Page 35 of Little Witch

"Room for one more?" I asked, already knowing the answer from the way she reached for me without breaking away from him.

"Always," she breathed, and I settled in beside them, watching Rowan finally let himself have what he'd been white-knuckling around for weeks.

His mouth moved from hers to her jaw, her throat, teeth grazing her collarbone hard enough to make her gasp. I caught her free hand and pulled it toward me instead, kissing along her knuckles slow, deliberate, watching her attention split between the two of us in a way that had her whole body going restless against the sheets.

Rowan tugged her shirt over her head without breaking the rhythm of his mouth against her skin, and the sight of her spread out between us, chest rising fast, pink hair fanned across the pillow, undid something in both of us at once. He palmed her breast with one hand while his mouth dropped lower, tongue tracing a slow line down her stomach, and I leaned in to catch her mouth again just as her breath hitched hard.

"Rowan." Half warning, half plea, the second his fingers found the waistband of her jeans and worked them open with unhurried, deliberate patience that had her hips already lifting to help him.

He pulled them down her legs slow enough to be its own kind of torture, mouth following the trail his hands left behind, and by the time he settled between her thighs she was already shaking, one hand fisted tight in his hair and the other still locked with mine.

"Quiet," I murmured against her ear, feeling her whole body jolt the second his tongue found her properly. "You're going to want to try, at least."

"Can't—" Her voice broke off into a moan she barely managed to swallow, hips rolling up against his mouth on instinct.

I kissed her through it, swallowing every sound she couldn't fully hold back, one hand sliding down to toy with her breast while Rowan worked her with a focus that bordered on reverent, like he'd spent every one of the last three years imagining exactly this and had every intention of doing it properly now that he finally could.

"Give me something to do," she gasped eventually, tugging at my waistband with far more urgency than finesse, and I didn't need telling twice.

I shifted, giving her room, and the second her mouth wrapped around me every ounce of composure I had left went straight out the window. She worked me slow at first, then faster as Rowan's mouth against her clearly started unraveling her focus, her moans vibrating around me in a way that had me fisting the sheets just to stay upright.

Rowan added two fingers alongside his mouth, curling them with a precision that made her whole body arch off the bed, her lips going slack around me for a second before she recovered, redoubling her efforts like she was determined to finish us both at the same time out of pure stubbornness.

"That's it," Rowan said against her thigh, voice wrecked. "Let go for both of us."

She did, shattering silently between us, her whole body drawing tight and then releasing in waves that dragged a groan out of me I couldn't fully hold back, and out of Rowan too, who followed her over the edge with his face still buried against her, hips rocking once against the mattress like he'd lost the fight to stay composed entirely. Her mouth around me finished the job a few seconds later, and I came hard enough to see spots, one hand tangled in her hair while I tried and failed to keep from making noise myself.

We collapsed into a loose, tangled heap afterward, all three of us breathing hard, sweat-slicked and boneless against the sheets.

"That was..." Rowan started, voice rough, and then trailed off entirely, staring at the ceiling like the rest of the sentence had gotten lost somewhere on the way out.

"That was what?" I prompted, grinning despite the exhaustion pulling at every muscle in my body.

He was quiet a long moment, jaw working, something unguarded moving across his face that he usually kept locked down tight. "Everything I didn't let myself think about wanting. For three years."

Amber made a small, breathless sound and reached for his hand, pressed between the two of us. "Good everything, or overwhelming everything?"

"Both," he admitted. "Mostly good."

She laughed, a little unsteady, her face still flushed against the pillow. "That was definitely something."

Nobody said anything else for a while after that. The room settled into something quiet and a little strange, three bodies too tangled together to properly separate, none of us particularly inclined to try. Eventually the exhaustion of the whole day caught up with all three of us at once, and I drifted off with Amber's head on my chest and Rowan's hand resting against her hip, the quiet hum of the Sanctum settling in around us like it was watching, patient, waiting to see what we'd do next.

Chapter Nineteen

I woke in the dead of night to the strange, muffled quiet of a room that didn't have a single real window in it. No wind against glass, no distant sound of the town settling into sleep. Just Amber's breathing beside me, and Orias's low, even snoring on her other side, and the faint, watchful hum of the Sanctum itself, always there under everything if I let myself listen for it.

I lay still a while, Amber's back pressed against my chest, one of her hands loosely curled around mine where I'd wrapped my arm over her sometime in the night. My mind wouldn't settle. Too much had happened in one day — Cian, Yakob, the trap we'd walked ourselves into, the thing I still hadn't told her, sitting heavier in my chest with every hour I let it go unsaid.

She stirred a few minutes later, shifting against me, and I felt the exact moment she woke up properly. Her breathing changed. Her hand tightened briefly around mine.

"You're awake," she murmured, voice thick with sleep.

"Couldn't switch my brain off."

"Same." She rolled over to face me, careful not to jostle Orias, her eyes catching what little light the room offered. "Too much happened today. Too much to just sleep through."

"Yeah."