He sets me down on the bed and stands over me. The look on his face is one I want to memorise. Tender and fierce and certain, a man who has stopped running and is standing still for the first time in his life.
“I love you,” he says.
“I know. Take off your shirt.”
He takes off his shirt. I pull him down to me.
The claiming is different from every time before. Not slower, exactly. More intentional. Every touch has weight. His mouth on my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast, each point of contact deliberate, a man mapping territory he already knows but is choosing to learn again. My hands on his back, tracing the muscles that shift beneath his skin, the scars on his ribs that are the first place I ever touched him.
I undress him. He undresses me.The unhurried patience of two people who know they have time, who aren’t fighting a heat cycle or three days of separation or the frantic urgency of a bond demanding consummation. This is choice. Pure, uncomplicated, fully informed choice.
He kisses his way down my body, and I arch into it, my fingers in his hair, and when his mouth reaches the inside of my thigh, I say his name in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine. He looks up, golden-eyed, and the smile he gives me is devastating and unhurried and full of intent.
“Tell me what you want,” he says against my skin.
“Everything.”
He gives me everything. His mouth, first, slow and thorough and maddeningly precise, building me up with the patience of a man who’s learned exactly what makes me fall apart. My hands fist in the sheets. My back arches. The pleasure builds in long, rolling waves that crest, recede, crest higher. He reads me without instruction, adjusting pressure, pace, and angle with an attentiveness that makes me feel known in the most intimate sense of the word.
I come with his name on my lips, his hands on my hips, the aftershocks still rolling through me when he rises over me and pushes inside. The sound I make is gratitude. Hunger. The deep, whole-body satisfaction of being exactly where I belong. He moves. I movewith him. Not desperate, not tentative. Steady. Deliberate. Building. A rhythm that belongs to us. His forehead presses against mine. We breathe the same air. His eyes are open. So are mine. Nowhere to hide. No distance left. Just this. The knot swells. I’m ready for it this time. I open to the pressure, the stretch, the fullness, the lock of his body inside mine. He groans, low and ragged. Holds still while I adjust, his arms trembling with the effort of restraint. I pull his mouth to mine and kiss him and rock my hips, and the sound he makes into my mouth is the most honest thing I’ve ever heard from him.
We move together. Small, deep movements, the knot holding us close. The pleasure builds differently this time. Not sharp. Not explosive. Wider. Like a tide coming in, covering everything. I feel it in my fingers, my toes, the base of my spine, the backs of my eyes. When it crests, it breaks long and complete, washing through me. Leaving everything clean.
He follows me over. I feel it in the way his body tenses and releases, the shudder that runs through him, the way he says my name against my neck like it’s the only word he knows.
Afterwards, we lie tangled together, the knot slowly easing, our breathing settling into the same rhythm. The bedroom window is open, and the night air carries the scent of the forest, the fading smoke fromMaggie’s herbs, and the distant sound of an owl calling from the treeline.
I think about the ceremony. The clearing, the lanterns, the circle of ancient stones. Chris’s rough voice and Roan’s unrehearsed words, and the laughter that followed mine. Maggie’s smoke. Rebecca’s hands are on our shoulders. Nell’s quiet, watchful face in the shadows.
I think about the morning I drove into Mistwood in the rain, looking for peace and quiet. I think about the wolf in the forest, bleeding and impossible, who looked at me with golden eyes and dipped his head. I think about a man in my kitchen with a welcome basket, and coffee in a café with a blue door, and the steady, patient pull that drew me in before I understood what it was.
I came here to be alone. I found something better.
“Roan.”
“Mm.”
“I’m glad I didn’t run.”
His arm tightens around me. His lips press against my hair. His heartbeat is slow against my back. Outside, the village sleeps. The forest holds its breath. The bond between us settles into its permanent frequency. Quiet. Deep. Certain.
“Me too,” he says.
Chapter 34
New Beginnings
Roan
Six months later,on a Tuesday morning in May, I wake to the sound of Phoebe arguing with a cat.
The argument is one-sided. Biscuit, Maggie’s ginger tom, has taken up residence on our kitchen windowsill and is refusing to vacate despite Phoebe’s increasingly creative negotiations. I can hear her from the bedroom, her voice shifting between the firm professional tone she uses in the surgery and the softer, slightly pleading register she reserves for animals who are testing her patience.
“You have a perfectly good home next door. Maggie feeds you actual cat food. I am not opening a tin of tuna at seven in the morning because you’ve decided you live here now.”
Biscuit, from the sound of it, disagrees.
I lie in bed and listen, and the smile on my face is the kind that would have alarmed me a year ago. The stupid, unreasonable happiness of a man who got everything he didn’t know he wanted by doing everything he swore he wouldn’t.
