“If you run, you’ll just find another man who’s worse at hiding it,” she said. “At least this one’s honest.” She coughed once, then said, “You got your pepper spray?”
I grinned, wiping my cheeks. “Always.”
“Then go back to him,” she said. “You’ve made him wait long enough.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Annie
Ithought about her words long time after I hung up with my mom. I watched the sparkle of the lake and the shimmer of heat off the demon sands, and I tried to picture what my life would look like if I went back right now, right this second. I didn’t feel fixed, or braver, or even especially together. I felt the same as always—too much and not enough, too loud, too hungry, too ready to throw myself into the fire even if I knew it would burn.
But the thought of seeing Samiel again made my entire body buzz, a frequency so high I could barely sit still. The cat, sensing my mood, pawed at the front door until I got up and opened it, then promptly planted herself on the doormat, as if to sayIt's about damn time.
I threw my stuff in the GTO, scooped Fluoxetine into the passenger seat, and cranked the ignition. She yowled the entire way down the mountain, a banshee howl of complaint that made me feel less alone. The wind through the open window tangledmy hair and dried the sweat on my upper lip, and all I could think of was how, in less than fifteen minutes, I’d be home.
Our home. I wanted it to be that, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise, not anymore.
I barely parked the car before I was out of it. The cat launched herself from the window, claws out, and immediately began patrolling the perimeter with the focus of a military scout. I stood in the driveway, heart raw and wide open, waiting for the first flicker of movement from inside.
He was at the door before I even knocked, like he’d been standing there the whole day, like he’d known I would come back as soon as the sun hit high noon. I braced myself for some speech, but he just reached for my face and held it like I was the last piece of glass left in a shattered cathedral.
“I missed you,” he said.
I tried to say something cool, or make a joke, or even just speak, but instead I started ugly-crying on his shirt. He smelled like oranges and dust and the salt I’d left behind on his skin, and I felt his arms go gentle-wild around me, holding me up, holding me tight, holding me like he’d already decided we were forever and was just waiting for me to catch up.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he said, but there was no threat in it. Just a splintery relief, sharp and honest.
“You are a fucking disaster,” I said, which made him snort laugh against my hair.
“Your disaster,” he said. “If you want.”
I wanted. More than anything.
We stood on the porch for a long time, neither of us moving, like the moment might disappear if we stepped away. The cat wound around our ankles, tail high, and I thought:This is it. This is what I came here for.
He pulled away just enough to look at me, wiping with a careful thumb the mascara tracks from my cheeks. His hands were trembling.
“I love you,” he said, and I felt it crack through me like a bullet. “I love you, Annie.”
The words landed so hard I nearly laughed, but it came out as a kind of hiccup, a mess of relief and terror and joy. “I love you too, you absolute monster,” I said, hands fisted in his shirt, and I could feel him exhale, every muscle in his stupid, dangerous body finally letting go.
We didn’t say anything else for a while. I pressed my forehead to his jaw, breathing him in. He kissed the top of my head, then my eyelids, then the place just under my earlobe where he said my skin tasted like cold stars. I wanted to say a hundred things, all at once—that I was sorry for running, that I’d always come back, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life arguing with him over nothing and fucking him against every surface we owned.
We didn't even make it to the bedroom. The front door slammed against the wall, and Samiel lifted me with hands that burned against my thighs, his claws pricking through the denim. My back hit the kitchen counter hard enough to rattle dishes, my legs instinctively wrapping around his waist, feeling the rigid heat of him press against my center. His mouth crashed into mine, all hunger and possession, fangs grazing my bottom lip as I arched into him. The low growl vibrating from his chest sent electricity straight between my legs. He tasted like every dark fantasy I'd ever had, his tongue sliding against mine as his hands gripped my ass, pulling me harder against him.
He broke the kiss, pupils blown wide in those red-gold eyes, a thin trail of saliva connecting our lips.
"Say it again," he demanded, voice rough as gravel. His hips ground against me in a slow, deliberate circle that made myeyelids flutter. The hard ridge of him pressed exactly where I needed it, and I couldn't stop the desperate sound that escaped my throat as his fangs extended fully, gleaming and deadly against his flushed lips.
“I love you. I love you more than anything.” It came out cracked and needy, and the second I said it, the mask slipped. He made this noise, half-groan, half something wild and wordless, and hitched my thighs up until my ass was right at the edge, body spread open for him, trusting he wouldn’t let me fall.
He tore my jeans off—not just a figure of speech, literally shredded them on the diagonal with his claws, the fabric unraveling in a spiral of blue and white over my skin. I shrieked, then started laughing, then shrieked again with the shock of bare air on skin, and he just pressed his face straight between my legs, shoulders pinning me to the countertop, tongue hot and alive.
He ate me out like he'd spent four days thinking about it, like every second apart had been rehearsed with his mouth on air, waiting for the taste of me. His forked tongue flickered against me—two precise points of pleasure that somehow reached everywhere at once. I clung to him, knuckles white, as he worked me slow at first, then with inhuman speed and dexterity, each split tip finding separate nerves to torment simultaneously. The more I bucked against his mouth, the deeper he moaned, the hungrier he got. When both tips of his tongue circled my clit in opposite directions before he sealed his lips around it and sucked, I thought I'd bite through my own tongue. The pressure was unreal, and I could feel the edges of his fangs graze, careful but there, reminding me what I was giving myself to.
I lost the thread of language. I was just sound and heat and shaking, every nerve in my body ratcheted up to the point of pain. Then he slid two fingers inside me, then three, working me with a precision that was obscene in every sense. He curled them just right, and when he dragged his tongue up the seamof me with his other hand pinning my hips, I saw stars—not metaphorical, actual bursts of white behind my eyelids. Then something happened I'd never experienced before—a sudden, intense release that shocked me as much as it soaked him. I gasped, mortified and exhilarated all at once, certain this wasn't supposed to happen outside of porn. But his tongue never stopped, not even to catch a breath. He just buried his face deeper and groaned like he'd discovered something precious that had been hidden from him until now.
