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Yes.
Lucas stares at me for a second before a shaky smile breaks through. “Menace.”
Your menace.
The flush that rises under his freckles is soft and immediate, and the bond gives me a quick flash of heat he tries to swallow down because he thinks this isn’t the right moment for it. I know enough now to understand humans often separate things into places where they think they belong. Sadness here. Want there. Fear on one side. Laughter on another. Lucas is especially bad at allowing them to touch.
The bond does not know those walls. It carries all of him at once, and I am beginning to love even the parts he tries to hide from himself.
His gaze drops to my mouth only briefly, but need answers in me. Not the frantic need from last night, or the sealing-hunger that burned through both of us until his fever broke under my mark.
This is quieter and almost worse. I have kissed him and thought of his mouth since, through ridge, creek, patrol, and every useless attempt to be patient.
Now he is here, salt on his skin, breath shaking softly, and I want to learn that human softness again. I lean in slowly, and he meets me halfway.
The kiss is different here than it was at his cabin. That one was morning, threshold, leaving, the bright sting of first learning. This one is dark, forest, return, the wet warmth of his tears still drying on his face. His mouth opens with a small, exhausted sound, and I take the invitation carefully. One hand slides to the back of his head while the other stays at his waist to steady him.
He clings, not desperately now, but firmly, as if he is proving to himself that I will still be here when the kiss ends.
So, I let him end it.
He pulls back only a little, forehead resting against mine, breath warm against my mouth. “Can we go inside?” he asks, then huffs a small embarrassed laugh. “Your inside, I mean. Your den. Not the annoying den.”
Pleasure moves through me so sharply that he feels it and looks pleased despite his swollen eyes.
My den likes you better.
He laughs again, and I rise before he can insist on walking. He starts to protest when I gather him into my arms, but then his body sinks into the hold as if it has been waiting for permission to be carried. I feel his embarrassment, but it is distant beneath relief.
“I can walk,” he mutters anyway, because he must.
I like carrying what came to find me.
He buries his face against my shoulder. “You say shit like that on purpose now.”
Yes.
His breath warms my skin in something close to a smile.
The annoying den does not win tonight.
27
Lucas
I can feel his satisfaction every second I stay wrapped around him. “You’re enjoyin’ this way too much.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. You came to my den in the dark because you missed me.
My entire face goes hot. “That is a very loaded way to phrase what happened.”
Truth is loaded tonight.
I let out a laugh that comes out thin and breathless because he isn’t wrong, and that’s the worst part. I was pining—actually pining. All day. For a cryptid. An ancient forest guardian with antlers in one form and an unfairly good face in another.
I spent the evening lying in bed, restless and off-kilter, and instead of dealing with it like a normal person, I stomped through the woods in badly laced boots because I needed to see him.
I should be too old to have my whole nervous system hijacked because I slept one night away from the giant skull-faced forest guardian who bit me into emotional stability.
