Neither of them seemed to be able to stop themselves as she sank down on him, groaning at the stretch and the heat and the breathless promise.
“Don’t. Move.” She gripped his shoulders hard and waited for the sensation of being impaled to ease. He didn’t move anything except his hands, which came to her hips and stroked slowly up her torso and back again, soothing her. He moved to her breasts, rolling her nipples until she was breathless and her hips canted on their own.
“Why aren’t you moving?” she asked with a groan.
He chuckled. “Patchouli, you are going to be the death of me.”
Something went jagged in her heart at the nickname she thought she would never hear again.
She shook her head, letting her nose brush his. “I don’t wear patchouli.”
He kissed her and finally moved.
As the plane swept westward with the sun, they were bathed in the same golden, timeless light for hours.
EPILOGUE
Denver International Airport was a sprawling prairie city. Cat smelled the familiar dry air when the plane door opened and felt herself relax. She’d told herself New York would work, but flying out of there had felt so good. And with Mateo’s contacts, they’d be back on the land in a couple of hours, and not the day and a half it had taken her to hitch a ride to a ski town to catch the bus to Denver. When they climbed out of the plane, however, there was no magic car waiting to whisk them away.
Mateo rubbed his neck roughly as he looked around, the book dangling from one hand like it didn’t weigh at least ten pounds. “I forgot.”
“You forgot what?”
“To tell anyone I was coming.”
“So we have to walk to the terminal?” she asked as she eyed the distant white tented roof of the main concourse.
A head popped out from the plane, and the pilot, another Italian who could not have been a shifter given his skinny frame, said, “The tower is wondering if you all need a ride?”
Mateo groaned. “Matt took care of these details.”
She shook her head. “And you call me the new age hippy, when you just float through life.”
“I was a little occupied,” he said, and she blushed.
In minutes, a little golf cart was whizzing toward them as Mateo spoke with the pilot about renting a hangar here so that he could arrange a moving company to empty the plane and get it all up to Silver Spring. It would go to the basement of the Double Thirteen house for now while they called an architect.
She realized she would spend this pregnancy building a house and gulped. She put a hand to her stomach. She didn’t feel any different, and she had expected to. Maybe the child in her mind was not a now thing? But she rarely got visions years into the future. She had to be close, right?
The cart, which was not for golf but one for driving luggage trains, dropped them off at rickety aluminum stairs to the concourse that were labeled employees only. They went through the steel door at the top.
Mateo looked around, shocked, clutching the precious book to his chest.
“What?” she asked.
“Is it always this busy?”
She looked around at the afternoon traffic. “This isn’t busy. When was the last time you were at an airport?”
“This morning, and when I flew home, and when I flew back, and when I flew to Taiwan last month, and?—”
“I don’t mean at the airport in your private plane. I mean in the concourse of an airport.”
He shrugged. “I was flying to Massachusetts to go to college.”
“Right. Come on.”
From her most recent trip to New York, she knew the way out. Presumably, there would be some sort of vehicle to rent. She tried to adjust to not worrying about money, which felt vaguelywrong. That was another thing she was going to have to fix. Many people needed it way more than they did.
