Chapter Twenty-Six

Xander

I set her down and stood apart, facing her as I undressed. Not slow, not fast, just one thing after another dropped to the floor, shoved aside. I wanted nothing between my body and hers. Nothing.

She was shaking, too. Standing there like the goddess she was, watching me. Watching my hands remove my coat, my shoes, gun harness, shirt, pants. When I finally stood nude before her, I approached and unwrapped her, piece by piece. Both of us were splattered with demon blood and the gut-punching fear of losing one another and the breath-stealing relief that we’d found each other whole and alive. Once her body—her beautiful fucking body—was revealed to me, I lifted her again and carried her to the bathroom. She said not a thing, understanding I needed silence. Needed her. Just her.

With steamy water streaming, I pulled her inside with me. She seemed content to be led. Her hair had been in one long braid, so I uncoiled it all, letting the wavy lengths fall loose around her delicate shoulders. Her chest rose and fell quickly as my hands moved slowly over her. Soaping her body clean, smoothing my hands over every lovely curve of hip, waist, shoulder, breast, I needed to ensure that every part of her was intact. She winced when I glided my palm across her belly, a purplish bruise forming there. I glanced back to the welt blooming on her cheek, then I wanted to go back and pull Rook from Styx’s throat so I could torture him more, longer.

Carowyn shook her head up at me. “No. Don’t go back there.”

Holding her fiery gaze for a moment longer, I shoved away the iron vise that had gripped my chest, wanting me to destroy and eviscerate…anything…everything. But my goddess begged me no. To stay with her. So I did. Whatever she asked, whatever she wanted, it was hers.

I slid my hand farther down over the slope of her stomach and cupped her sex, then kept still. Very still. She gasped, pressing her back to the cold ceramic wall, her palms flat down by her sides. I braced my free hand next to her head, my legs wide on either side of hers, I needed to have her completely within my keep, inside the protection of my body before I could finally speak a word. She looked up at me from under her long, wet lashes, her body so heartbreakingly perfect, the jagged and smooth and sharp and lovely images in ink whispering to me of all the beauty encased in this woman’s body and soul. As if I didn’t bloody well know. As if I didn’t want to possess and cherish and worship every fucking inch of her.

Three steady breaths in and out, then I finally—finally—spoke. She needed to know once and for all where we were.

“Going alone…that was reckless and stupid.”

“I know.” She struggled to speak, voice quivering. “But I didn’t want anyone else to be hurt.”

I lowered my head, my mouth hovering over hers. “It was also brave and beautiful.” Then I slid my middle finger along her sweet, slick cleft.

She sucked in a breathy gasp, lips apart, amber eyes flaring bright and completely focused on me.

“I didn’t want—”

“You are no longer alone,” I ground out in pain, pressing my forehead to hers and stroking her slowly, gently. “Do you bloody understand me?”

She nodded. “Yes.” Her hands came off the wall and cupped my jaw. “Yes, I understand.”

I watched her tough exterior that had been in play at the castle melt right before me, slide away into nothing as I slid my finger up and down her slit, dipping at her entrance just an inch before gliding away again. She’d gone there to that house of death, thinking there was no alternative. Still thinking she was Bone, back in her shop, hammering away endless hours in isolation.

I stopped stroking and cupped her again, firming my grip on her sex possessively. “I don’t think you do understand.”

My attempt at steady and calm vanished into the ether. I shoved off the wall and withdrew my hand from her body. After shutting off the water, I tugged her out of the shower, intending to dry her like a rational fucking human being before I buried my cock so deep inside her she’d understand well what I meant. But that plan all went to hell when I knelt before her on the plush bathroom rug and started to rub her dry.

Her tawny-brown nipples puckered in the cool air under my heavy gaze. She gripped my face again and pulled my head closer, guiding my mouth to her breast. I obliged with a throaty growl and licked and nipped, and then clamped my lips around her perfect nub till she whimpered. Then I did the same to the other. When her nails grazed my scalp, I lost my goddamn, bloody mind.

I flipped her beneath me on the rug, widened her thighs with my own, and pushed inside her body with a rumbling, quivering groan. She sucked in a sharp breath, gripping my shoulders.

“Hear me now, woman.”

I rolled my spine, pumping my cock out then in on a long glide, slamming hard at the end of each thrust.

“You…are not…alone.”

She nodded, “I know, I know, baby.” She lifted her head and flicked her tongue over my lips, then pushed past them to stroke me deep. I devoured her sweet, lush mouth and fucked her hard.

I tried not to be an animal, not to be this raging, hungry beast who needed to consume, to possess. Who would never be satisfied. But it was hopeless. She made me insane with need. There was nothing but our slick bodies, sliding over and inside each other, the pounding rhythm of our hearts and the beastly hunger driving me on. But my woman, she matched me thrust for thrust, rocking up and angling her sex so I could drive deep. So deep.

“God. Carowyn,” I groaned as I whispered against her lips and pounded hard inside her body. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

My confession became a promise, then a mantra, and then a pleading prayer. Pressing my chest to hers, my fist in her wild locks, my teeth grazing her sweat-slick neck, I pinned her in place with my torso and pumped inside her like a feral animal. She didn’t seem to mind, her moans growing louder and louder as we both raced toward that inevitable cliff where we’d finally fall over together.

As soon as the first few pulses of her orgasm rippled, her sex clamping around my cock, I was done, or undone, coming in a mind-hazing blur of glory and pleasure-soaked joy. Then she unhinged my heart and put it back together. Again.

“Cara,” she whispered, panting in my ear.

I lifted my head to gaze down into her otherworldly fire-gold eyes, tears pooling there. She licked her love-swollen lips.

“That’s the name my friends used to call me…before…when I was—”

“Cara,” I repeated, a smile finally breaking across my face, the first since the moment I’d read her note and thought she was snatched from my arms forever. I lowered my head again, sweeping my lips slowly across hers, saying her name with the reverence it deserved. “Cara.”

She did understand, after all. She might wear the battle-hard, I-stand-alone armor of Bone when she was in this shop forging blades and making arms. But she was no longer that lonely creature relegated to her world of one. No. Now she was mine, and I was hers. And she was—

“Cara,” I whispered again, coaxing her lips wider with my own.

“Yes, Xander.” She trailed her forefinger over my mouth, tracing as if to memorize it, or this moment. Or both. “When you say my name…” Her voice cracked with heartbreaking emotion, and she swallowed hard. “When you say my real name”—her gaze finally lifted from my mouth to my eyes—“I feel whole again.”

That was the moment I truly became her man, her protector, her partner, her eternal soulmate. For she’d verbalized how her presence had made me feel for quite some time. I just hadn’t realized it until there was the possibility that she would no longer be in my life that I was losing half of myself.

“I love you, my sweet, sexy, bewitching siren-warrior, angel-demoness.” I cupped her cheek, sliding my fingers into her thick hair. “My Cara.”

“I love you, too,” she said on a hearty laugh, then kissed me hard.

And my heart—the one she’d mended and made beat again for the first time the way it was supposed to—quickened at her words and her voiceless promise of forever.

In this godforsaken, bleak, gray world, we’d found each other. We loved each other. And that was enough.