Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Tinker Bell
“Captain! Intruders.”
Alice and Darius. It had to be.
Caspian grabbed my hand and we raced to the rail.
They were alive. Both of them, standing on the deck below with half of Pan’s crew backed off around them, and every bit of air I’d been holding since those cannons went off came out of me at once.
Alice had the shard up in one hand like a torch. Darius stood in front of her with a sword.
“Stand back,” Alice warned.
“Alice!”
Her eyes widened. “Tinker Bell.” Then she looked me over — the red dress, the hair somebody else had combed, the light coming off my skin — and her sword hand dropped an inch. “What happened?”
I knew how it looked. I’d been taken out of my own bed in my pajamas and here I was standing on Peter Pan’s ship dressed like a doll with Pan alive behind me.
“She’s the Christmas Star,” Caspian said.
He said it before I could. Said it like he’d been waiting for somebody to ask.
I laughed. “I know it sounds crazy.”
Alice shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. You’re the most powerful witch I know. Only you could hold that much.”
Darius scanned the deck. Pan standing there in his own light. Wendy beside him with gray eyes. “So the darkness is out of both of them?”
Caspian held my hand and kissed my wrist. “She did that.”
His lips brushed the same place I’d fed him and heat went straight up my arm.
Alice looked down at the shard in the box. “So this is worthless?”
“Not worthless. It’s a piece.” I stopped. I’d been about to say of me, and it stuck. “It came out of me. Or I came out of it. I’m still working that part out.”
Alice’s eyebrows went up. “You’re holding it very well for someone still working it out.”
“I’m not holding anything.” I looked at my own hands, still lit up. “That’s the trouble.”
Darius sighed. “I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time to go back home.”
Home.
I’d been telling myself home was a townhome in the Bywater with a tree in the window I’d put up for nobody. Jeans in the closet. My own bed and nobody in it, and I’d called that a life.
Caspian’s hand was still around mine.
That’s when I got it. Home wasn’t a building. It hadn’t been for a while and I’d just been too stubborn to notice. Home was a man who’d crossed two worlds for me and let a whip open his back rather than give me up.
Whatever I’d become, I wasn’t going back to that empty house alone. Not this time.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
Wendy clasped Peter Pan’s hand. “My home is with him.” She looked up at Caspian. “But don’t worry, brother. We’ll come to visit you for New Year’s.”
He grinned. “You’d better.”
Alice reached for the box. “I can open it from here. It’ll take me a minute to—”
“No.”
She looked up.
I didn’t know how I knew. I just did, the same way you know your own name, and I held out my hand and reached for something I’d never reached for in my life.
The air came apart in front of us.
White at the edges, green going through it, and past all that a black hole in the middle that didn’t lead anywhere yet. It opened like it had been waiting for me to ask.
Caspian looked at the portal. Then at me. “Remind me not to make you angry.”
I looked at Alice. “It will take you wherever you want.”
She glanced at Darius. “Colorado. His family’s expecting us.” She gave me a big hug. “Take care.” She handed me the box with the shard. “You should keep this as a souvenir.”
“Thank you,” I said as I took the box. “Merry Christmas.”
Darius and Alice stepped through the portal. They disappeared.
Pine came through after them. Cold pine and clean air and somewhere with trees, and I got one breath of wherever those two called home before it closed up behind them.
They’d come for me. Both of them. They’d crossed an ocean in somebody’s boat and gotten shot at and walked onto Peter Pan’s ship with a sword and a piece of glass. They were family.
But I had other plans.
I looked at Caspian. Healed. Standing there on his own two feet with his back closed up because I’d closed it, and I wanted to get him somewhere with a door I could shut.
“Are you ready to go home?”
He stepped closer. His eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there. “As long as there’s a bed.”
My cheeks heated and I couldn’t look at the others. I thought I heard Pan chuckle. I didn’t care.
We stepped through and the colors swirled around us, and I thought of my own house the way you’d think of somebody’s name.
Then we were standing in my bedroom.
The bed I’d been dragged out of. The window he came through. Everything exactly the way I’d left it.
I waited to be afraid of it.
I wasn’t. Caspian was behind me with his hand on my back, and the room was just a room.
Home.
“Ah. A bed.” He kissed my neck. “So, Christmas Star. Think I can make you see stars again?”
I smiled. “You’re that good?”
“You’ve no idea.” His gaze went over the dress. “You want to get out of that thing?”
I did. God, I did. Somebody’s hands had put me in it while I sat in a chair and couldn’t stop them, and I’d been in it through all of it — the deck, the whip, every second of Pan looking at me like I was something he’d arranged.
“Yes. Please.”
He turned me around and started on the laces.
That’s when I felt it. My hands were free and my magic was mine and I could have taken this whole house apart, and I stood there and let Caspian Hook undo the back of my dress in the dark.
All that time telling him no. All that time sure I knew exactly what he was.
I’d never let anybody stand behind me. Not once, not ever, and here I was.
His knuckles brushed my spine and I closed my eyes.
“Tinker Bell.” Low, right against my ear. “You’re shaking.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No.” I got the word out and it came out steadier than I felt. “Don’t stop. I want your hands and lips on me.”
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.”
He pulled the dress off my shoulders and it went down and I stepped out of it, and I kicked the thing across the floor and neither one of us looked at where it landed.
There was nothing under it. There’d been nothing under it the whole time — on that deck, in front of Pan, in front of every man on that ship — and I’d known it every second and hadn’t been able to do one thing about it.
I turned around and let him look at me anyway.
Because this time I picked it.
His lips found my bare shoulder and something unlocked in me, a warmth that pooled slow and deep.
“Now, you.”
All I got was a boot cracking off the far wall and a rush of air, and then he was standing in front of me with nothing on.
White hair, long enough to brush his collarbone, caught the low light of the room.
The breadth of his shoulders, the hard taper of him—he was built like something that had never once been fragile.
He came to me without hurry now, slid his arms beneath me, and set me down against the sheets like I was something he intended to keep.
His mouth found mine. Slow, unhurried, tasting of something spiced I couldn’t name. One hand went down my side, rough palm following the curve of my waist and the dip of my spine. The other cupped the back of my neck and held me there.
I let my hands wander in return—over the hard line of his shoulders, down the ridges of his stomach—and then around to his back.
Smooth. All of it. Not just where the whip had been.
He’d had scars back there. I’d seen them in that church with his shirt off, old ones, the kind a man collects over a long life. They were gone. Every one of them, and I hadn’t meant to do that.
“Your scars,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“Don’t be.” He caught my hand and moved it back where it had been. “You gave me a clean back. I don’t want to remember who gave me those scars. Nobody’s ever given me anything like it.”
His mouth closed over my nipple, a hot, wet shock that made me gasp and arch against him.
My fingers tangled in the thick, white waves of his hair, holding him there.
He took his time, working with a slow, devastating precision that had my breath catching in ragged hitches—every suck, every graze of teeth a promise and a punishment.
By the time he moved lower, I was already panting, skin flushed and sensitive, utterly at the mercy of him.
“Claim me,” I whispered, the words a raw plea in the quiet dark. Every cell in my body ached for him, a deep, consuming hunger that went beyond thought. He’d had a hundred women and I wanted every one of them gone out of his head. That’s not a nice thing to want. I wanted it anyway.
“I will.” His voice was a low promise against my lips before he began to move.
He shifted his weight and then the whisper of his hair trailed like silk down my fevered skin, over my ribs, my stomach.
When his mouth finally found me, hot and knowing, the shock of it arched my spine off the sheets.
My hands fisted in the cotton, gripping for purchase in a world that had dissolved into sensation.
A tremor began deep in my core, a shuddering wave that made me clutch the sheets, my knuckles white against the linen. The room dissolved into a constellation of silver sparks behind my eyelids.
“Please,” I breathed, the word ragged.
He shifted his weight, the mattress dipping as he moved between my thighs. His gaze locked with mine, dark and intense, the pupils wide and swallowing the light. “I’ll claim you now and forever.” The low timbre of his voice vibrated through me.
“Promise me you’ll never look at another woman or want another woman.”
His breath was warm against my lips. “You’re all I have ever wanted. I pledged myself to you for eternity. You’re mine.”
Then he was inside me, a slow, perfect stretch that stole the air from my lungs.
I gasped, arching to meet him, our hips finding a rhythm as ancient as the tide.
I could taste the salt on his skin when I kissed his shoulder, desperate and hungry.
He was everything—the solid weight of him, the scent of his sweat, the way his hand cradled the back of my head.
No longer would I be afraid of love. Not with Caspian.
Something gave way in me and I couldn’t stop it.
It went through me like the light had, white and hot and everywhere at once.
He plunged deeper and came inside me. He collapsed on top of me, trembling. I held on and didn’t let go. His weight, his heart going against my chest, the whole length of him shaking.
Nobody had ever come apart because of me. Not once.
My eyes stung and I let them.
He brushed back my hair. “I could listen to you call out my name forever.”
“I love you, Caspian. You’ve taught me I don’t have to be in this world alone.”
“Never. I’ll always be at your side. You’re my heart, my Christmas Star.”
He fell asleep with his hand still in my hair.
I lay there in the dark and let the light come up off my skin, soft, filling the whole room. It lit his face. Lit the ceiling, the window, the tree burning down the hall in a house that wasn’t empty anymore.
The Christmas Star. That’s what I was now.
I’d spent my whole life certain that loving somebody was the fastest way to lose them. Then a vampire tore up his own jeans in a wrecked church so I wouldn’t burn my hand, and crossed two worlds, and let a whip open his back rather than give me up.
The first one hung over a stable and showed three men where to find what they were looking for.
Mine had done the same thing. It had brought me here, to this bed, to him.
Merry Christmas, Caspian Hook.
I love you. I’ll love you for as long as this thing in me burns, and longer.
I let the light stay on until morning.