Chapter 176. Definitions
Maisie
"Uh..." I hid the clothes behind me. "Nothing."
His eyes narrowed. "You are very obviously stealing my clothes."
"Stealing?" I scoffed dramatically. "What’s yours is mine, remember?"
"How convenient that you remember that now of all times," he said. "Why do you smell like that?"
"Like what—hey!"
The rest of my protest vanished into a yelp. He crossed the room in three strides, and then his hands were on my waist and I was leaving the floor, my feet dangling uselessly as he lifted me to his eye level.
"What are you—"
He was hardly listening. He was sniffing me. His nose pressed into my hairline, dragging down toward my temple. Then my cheek. The hinge of my jaw. The soft skin just beneath my ear. Then he made a sound somewhere deep in his chest, a vibration I felt before I heard the purr, like a cat that had been stroked.
"You were out," he said against my neck.
My grip on his clothes was loosening. "Yes."
"Looking for me?"
His hands began to move. Down my arms. Spanning my waist. Skimming up and down my ribcage. Like he always had to be touching me somehow. The touch sent heat blooming under my skin and left goosebumps in their wake.
"Yes," I sighed. "You left and I was worried that what I said—"
"No," he said softly. "It was a lot to take in, but I shouldn’t have left like that. You were only trying to help. I’m sorry."
When he added, "I’ll have it looked into," I knew he also didn’t believe that the Queen might have done it. He was possibly saying that to pacify me, but his hot breath, his body crowding mine, and his hands... It was distracting.
My head fell back against the closet door on another soft sigh and he took the invitation.
His nose traced the column of my throat, up, down, up again, and each pass pulled another thread of rational thought loose from my head and I forgot about how freezing it was outside and the injured man in the woods.
The clothes fell and pooled on the floor by our feet.
My spine curved. I was arching into him like a drawn bow, and I could feel the shape of his mouth hovering just above my pulse point. His hands found my waist again. Tightened. Released. Tightened. Like he was fighting himself and losing.
"I’ve been trying all evening." His voice had dropped an octave. Rough at the edges. "To get rid of it. I’ve tried everything. Cold baths. The treadmill. Working. Meditation. I ran forty miles. But nothing works, and I just feel..." Another inhale, deeper this time, and his fingers pressed divots into my hip bones. "Hungrier and... needy."
"N-needy?" I echoed.
He took my hand from my side and pushed it under his shirt, flattening it over those rock hard abs that made my mouth go dry instantly. "There." His face flushed a stunning red. "Would you..." Even redder. "... please touch me."
My fingers curled against his skin. He was burning up. "Y-you have a fever," I stammered.
His hands found the hem of my top. "You know, fever is just another name for heat."
The first brush of his knuckles up my bare stomach knocked the air from my lungs. We both glanced down to watch him hike up the small top, until it was inches away from the down curve of my breasts.
"And it surely doesn’t help that I can smell you," he murmured.
My heart was beating in my throat.
His head lifted and I saw the fine tremor in his jaw. The way his pupils had blown so wide that only a thin ring of violet remained around the edges, like eclipses.
He looked wrecked. He looked hungry.
He looked exactly how I’d been feeling all evening.
My nails dug into his skin. "Soren," I breathed. I didn’t know what I was asking for. My voice came out thready and thin.
His hands slid higher. The pads of his fingers skimmed the underside of my breasts, and his nostrils flared when I whimpered, my core clenching. He groaned and his hips rocked forward against my thigh.
The hardness there made my vision swim.
Something nagged at the back of my mind. I was forgetting something—
"Tell me you didn’t come here for this. Tell me you don’t feel it too, and I’ll--I’ll stop. I’ll let you go..." He was trembling with restraint. He looked and sounded miserable.
My hands slid up his chest and he moaned, rocking harder into me. And then, his mouth was on my throat. Claiming me in hot open-mouthed kisses that made my toes curl and sent lightning straight down my spine.
And then I was tugging his shirt over his head and he was crushing me into him, and my fingers twisted into the dark, silky strands of his hair. He groaned against my skin when I pulled, and the sound vibrated between my legs.
I felt every line of his body aligned with every line of mine, and I could feel everything. The planes of his chest. The narrow taper of his waist. The insistent ridge of his cock grinding against my hip without rhythm.
Another moan tore out of me and I rolled my hips to meet his.
He cursed. And then laughed hoarsely. "Fuck," he said. "I’m supposed to be strong. I’m supposed to be the one who keeps his head when everyone else is losing theirs. That’s my job. That’s my identity. And here I am, rutting against you like a teenager, and I can’t—I can’t fucking stop—"
His hips kept moving. Rolling. Pressing. The friction was maddening through layers of fabric, and I could feel how wet I was, how ready, how every single nerve ending had migrated to the place where his body met mine.
"Then don’t stop."
Our lips met. His tongue swept past my lips almost instantly and his hands were everywhere at once. In my hair. On my throat. Sliding down to grip my ass and haul me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist like they’d always belonged there.
The door rattled in its frame and creaked violently.
And in the next second, my back hit the bed.
Soren followed, his lips never leaving mine and my hands delved into his hair, while I raised my hips, letting him tug my pajama pants down my waist.
I didn’t know what it was, but it felt like I could predict every movement before he moved, and we were in a strange kind of sync that almost felt choreographed. I knew when he dipped his head that he was going to lick my cleavage and so I arched my chest up to his face, letting him bury his nose between my breasts.
The coolness of the chain around my neck was a jarring contrast from his hot mouth.
He knew I was going for his belt buckle and he inched closer, just so I could rip it out. His button went flying and his zipper tore right off.
My fingers dipped into his briefs and he caught my wrists, trapping them over my head. "No teasing," he half-snarls. "Can’t take it tonight. Need to—May," he chided when I reached up and bit his neck, sucking on his pounding pulse.
"Fuck, that mouth of yours," he groaned, abandoning my wrists to tear my pants off.
Maybe I should stop wearing panties around them. They always got ripped up and stolen anyway.
I wiggled against him, wanting more of him, and he recklessly shoved down his briefs. There was a brief moment when hesitation flickered across his face. "Your eagerness isn’t because of the tonics, is it?"
He seemed uncertain, which was strange because Soren had never struck me as the kind of man who felt uncertain about anything.
"No," I whimpered. "I want... this. I want you."
"Only tonight?" he asked me, eyes tracking mine, and the question posed felt deeper than it should’ve. What are we doing? Where are we in our relationship? What are we? Always? Definitions.
I’d come to realize since I met them that I hated defining things. Definitions made things real. And when you made things real, you couldn’t go back from there, acting like they didn’t exist. When you got hurt, you simply couldn’t claim oblivion or find an easy way out to hide your pain away.
But I looked in his eyes and I knew I shouldn’t, but I trusted him not to hurt me. Not anymore, at least. I trusted him to protect me. Us. My feelings. My interests.
And I knew everything was going to be okay.
My lips brushed against his. "Depends on how much I like how you touch me tonight." I kissed the corner of his mouth. "And tomorrow. And the day after. You’re on probation—"
His head was buried between my thighs before I finished speaking. And I was screaming his name for the next three hours.
***
Soren was a light sleeper.
And so it took a very long time to get out from the embrace of his thick arms. They tightened every time I moved and his face was buried in my neck, mumbling sleepily. A pleasant ache had settled between my legs despite how gentle and sweet Soren was.
It was a surprise, really, to find that he could be a gentleman in bed. Frankly, between the sheets, he was the sweetest one.
A sweet drowsiness sank heavily into my bones, making it near impossible to move an inch away from where my face was buried in his chest and his fingers in my hair, cradling me to him.
It was another side effect of the drug. Extreme fatigue. And I suspected it was the only reason why I was able to wiggle away from him eventually without waking him. He was sleeping it off.
I didn’t want to, but I knew it would eat at me if Philip Gruer had frozen to death out there because I got side tracked.
More like side... fucked.
If he hadn’t already left. I was sure he had. I hoped he had.
I took the clothes that were still where we left them hours ago and slipped into another one of Soren’s fancy shirts and one of shorts before slipping out into the kitchen on silent feet, grabbing whatever was left in the pantry, as well as the first aid kit, wrapping it all in a bundle.
When I returned to the trail, he was exactly where I left him. Though, he looked somewhat better now, reclined against the tree, watching me as I approached. The wound in his side had healed significantly, and some color had returned to his face despite the cold.
"You didn’t leave," I said.
His black eyes took in my face, my kiss swollen mouth, my disheveled hair and the hickeys on my collarbone. If he thought anything about how heavily I smelled like sex, he didn’t give it away.
Instead, he said, "Advice?" He took a step forward and that other scent on him, the one I couldn’t place, filled my nostrils. "You really shouldn’t meet strange men in the dark, little girl."
There was a greenish tint to his eyes and a slit appeared in them, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
I stumbled a step back. "What are you?"
He grinned, canines wolfish. "Whatever scares you."
I took another step back, but he caught my wrist.
His hands were ice cold and his eyes even colder. "You smell like someone I used to know." He cocked his head. "Any relation to the Thorne bloodline?"
I started to shake my head before I remembered my father’s real name was Silas Thorne.
I froze. "How do you know that—"
"You do not know what you are, do you? I suppose they don’t, either," he mused, his hands tightening, so cold, they burned. "There is an order to things. You do not fit into that. There is a reason why the bite leads to death. And if you didn’t die, you are an anomaly."
I wrestled out of his grip but he didn’t let go, more words tumbling out of him, making him sound half-crazed. "Anomalies do not exist unless someone created them. The more important question would be why." A sheen brightened his eyes. "I should like to study you one day."
He took the bundle out of my grasp and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.