Chapter 21
Reilly
Dawn in the cabin was worse than the dinner.
I woke on the bench with his arm around my waist and his stitches stuck to my back and his cock soft against my ass.
The dress was a wreck on the floor. My underwear was gone.
I could feel him dried on my stomach, on my thighs, inside me from the three breaths I had let the knot stay.
The path outside would have Gareth’s man on it.
The hall would have Gareth in it. I should have already been gone.
I stayed.
Owen woke when I shifted. His mouth touched my shoulder. Not a bite. I felt him get hard against me in the slow way that had nothing to do with a fight. The anger from the table was still in the room. Under it was something I wanted less.
I almost asked him to come up to the hall.
Not as a claim. As a body I did not want to leave on a bench while I sat next to Gareth Hills at breakfast. The sentence got as far as my teeth. I swallowed it.
“I cannot burn the pack for a feeling,” I said.
His voice was rough with sleep. “I never asked you to burn anything. I asked you not to use me like a door you slam.”
That sat. The yard. The contract. The river. The table last night. Choose him in the cabin, unchoose him in the hall. Slam.
“I know,” I said.
He turned me on the bench, careful of his side.
I ended up on my back on the narrow wood.
He looked at my face like he was tired of looking at my throat.
His hand ran from my collarbone to my breast, over the shack bite, down my stomach through the mess he had left, and between my legs.
I was sore. I was wet anyway. He rubbed my clit with two fingers, slow, and watched me breathe.
No hand on my mouth. No Gareth sentence to fuck through.
He kissed me.
First time it was really a kiss. I let him. I opened my mouth and it was worse than the knot. Kind. His tongue. My hand on his jaw. I almost said the words into it. I reject the rejection. I take it back. I claim. I swallowed them and kissed him harder so my mouth would be busy.
He went down the bench on his knees on the floor and put my thighs over his shoulders and licked me slow.
Not the frantic shack. Not the angry table.
Long passes, then his mouth on my clit, two fingers in, turned up, a rhythm I could have counted.
I came with my fist in my mouth and my other hand in his hair, a long grind, tears I did not want. He stayed until I pulled him up.
He lay between my legs and pushed into me slow.
Sore. Full. I felt every inch because he gave me every inch without slamming.
His forehead on mine. His mouth on mine again.
I wrapped my legs around him and took it.
The swell of the knot rubbed and I said, against his lips, “Don’t,” and he said, “I won’t,” and he kept the strokes short enough that it did not catch.
It was worse because it was kind.
I came on him looking at him. He looked back.
I almost said it then. The undo. I put my mouth on his instead and bit his lip so the words would not fit.
He groaned and pulled out and I reached between us and stroked him through the finish, his come on my knuckles and my belly, his face in my neck, his teeth not closing.
We lay there. Gray under the door. His blood on the cloth at his side, new, from the night. My hand on it.
“Gareth walks the cut today,” I said.
“I know.”
“He’ll come here.”
“I know.”
“If I ask you to stay in the hall—”
“Don’t.” He said it quiet. “Don’t ask unless you mean the hall. Not breakfast. Not a chair at the far end. The hall.”
I did not ask.
I got up. My legs were not good. I washed with the cold basin as much as I could. I had no dress that would hold. I put on his spare shirt and my coat over it and the ruined dress under my arm like trash. He watched from the bench, naked, stitched, marked with me.
“I will not slam the door on my way out,” I said.
“You still have to walk out.”
“Yes.”
He nodded once. I almost went back to the bench and took him in my mouth and stayed until Gareth dragged the door open himself. I unbarred it.
The path was cold. Hillsford smell in the trees. The man had been there. He would have a sentence for Gareth before I hit the yard. I walked anyway.
Marshall met me at the side door like he had not slept. He took in the shirt, the coat, the dress in my hand.
“I told you not to go down.”
“I know what you told me.”
“Gareth already knows. His man came in at gray.”
“Then he knows.” I went past him. Edward was in the corridor. He looked at Owen’s shirt on me and went red and then white. I said, “Kitchen,” and he went, because if he spoke I was going to break in front of him.
I changed. I hid the dress. I washed my mouth and still tasted Owen’s kiss. I bound my breasts over the marks and put on my own clothes and went to the hall like a Luna.
Gareth was already at the table. Clean coat. Easy smile. He looked at my throat, then my mouth.
“Sleep well,” he said.
“Eat if you’re eating. Then we walk the cut.”
Idony watched my hands. Pell watched Gareth. Marshall stood where he could see both doors. I sat. Under the table I was sore and wet and the kind sex was still in my body like a bruise. I ate grain. I did not look at the window that faced the ridge.
Gareth leaned in. “My man said you were in the cabin until dawn. He said it did not sound like a fight the whole time. I’ll be sure to mention the hospitality when I write my father.”
“Write what you want.”
“I will.” He stood, napkin neat. “The cut. Bring your hired watch if he can walk. I want to see the posts. I want to see the shack. I want to see the room under the ridge in daylight. Unless you’d rather I went alone.”
“You don’t go anywhere on this ground alone.”
We walked.
Owen was on the cut when we got there, shirt on, face shut, Melanie at his shoulder.
Gareth smiled at the stitches like they were proof of something.
We walked posts. We walked the alder. We walked past the line shack that still smelled like a claiming that had not finished.
Gareth breathed it in and said nothing, which was worse than a joke.
At the holding cabin he stopped.
“Open it.”
I opened it. Daylight on the bench. On the table. On a room that smelled like sex and blood and us. Gareth stood in the door and looked at the boards and then at Owen and then at me.
“This is a watch cabin,” I said.
“This is a bed,” Gareth said. “You rejected him in a yard and you made him a bed. My father will enjoy that line.” He stepped out. “The date, Reilly. I’ll have it before I leave. If I don’t, the levy conversation changes. I’m done being polite about seed.”
He walked back toward the hall with four men. The rest stayed in the trees.
Owen did not touch me. I did not touch him. The morning’s kiss sat between us like a thing Gareth had not seen and had still priced.
Melanie said, low, “You stayed till dawn.”
“Yes.”
“Then stop looking at him on this cut like you might say something you won’t say in front of Hillsford.” She jerked her chin at the hall path. “Handle the date. Or handle the war. Don’t stand here wet and stitched together and call it a contract.”
I went up.
Edward caught me in the yard. “Are you marrying him.”
“Owen?”
“Gareth.”
“No.”
“Then you need to say it where Pell can hear it, because Pell is already writing the wedding in his head to save the grain.”
I went to Idony. I told her the date was not set. I told her Gareth would change the levy. I told her I would not sign a marriage to keep sugar on the table. She looked at my mouth like she could see the kiss.
“Then we prepare to be hungrier,” she said. “And you stay out of that cabin until he leaves this ground. If you cannot do that, Reilly, you are not holding a hall. You are holding a secret everyone can smell.”
I sat in my rooms at noon and put my hands on my knees and felt Owen on the cut. The kind morning was still in me. I could still have said the words into his mouth. I had swallowed them. Gareth was in my hall. The pack was eating seed. The door I kept slamming was still a door.
I did not go down.
I lay on the bed on my back and shoved my hand into my pants and I was swollen from dawn, from the slow fuck, from the kiss.
I rubbed my clit and cried into the empty room and came with his name in my mouth and the undone rite behind my teeth, unsaid, and when it passed I washed my hands and went back to the hall because Gareth Hills was still under my roof and he was not going to watch me stay on a bed thinking about a bench.