Page 115 of Final Drive

I give her what she’s asking for.

She takes it with her face turned into my jacket, one hand fisted in the leather and the other reaching back for me whenever I get too far away. My control doesn’t disappear. It stretches. There’s a difference, and for the first time I understand exactly what that difference feels like.

When my knot starts to build, Reese feels it too. Her whole body tightens, and I slow enough to make sure she’s with me.

“Cameron.”

“I’m here.”

“I know.”

Two words shouldn’t do anything to me.

They do.

I pull out of her.

The noise she makes into the jacket is pure outrage. “What are you doing.”

“Two seconds.”

I put my mouth low on her back, against the place we chose, and her skin is hot under my lips. I can feel her pulse even this low on her body, or maybe I’m imagining it because mine is beating hard enough to make everything feel alive.

“Still here?” I ask.

She turns her face enough that I can see one eye.

“Bite me, Cameron.”

So I do.

My teeth break skin at the base of her spine. Reese swears into the leather and her back arches under my mouth, and I’m inside her again before she finishes the word.

The bond opens while I’m still moving.

It doesn’t hit me.

That’s the first thing I understand.

There’s no explosion, no violent rush, no moment where I disappear inside something bigger than myself. It just arrives, so naturally that for a second I don’t realize what’s changed.

Then I feel her.

Not her thoughts. Not words. Nothing that simple.

Her.

Warm and bright and exhausted and happy and so completely Reese that I close my eyes.

I’ve spent seven years waiting for the second before everything goes wrong.

It doesn’t come.

I ease us down carefully, because the knot has us for a few minutes and there’s already sand in places sand has no business being. Reese settles on her side with her back against my chest, and I get an arm under her ribs and hold her there.

For a minute neither of us says anything.

Then, quietly, “Cameron.”