"Then start. Right now. Believe it right now, with me in your lap, with your body inside mine, with nothing between us except the choice to be here." She kissed him, tasting salt, tasting the remnants of his long night, tasting the man underneath all the layers of grief and guilt and curse.
He surged upward, flipping her onto her back on the bed, covering her body with his, and the force of it drove him deep enough that she cried out. He braced himself on his forearms and looked down at her, and his eyes were still gold-blue, still the wolf and the man both present, but something had shifted in the landscape of his face. Not hope, exactly. But the space where hope could take root if the soil wasn't poisoned. She wrapped herlegs around his waist, heels digging into his lower back, pulling him deeper.
Anatole took her with long strokes that made the bed groan and her back arch. Her fingers clawed at the sheets. He buried his face against her neck, breathing her scent at the source, and she could feel his wolf so close to the surface that the sound he made against her skin was more growl than moan. She met him thrust for thrust, her hips rising to take him deeper, the slick heat between them making every movement frictionless and obscene and exactly what she needed.
"Harder," she said, because she wanted him to stop thinking, wanted the animal part of him to take over, the part that knew without doubt that she was his and he was hers and no curse in the world could alter that equation. "I won't break."
He gave her harder. Drove into her with a force that shoved her up the bed with each thrust, and she braced her hands against the headboard and pushed back, and the clash of their bodies filled the cabin with the wet, rhythmic sound of sex and the mingled scent of alpha and omega, pine and honeysuckle so thick it was like breathing through honey.
"You're mine," he growled against her throat.
"Yes."
"Say it. I need to hear it."
"I'm yours. By choice. Not by purchase, not by biology, not by curse. I chose you and I keep choosing you and I will choose you in that room when the mirror shows me the worst it has."
His knot swelled, and she gasped at the stretch of it, the way it caught at her entrance with each thrust, the pressure building toward the lock that would bind them together. He slowed his thrusts, letting the knot work its way inside her incrementally, and the sensation was an exquisite, overwhelming fullness that erased everything except the two of them and the place where their bodies joined.
"I'm yours too," he said. Strained. Almost inaudible. His knot locked inside her, and they both stopped breathing for a moment as the sensation crested, his release flooding her in thick, hot pulses while her own orgasm clenched around him in waves. "Whatever that's worth. Whatever it costs. I'm yours. I love you."
She held him through the aftershocks. His body shook, and hers shook with it, their nervous systems tangled as thoroughly as their limbs. The knot pulsed between them, each pulse sending a secondary wave of pleasure that made her toes curl and her fingers tighten on his back.
"Tell me something," she said. The way she always did, when they were tied.
"Anything."
"Tell me what you're going to do when the curse breaks."
He was quiet for a long moment. She could feel his heart beating against hers, two rhythms that weren't synchronized but existed in the same space, close enough to talk to each other. His knot pulsed, and they both gasped, and for a moment the conversation dissolved into the physical reality of being locked together, the intimacy of it, the inescapable closeness that knotting demanded. When the wave passed, his voice was quieter. "I want a future, Jeanne. I haven't wanted that in what seems like forever. I haven't let myself think past the next bride, the next attempt, the next failure. But you make me want things I have no right to want."
"You have every right."
"I have six graves that say otherwise."
"Those graves are part of the past. The future is the room, and the mirror, and what we build after we walk out of it."
His arms tightened around her. "If we walk out of it."
"When," she corrected. "When we walk out of it."
The pull hummed beneath them, patient as the sea. But in the space between their bodies, where his skin pressed againsthers and his scent wound through hers and his heartbeat spoke to hers, there was a silence that the pull couldn't penetrate.
She held onto that silence the way she held onto him. With both hands, and all the stubborn, freely given love she possessed.
