65. Sage
SIXTY-FIVE
SAGE
“Fuck—right there. Don’t stop!”
Holden doesn’t stop. Holden never stops when I tell him not to. It’s one of the few areas of his life where he takes direction without question, and the dedication he brings to it deserves a medal. If there are awards for skillful, controlled, mind-blowing orgasms, this man would sweep the podium.
He’s got my hands pinned over my head, loose but unbreakable, his forearms bracketing my face, knee wedging my thighs apart enough to let him work.
I’m on my back and he’s on me, inside me, sweat slick and relentless with the measured focus of someone running a very specific experiment in “how much pleasure can one woman take before she snaps in two?”
I’m close. That edge is right there, and he knows it because my breath is coming too fast and my entire body is locked around him, my ankles crossed behind his ass, trying to pull him even deeper.
“Holden—”
I gasp, but he shuts me up with a bruising kiss, tongue hot and inescapable.
We’re on my bed. My old bed, in my old room, in the apartment that still smells of new paint and carpet from where the guys erased all evidence of one of the worst nights of my life—I hate that I have a few to choose from.
Every time he thrusts, the headboard knocks the wall.
I want it to stop, I want it to last forever, I want his voice in my ear the way it was a second ago—steady, ruthless, like he’s reminding me with every inch that this is how he loves.
With discipline. With hunger. With a control that borders on violence and is never, ever anything but safe in his arms.
“Fuck, you feel good, wildcat,” he grunts, trailing his mouth down my throat and sucking lightly on my pulse.
He goes harder, deeper, and my body bows under him, back arching so hard my vision stars. The headboard’s rhythm is a metronome for every flick of his hips. There’s a trembling underneath me, in me, needier than it’s ever been, like my whole nervous system is tuned to the frequency of him.
“You gonna come for me, wildcat?” he mutters, barely more than a rumble against my jaw. I could lie, but there’s no point. He already knows.
“Y-yes—”
The word gets cut off by the heat in my stomach blooming outward, ripping pleasure through me so sharp I bite his shoulder to stay anchored to the world.
Holden’s groan is immediate, primal. He takes my jaw in one hand, as if to look me in the eye even as the quake hits, and his own release follows—tight and buried so deep inside me I feel the hot pulse of it.
I don’t know how long I drift, heart still crashing, Holden’s body heavy and perfect over mine.
His mouth finds my cheek, my throat, the corner of my lips—softer now, almost apologetic for the onslaught.
Our sweat is a shared ecosystem. At some point, he lets my wrists go, and I bring my hands down, threading my fingers through his hair and feeling the pulse beneath his skin.
“You alive?” he murmurs, barely above a breath. His voice is frayed but with an edge of pride.
“Give me a minute,” I say, and he laughs, the vibration shuddering through both of us. He rolls off, but stays close. An arm slung across my waist. His other hand traces over the lines of my ribcage, the faint aftermath bruise where Tyler’s grip left a finger-paint disaster across my skin.
His hand goes still on my ribs, and his energy shifts.
“Holden?”
He doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling. “Camera,” he says, and a smirk pulls at the corner of his mouth. “I remember the first time you turned that thing on.”
I shift so I’m lying beside him, looking up at the camera and remembering the show I put on for all of my guys. “From my understanding, it was quite the circle jerk.”
Holden settles over me, mouth finding my ear. “We could go again,” he murmurs. “Put on a show.”
God help me, heat pools low in my belly all over again. But my brain—traitorous, practical—kicks in.
“Holden.” I press both palms to his chest until he has to look at me. “If Milo’s camera catches us starting round two, that feed pings every phone in this family. You know it does. They’ll be here in minutes. All of them.” I arch a brow. “You really in the mood to share right now?”
The question hangs between us. Holden Cross—the most possessive man in this arrangement—stares at the camera, thinking.
Then he gets up, plucks the camera from its housing, and drops it lens-down into the water glass on my nightstand.
“Not today.”
I giggle as he pulls me into him hard, one arm banded across my back, and kisses me like the word mine is a language he’s fluent in. Deep. Slow. Claiming. When he finally lets me breathe, his forehead is pressed to mine, eyes closed.
“Today, you’re mine,” he says.
“Milo’s going to be devastated about his camera.”
“Milo can buy another camera.” His hand slides down my spine and settles low, anchoring me. “I’ll even take him shopping.”
I laugh into his shoulder.
It’s been a little over a week since the night Amy killed Tyler in our living room and Milo wiped out fourteen Kennel predators like a biblical plague.
Since then, all six of us have officially and irrevocably decided that this strange, bruised, perma-horny group is a family and none of us are allowed to leave until further notice.
Today, Holden and I were supposed to “drop by” the apartment to pick up some of my things to take home, and to grab some more clothes for Amy—she hasn’t been back here yet, and is still staying with Dean—but Holden decided we needed to say a proper goodbye to my bed.
And now, I guess we’ve said goodbye to Milo’s camera too.
I run my fingers through his hair. It’s damp at the temples. His heart is hammering against my ribs and the rhythm is fast and unsteady and so different from his usual composed cadence that it makes me smile.
“You’re smiling,” he says into my skin.
“Your heart’s going a mile a minute.”
“You do that to me.”
“The great Holden Cross. Undone by a five-foot-four waitress.”
“Five-foot-three.”
“I round up.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me. And the expression on his face is one I’ve been seeing more of lately—a softness, like he’s not sure why he gets to have this, but he’ll take every second and bite the bullet on karma later.
“Do you remember the first time we were alone together?” he asks.
I trace the line of his jaw with my finger. “You mean the time you pinned me against a wall, forced me to eat breakfast with you and threatened me so I wouldn’t talk? Yeah, I remember.”
He grins. “That was a great moment. You were so feisty. My dick was so fucking hard the whole time.”
“I’ll bet it was.” I laugh.
He rests his forehead against mine, nose brushing my cheek. “No one’s ever looked at me the way you did that day. Like you could see straight through me and didn’t like what you saw, but you were still rooting for me to get it right.”
“You were an asshole.”
“I was. I am.”
“You’re a sexy asshole.”
He snorts. “You know that’s what made me spiral about you, right? Not the sex, or the chase, or all the drama with Brock and Stephen and the Hangmen. It was you not being afraid of me.”
I laugh. He smiles in a way that transforms his whole face and makes him look ten years younger and approximately four hundred percent more dangerous.
“I was terrified though,” he says.
“Of what?”
“Of wanting you. Of how much I wanted you, how fast. I’m supposed to be the one who thinks three steps ahead, who weighs every risk, who doesn’t let the personal compromise the operational.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “And then you let me into your apartment.”
“Did I let you in? Or did you let yourself in?”
“I knocked.”
“Oh yeah. You said you were being a gentleman.” I giggle at the memory. “And then you were very quickly railing me against the refrigerator. You know we put a dent in the door, right?”
He laughs at that, drawing a crooked S down my chest with his finger.
“I used to think the only way to be safe was to be alone. That if you brought people close, it was just more targets for the universe to aim at. But you—” He pauses, searching my face, the words catching on some internal splinter.
“You made it so the thought of not having you was more dangerous than anything I’d ever faced. That’s fucked up, right?”
“Only if you’re a coward.” I thread my fingers with his, holding our hands up against the light. Mine look smaller than ever in his grip. “You’re not a coward.”
“I’m not, but—” He shakes his head. “Every day I think I’m going to fuck this up. That you’ll get tired of being wanted by all five of us. That one day you’ll want something more normal, that you’ll choose just one and it won’t be me.”
My chest goes hot, and for half a second I taste the sick possibility of that version of the world—one where I have to choose, one where Holden and I aren’t together.
“I can’t choose,” I say. “Couldn’t. In fact, I’d rather die.
” It sounds so dramatic as I say it, but I mean it—fuck me, I mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything, and not just because Holden is currently turning my bones to pudding with aftershocks.
“You’re one of my guys, Holden—mine. And I’m yours.
And I know it’s messy, and I know it’s fucked up because I expect you to share me, but I’d literally kill any woman who tried to touch you.
Seriously, that’s how I feel. And it’s what I want.
You’re it for me. Even if you’re not the only one. ”
He pulls away, but only enough that he can look at my face. “Good,” he says. “Because that’s exactly the life I want.”
“Holden.”
He leans down and kisses me, slow and deep, and the tenderness in it is so different from the sex we just had that it feels like a different language.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you too, detective.”
He kisses me again. And when we come up for air, I start to pull away—we have things to do, reasons we came here, a whole apartment to sort through—but his arm hooks around my waist and drags me back.
“Not yet,” he murmurs against my mouth. “Five more minutes.”