Page 67 of Wretched Thorns

“I know you do. I can taste it through this. That is why I am telling you. Wanting it doesn’t change the fact that we cannot.”

“Tell me what we can do.”

He lifted his face. His eyes solid gold.

“Oh, I’m going to leave you something.”

“Show me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very sure, Callum. Show me.”

He lowered his mouth to the dip of my collarbone. Not the side where Jasper had been. The front. The small private place a high-collared shirt would cover.

He kissed it once.

He pressed his teeth there with no force at all. Then he closed his lips and sucked, slow and steady and devastating, and the heat of his mouth against that small private place was the warmest thing my body had carried in months.

He held it. He let go. He kissed it once more.

When I opened my eyes the small place at the dip of my collarbone was the dark,hot bloom of a bruise rising under my skin.

“Mine,” he said against the new mark. “Yours.”

He pushed back into me on the “yours.”

***

The second O took both of us together.

He had his hand fisted in my hair. I had my legs wrapped around his hips. He was saying my name against my throat in a voice I had never heard him use. I was saying his name back without realizing I was.

The bond surged so hard the moss seemed to surge with it.

I came with my fingernails in his shoulder blades and my mouth on his and the new bruise hot under his palm.

He came a beat behind me with my name in his mouth.

We laid in a tangle of arms and legs. I welcomed the escape, savoring each second in Callum’s arms and praying for the dream to become our reality.

***

He kept his forehead pressed to mine.

“You have to go back,” he said. “I don’t want it, but it’s dangerous to be here too long.”

“Okay.”

“This bond isn’t going anywhere.”

“I know.”

“He is going to see what I left you.”

“I am counting on it.”

His mouth moved at the corner the way it had moved on the porch the first morning he had laid eyes on me. He leaned down. Pressed one last kiss to the new mark.