Page 13 of My Halloween Hunter

He goes down on me without warning, his mouth hot and open on my pussy, his beard rough on the insides of my thighs, his tongue dragging up through me slow and flat until I buck. He pins my hips to the ground with both forearms. Then, he eats me like he's been starving for a week, licking into me, sucking my clit into his mouth and flicking it with his tongue until I've got fistfuls of his hair and my heels dug into his back and I'm saying his name up into the pines over and over.

"That's it," he says against me. "Let the mountain hear you."

I come screaming. Somewhere in the dark, an owl goes quiet.

He's up my body before I've stopped shaking, kissing me so I taste myself on him, and I grab his belt and yank it open with fingers clumsy from the cold.

"Now," I say. "Right now."

He's thick and hard and hot in my hand, and when I stroke him once, twice, his whole big body shudders over me and his head drops to my shoulder.

"Darcy."

I guide him to me, wrap my legs around his hips and pull.

He sinks into me in one long thrust, and we both stop breathing. I'm so full, stretched around him and pinned under him, the frost under the wool and the moon over his shoulder and his heart slamming against my breasts. He holds there, all the way in, and looks down at me.

"Where are you sleeping tomorrow?" he asks, quieter, like he needs to hear it land.

"Your bed."

"And the night after."

"Your bed, Cade. Your bed, your—"

He starts to move, and I lose the words.

Then I shove at his shoulder, and he lets me roll us, and I'm on top of him with the red wool sliding off my shoulders and the moon at my back, and I ride him. I go slow, sinking all the way down until he's so deep I can feel him everywhere, lifting until only the head of him is left inside me, then taking him again, while his hands grip my hips hard enough to leave marks I want to keep.

He watches me like I'm the moon.

"Look at you," he says, his voice gone to gravel. "Fuck. Look at you on me."

I lean down and bite his lip, and he rolls us back over in one move, and after that he's in charge again.

He fucks me slow at first, deep, grinding into me at the end of every stroke so his body drags across my clit, and then harder. My hands are under his shirt with my nails in his back, his hand is cradling my head off the ground, and the red wool bunches under us while our breath goes up white together into the dark.

"Going to keep you," he says against my mouth. "Keep you in my bed. Keep you full of me."

"Yes."

"Going to put a baby in you." His voice breaks on it. "Fill you till it takes. My woman, round with my kid, in that chair by my fire. Mine."

It goes through me like lightning through a tree.

"Do it," I say. "Cade. Give it to me."

He groans like I've gutted him and drives into me hard, again and again, and I meet every thrust until the whole forest seems to rock with it. I come with him buried deep, clamping down so hard he swears, and he gets both hands under my ass and lifts me into it and slams home three more times before he comes with his face in my neck, shaking, pouring into me, saying my name like it's the only word he has left.

He wraps the red wool and his coat around both of us and holds me there on the frozen ground while our hearts slow down.

Down in the valley, Edna's jack-o'-lanterns are guttering out one by one, the kids are home in bed, and the frost is coming down thick over everything.

He puts his mouth against my temple and leaves it there while midnight goes past and it becomes November, and neither of us moves.

Epilogue

Darcy