Page 31
“So good.” Her breathless murmur held wonder, not judgment. Her inner muscles pulsed, gripping me like a fist. “Oh God, you fill me completely.”
“Jesus,” I managed through gritted teeth. I’d never felt anything like this perfect, suffocating embrace. Every slight withdrawal met immediate resistance, her body already mourning the loss before I surged forward again, feeding myself into her slick heat until my hips met hers with a soft, wet sound.
Her breath left her in a guttural cry as I buried myself to the hilt. Heat. Grip. She stretched around me, incredibly tight, incredibly slick. I bottomed out completely, shaking from the rightness of being fully sheathed in her clenching heat.
Home.
Hazel sighed, her fingers clenching my shoulders. Satisfaction vibrated through my bones.
Braced forehead to forehead, feeling the universe shift. She pulsed around me, a tight, fluttering grip.
“Okay?” I asked, needing confirmation that this was really happening, that she wasn’t in pain.
“More than okay,” she breathed against my jaw, tilting her hips to take me. “Perfect.”
I withdrew slowly, savoring the drag of her clinging heat, the delicious friction against my sensitive crown. Then plunged back in. Harder. Deeper. Hitting the end of her. A guttural roar tore from my chest. Hers.
I found my rhythm, or she did—one of us led, the other followed, and after a while, it didn’t matter which. Slow strokes because I was still afraid. Deeper strokes because she wouldn’t let me be. Her heels dug into my lower back, urging me on, and every time I hesitated, she whispered more into my throat until the word became a rhythm in my blood.
The bed groaned under us. The rain had stopped. I could hear the drip of water off the eaves, the shift of wet cedar in the wind, the small, wet sounds of her body accepting mine.
She came again with almost no warning—a shudder that started in her thighs and unwound through her belly, tight and rippling, gripping me so hard that my vision blurred. She said my name like she was surprised by it. Like she hadn’t meant to.
That undid me.
Two more strokes. Three. My spine locked. My bear surged up beneath my skin, and I let him, for one blinding second—let the roar tear out of me, let my body finish what it had been asking for since the moment she walked into my cabin. I emptied into her in long, shuddering pulses, forehead pressed to her collarbone, breathing her in.
For a long moment, neither of us moved.
The stove ticked. Somewhere in the walls, the cabin settled.
I stayed inside her because I couldn’t bring myself to pull out. Her fingers combed slowly through the fur at the back of my neck, gentling me the way I’d gentled a hundred frightened animals in my life. No one had ever done that to me.
“Barrett.” Her voice was small and warm and unbelievably steady. “You didn’t break me.”
I lifted my head enough to look at her.
She smiled up at me—soft, sleepy, wrecked. Not a stranger anymore. Not a guest waiting out a storm. Something else. Something the word didn’t exist for yet.
I pressed my lips to her forehead. Then her temple. Then the hollow under her ear that had been driving me quietly insane for two weeks.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
She reached up and traced the seam where the beard met bearskin, exactly where she’d started, and closed her eyes.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Neither was I.
Chapter 7
Hazel
“You cannot write little purple one on a propagation tray and expect me to accept it.”
Barrett looked up from the length of cedar he was sanding at the other end of the kitchen table. Sawdust clung to the dark fur on his forearms and dusted the front of the old gray T-shirt he was wearing. “I know which one it is.”
“That’s not the point. It needs a proper identifier.” I held up the wooden marker between two fingers so he could see the offending words, written in his large, blocky handwriting. “Preferably one that would allow another human being to identify the specimen if you were unexpectedly incapacitated.”
