Page 65 of Wretched Thorns

He stopped breathing for one long breath. Then he let it out.

“Come here, baby.”

I went.

He folded me into his arms and laid his face against the top of my head. His shirt smelled like cedar, wood-smoke, and the sweet, wonderful smell of him. I marveled at the details brought into this dream realm.

We stood like that for a long time.

“You came to me,” he said.

“You’re there, first and always.” An image of him with the axe above his head as I unpacked my car popped into my mind, triggering a ton of memories. “I guess you always have been.”

“You found me.” He pulled back half a step. His hands came up to my face. His thumbs along my cheekbones. “On your own.”

On your own. The words should have landed like a gift. For a breath, they landed like a hook.

That was the thing I had not allowed myself to face. The bond had not asked me. It had struck before I knew any of their names, the way Marcus’s roses bloomed out of nothing and decided where I would go and who would always be able to find me. I had spent three years being chosen by a creature that called the choosing love. I did not know how to tell a bond from a leash anymore.

I must have gone still, because Callum went still with me.

“How do I know this is mine?” I said. “And not just another thing that owns me and calls it mine?”

He did not rush it. He never rushed anything.

“Because I’d let you go,” he said. “Right now. Turn around and walk away if that was what you wanted. It would gut me. I’d do it anyway,” His thumb moved on my cheekbone. “That’s the difference, baby. He built a door that only locks. Mine stays open. Our bond isn’t a prison. It’s a question. You get to choose your answer every day.”

I answered it.

***

He undressed me like it was the first time. Like he had been thinking about nothing else the whole time I had been away from him.

He started at my mouth. Kissed me deep and unhurried. His hand found the hem of my shirt and lifted it without breaking the kiss. He laid his palm flat between my breasts where the bond was running and held it there. His eyes weren’t gold yet. They were thinking about it.

He kissed my throat where Jasper’s mouth had been. Slower. Deeper. No teeth. Just the sealed press of his lips over the bruise. When he found it, he made a sound in his chest that came up under my hand on his collarbone.

“Mine,” he said against my throat. “Mine for the fact that you want him too. Just mine. Ours.”

“Yours.”

He kept going. He kissed the inside of my elbow where I have an old white scar. He kissed the inside of my wrist. He undid the button of my jeans with one hand and slid them down my hips. He kissed the bone of my hip and the soft place below it.

He kissed the inside of my thigh where Eli’s grip had left a print.

“Eli marked you, too.”

“He did.”

“Stay still, baby.”

He kissed the print in slow, unhurried circles. Until it was a warm, humming thing instead of a tender one. Until my body was trembling in a way, I’d been trying not to.

He kissed every place a hand, or a mouth had been on me in the grove. Only then did he come back to my mouth.

By the time he did, I had stopped pretending I was going to walk out of this dream space the same woman who walked in.

I pulled his shirt over his head.