,” she said, wrecked and pleased with herself. “Told you.”
He had no answer. He was not certain he had words at all.
Then she moved under him, and his control snapped.
He was not careful after that. She didn’t want him careful, and she told him so, in words at first and then in nothing but sounds, her nails in his shoulders and her heels locked at the small of his back.
He gave her exactly what she asked for. The firelight coming through his wings.
Her voice breaking on his name. He shifted his angle and his ridges brought her up off the floor, and when she came the second time she took him with her, hard enough that the sound he made had no words in it either.
He gave her everything he knew how to give. And when the fire had burned lower and the forgotten dinner had long since passed the point of rescue, he lay on the rug with her tucked against him and both wings curved around them.
One wing lay beneath her, the heavy outer edge curled up beyond her back.
The other had come over them sometime afterwards, enclosing the small warm space they occupied until there was almost nothing beyond it.
Firelight came through the dark membrane in shades of muted amber.
The rest of the room might as well not have existed.
She traced an idle line across his chest.
“You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“Thinking.”
“I wasn’t aware that was prohibited afterwards.”
“I’m considering an amendment.”
His hand moved slowly along her back. “I’ll have my attorney review it.”
“Your attorney is going to hate me.”
“He already does.”
She lifted her head. “You’ve discussed me with your attorney?”
“No.”
“Then why does he hate me?”
“Because you’re going to make me amend a contract.”
For a second she stared at him. Then she laughed. The sound filled the small space beneath his wings, warm and sleepy and entirely without restraint, and he drew the wing a little closer around her.
He kissed the top of her head, and she settled against him again. Neither spoke for a while.
The quiet should have been familiar. He had built his life around quiet. He’d sought it out, protected it, returned to it after crowded construction sites and airports and boardrooms. Stonehaven had given him all the quiet a male could want.
This wasn’t the same.
She breathed against his chest. The fire cracked and popped. Somewhere in the kitchen, something in the ruined pan gave a faint, accusatory hiss.
“We murdered dinner,” she murmured.
“It knew the risks.”
Her shoulders shook, and he smiled into her hair. He didn’t want to move. There was a perfectly good bed upstairs. There was food that hadn’t been destroyed somewhere in the kitchen. There were clothes scattered across the room. None of it seemed sufficiently important to justify lifting his wing.
Her hand had stopped moving against his chest. He looked down and discovered her eyes were closed. She had fallen asleep in his arms, warm and trusting.
He should wake her eventually. Her son would be home in the morning. She would want clothes and a toothbrush and whatever else human females reasonably required after spending a night they had not technically planned to spend. But not yet.
Her cheek was warm against his skin. One strand of blonde hair had caught beneath his wing, and he freed it carefully with the tip of one claw. She didn’t wake.
Something deep inside him settled. It was the same feeling he’d had when she stepped through the gate in the morning.
When Toby’s voice came through the garden.
When he’d sat at the kitchen table listening to the boy explain construction vehicles while she stole roasted potatoes from the serving dish and denied doing it.
Except the feeling was stronger now. Dangerous in a way he couldn’t define.
He looked towards the fire through the amber shadow of his wing and decided he didn’t need to define it tonight.
For once in his life, he didn’t need to fix it either.
He lowered his head to Maris’s hair, closed his eyes, and let himself stay exactly where he was.