She had to go home.
If she wanted to deserve him, really deserve him?—
She had to face herself.
She had to choose.
Her pace faltered, hips trembling, and he surged up beneath her, bracing on his elbows, his mouth capturing hers. The kiss was messy, wet, gasping. His hand slid to her jaw, held her there as he used his big, beautiful body to roll her beneath him.
He gasped, pushing up with his hands, breaking the kiss. Water dropped from his hair, splashing against her nipple, her belly, erotically hot.
“Bailee.” He cried, then a stream of so many beautiful words in their language, declaring himself hers, her climax detonated. Fully seated in her, and even as her climax pulsed around him, he made a sound that trembled through her, deep, guttural, claiming, a predator’s growl, primal and basic.
There was no gentleness left in him. No patience. No restraint. Just a raw, aching desperation that drove him into her with a force that bordered on fury, only it wasn’t anger. It was everything else. Years of silence. A lifetime of hunger. All the parts of him he’d locked down, shoved deep, sealed beneath grit and discipline and survival, now pouring into her with every savage thrust.
She clung to him, legs wrapped high around his waist, back arched into every driving, punishing stroke. Her nails scraped down his spine, not in pain but in grounding, as if she could feel the storm unraveling inside him and wanted to anchor him to something real. Something that didn’t hurt. Something that whispered you’re not alone anymore.
His body moved like it was burning from the inside out, hips grinding, pumping, his jaw clenched tight like he was holding back a roar that would break the world in two. But she didn’t look away. She took all of him. Met him stroke for stroke. Matched his fire with her own until the rhythm between them blurred, then fractured.
He shattered and she captured his mouth, taking that cry into her like sacred smoke.
She felt it in the way his breath caught, in the brutal shift of his hips, in the way he suddenly buried himself deep and ground down like he could crawl inside her and never have to come out. His voice broke open against her throat, a sound so savage, so full of everything he’d never said, it ripped through her like a second climax.
She gasped as pleasure overtook her again, unexpected and fierce, her body arching as her second release slammed into her. He followed with a broken growl, grinding so deep into her it felt like he might tear through time itself. His body seized, bucked, then collapsed, crushing her beneath the full weight of his need, his grief, his surrender.
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just buried his face into the curve of her neck and held on like he’d finally found home in a world that never gave him one.
For the first time, he didn’t hide.
Bailee couldn’t breathe, not from the weight of him but from the truth of him. Of this. Of the way his body trembled against hers like he’d finally let go of something that had been holding him hostage for years.
She wrapped her arms around his back, fingers threading through the damp hair at the base of his neck, and closed her eyes.
No one had ever given her this before. Not just the intensity. Not just the body. But the breaking. The way he had poured himself into her like he wasn’t trying to take anything, only give. Everything. All at once. Every dark corner. Every wound. Every ounce of fury and fear and longing.
He hadn’t just claimed her. He had trusted her.
That undid her more than anything else.
She swallowed hard, her voice unsteady but clear as she whispered the only truth she could speak out loud. The one that didn’t terrify her.
“You feel like something I’ve been aching for… and didn’t know how to want.”
He didn’t lift his head. Didn’t move. Just let her words settle over him like the first rain after drought, quiet, steady, soul-deep.
Something she’d been aching for.
Great Spirit.
His breath stuttered, and for a long, raw moment, all she could feel was the thunder of his heart against her chest.
Then he spoke. Low. Rough. Unshakable.
“You’re the only thing I ever wanted that didn’t make me hate myself for wanting it.”
His voice broke at the edges, not from weakness, but from too much honesty. Too much finally. The air between them thickened, not with fear, not with the threat of falling apart, but with the sharp, sacred stillness of two people who were desperately trying to find a way to stop running.
Her breath caught at his words, not for the heat in them, for the pain. For the way he said didn’t make me hate myself like that had always been the price of desire. As if anything he wanted had to come with shame. As if he came with shame.
