I'm not a virgin anymore. The thought lands softly, not with loss but with something close to wonder.
I chose this. I chose him. Whatever comes next, this moment is entirely mine.
“Christ, baby girl. Your cunt feels like heaven, squeezing me tight, choking me to keep me in.” He finds my mouth again. This time the kiss is different. It is deep and possessive, as if he's branding me with his kisses too now. As if he means to own every part of me. His lips drift from my mouth to my temple, warm and deliberate, even as his hips begin to move.
"You with me?" he murmurs against my skin.
"Yes," I say, bringing his hand to my chest. "It feels like you're here. It feels like you're everywhere. It feels like I've come home." I don't swallow the words. I don't even shy my gaze away. I hold his and say the words.
He nods. Or I think he nods, because my body is under a surfeit of sensations and it's very possible that my mind is making up things I want to see.
"Hold on to me, Princess. I'll try to be gentle." He laughs again and the sound is serrated, filled with self-deprecation. "I might not succeed. It seems I fail at a lot of things when it comes to you."
I bite his lower lip and smile. "I like you failing with me, Elias. I like that you can't follow all your rules."
"You're a witch," he says, and then he's moving.
It feels like each thrust is hitting me in so many different places—deep inside my womb, inside my heart, inside my throat.
He's everywhere. Those first few thrusts are rough, pushing me up on the sheets, but he's there anchoring me down, his body a furnace against the cool air of the cabin.
I press my feet against the hard curve of his ass, pulling him deeper, and hear his breath catch. His chest draws up and down like bellows, the drag of his skin against mine a friction that sets off sparks everywhere we touch. Somehow, he sneaks a hand between where we are joined and tweaks my clit and I go off again.
And then he loses it.
My grumpy, wounded mountain man loses it, loses himself in my body, chases his own pleasure. He uses my body, pounding into me in a merciless rhythm. And I hang on to him, my fingers clasped around his neck, loving each thrust, loving how he takes what he needs, loving that he's lost in me.
I store every sensation. Every drop of sweat that plops from his face into my hair. Every guttural sound he makes, every time he chants my name, every merciless thrust as he owns me.
Because this is mine. All of it. Even if only for a little while.
And I know that I will survive the rest of my life, whatever horrors come, with this memory, this man, lodged deep inside my heart.
With this memory of him moaning his release inked into my flesh.
10
IRIS
Amere two days later, I'm sitting in Elias's lap, sewing a rip in one of his shirts while he reads a book.
I know now that he prefers paperbacks to e-readers, though he has two of those lying around. Historical fiction to thrillers. Milky, sugary tea to coffee.
And taking me—nestled against him or straddling him or under him—with my eyes locked onto his. Though he accommodated my need for wanting to know how it feels to have him take me from the back while I was on all fours, with a growl.
It had been rough and fast and God, just thinking of how he'd snuck under me first and suckled on my hanging breasts, then slid lower and ate me out,thentook me from behind makes heat rush through every pore.
Everything I ask of him, he gives me a hundred times more.
I bite my lower lip to stop my grin from spreading and look around the cabin.
It smells different in here now. Still pine and woodsmoke, still him, but underneath it something warmer and softer has crept in—jasmine, the ghost of the lavender soap I found under the sink, the two of us mingled into something new.
Something all ours.
The afternoon light slants through the window above the kitchen shelf in a way I already recognize, the way it turns the pine walls amber at this exact hour.
My cardigan—one of his flannels he gave me and that I've been wearing open over his t-shirts—is draped over the arm of the leather couch. The dish sponge lives on the left side of the sink now instead of the right, a small mutiny he hasn't commented on or reversed.
