“We’re not leaving here anytime soon,” Rosemary reminded me, her legs wrapping around the backs of my thighs. “Unless you want to ask my pop to leave his own home to give us privacy, we’ll have to do it here.”
I was paying attention to the best of my ability, but it felt like my brain was short-circuiting. She was right there. We were so godsdamned close. My hips moved without conscious thought, and Rosemary let out a little whimper of need.
“It’s supposed to be special,” I replied, focusing on her eyes. The pupils were huge with arousal, and around the edges, her irises had darkened into a thick line of darker green. “It’s the beginning of everything.”
Rosemary lifted her hands to frame my cheeks in her palms. “If you haven’t realized that our beginning started already, you haven’t been paying attention.”
I groaned and pressed our foreheads together as her hips rolled languidly.
“What are you waiting for?” she whispered.
Every euphemism and cliché I’d ever heard felt absolutely correct as I pressed inside her, both of us barely breathing. We fit perfectly, like a lock and key, a pair of puzzle pieces, a glove. She shuddered as I paused, fully inside her.
It was a miracle. The culmination of my entire life. There would never be anything better than that moment, with the lightfrom the lamp illuminating her beautiful face, her nails pressed into my shoulders, and her body welcoming mine.
“Please tell me you’ve done this before,” she said nervously after a moment.
I choked on a laugh. I must’ve been lost in my head for too long. She looked so concerned.
“I’ve done this before,” I confirmed against her lips.
Catching her hands in mine, I tugged them up above her head and braced myself on my elbows. Then, I finally began to move.
It was nearly impossible to keep Rosemary quiet, but I did my best. I caught every sound in my mouth as I memorized what made her gasp or moan or curse. While I held her hands captive, she used the rest of her body to drive me out of my mind. Her hips rolled in counterpoint, her knees bent and fell wide, her back arched, and her legs wrapped around my back, holding me to her like a vice.
When it all felt like too much, my skin so sensitive it felt like I might go out of my mind, I found myself suddenly pressing my mouth against the pulse point on her neck.
Rosemary tipped her head back further, urging me on as she whimpered.
I’m not sure what I expected to happen. I’d thought about it a lot during my life—the moment when I would complete the bond with the other half of my soul—but nothing had prepared me for when it actually happened. As the first taste of her blood hit the back of my throat, I came so hard that the world around me went silent.
It waseverything.
Somehow, I had the presence of mind to pull away before I hurt her, and when sound began to make sense again, I realized that Rosemary was making these little gasping noises as she pulled at the hold I had on her hands.
“What?” I asked frantically, letting go of her. “Baby, what?”
“You have to do it,” she said, turning her head to savagely bite my arm. When she pulled away, little lines indented where her teeth had been, but the skin was intact. “I can’t do it. You have to do it.”
“Shhh,” I murmured, understanding the problem. Lifting my hand to my mouth, I quickly bit down to break the skin and offered it to her.
As she pulled the fleshy part of my thumb into her mouth and took a long pull, her body tightened around my cock. The two sensations were so powerful that another orgasm rolled over me, and by the time her mouth grew slack and her head dropped back to the bed, we were both shaking with exhaustion and maybe a little bit of shock.
Chapter 7
Rosemary
Carefully lifting the heavy arm off my waist, I scooted off the side of the bed. The floor was freezing against the soles of my feet, and if I could feel the discomfort of it, that meant my body temperature must be somewhere close to normal.
The heat had dissipated.
I’d known that it could happen, and I also knew that it wouldn’t last long.
I tiptoed across the floor and grabbed some clothes out of my dresser, inwardly cursing at every sound. Daniel never stirred, and I barely breathed until I was out of my room and making my way down the hallway in my socks.
It wasn’t as if I was sneaking away, not really. I just needed a little time to myself. After the upheaval of the day before, culminating with the completion of the mating bond, I needed a breather. I needed a moment when everyone wasn’t looking at me.
Their looks had run the gamut the day before. The eyes on me had ranged from shock to love to sympathy to possession. And while I didn’t normally pay attention to the opinions ofother people, it was hard to ignore those opinions when they matched your own.
