Page 68 of Penny for Your Saints

After almost thirty hours of intense conversation and huffing each other’s scents—my body simply could not stave off triggering a heat. With a complete loss of inhibitions, I tumbled headlong into full on heat sickness. Far away from a hospital or placement where I might find medication to help manage the heat chemically or professional heat helpers who were trained to guide me through the heat and back into homeostasis, and Dennis toeing the line of rut around my suddenly raging heat; we spent the next 72 hours in and out of the car, all over the glorious nature of the state park locked in the most intense coupling I’d ever experienced before.

The very last time Dennis knotted me before the heat broke had been the most exquisite of all those that had come before; him on his back on a blanket in the tall, soft grass. As I rode him slow and deep, my pale skin and red hair glowing in the silvery blue light of night—the warm summer breeze making the field around us appear as the surface of the ocean long before dawn—the reflection of the moonlight off the blue-tinged grass as it rippled in the wind like whitecaps over the distant windswept waves.

With a sudden swell, Dennis had flipped me onto my back on the soft blanket—so that I was looking up at him, the stars and the moon; his knot filling me like the full silver cratered coin in the sky above us.

Was the night really that beautiful? Was our coupling so ecstatic, so divinely sensuous because of brain and body chemistry reaching a fever pitch? Or was the sensation of otherworldly harmony, a touching of souls, if even for a fraction of a second, real?

We lay there, joined together—our breathing normalizing as the grasses whispered around us until we both drifted off.

The next morning, not but a handful of hours later, we woke—covered in mosquito bites, dehydrated, and ravenous; the heat broken—the magical connection we’d shared the night before, a distant memory.

Of course, Lowry had known what happened. Both McBride and I had reported to her before going dark during the heat. While hardly thrilled at the situation, it wasn’t as if she herself hadn’t been reduced to similar scenarios back in her days as a field agent. After she gave her blessing and sealed the records, Dennis and I agreed to never speak of it again.

Not long after that, we both moved onto steady office work and out of the field. It wasn’t hard to avoid Dennis and any potential deepening of our relationship beyond our professional involvement with one another.

It’s just as I’m about to surface from this deep pool of memory that I feel something—like a warm, open hand running itself through the rippling waters.

Frank?

It couldn’t be… a mating bond?

“Dennis?” The name slips his lips as a question—tinged with want, but also hurt.

“Yes.” My breath hitches as Frank pulls me against him in tandem with the upward roll of his hips. The combination of clitoral stimulation and deep penetration—his knot banging at my gates, nearly stealing my ability to make words entirely.

Before I can say anything else, there’s another gentle stroking of my mind—as if Frank has reached out and run a finger down the pane of my consciousness, letting me know he’s seen and felt what’s there—entreating me to open myself to him as words pour from his lips against the curve of my jaw.

“Me too, Dennis—and my old partner.”

The two of us make soft, low moans as we move against one another.

As I close my eyes, I catch a wisp of Dennis’ scent—herbal thyme and hyssop with a clean bite of sea salt, and another that’s entirely new to me; sharp balsam, plum brandy, and black pepper.

I am immediately struck by how much this last scent mirrors my own, but powerfully masculine. Before I can regain my grip on reality—a vision dances across my mind’s eye.

Frank and the handsome man in the blue suit from the photo on Compton’s desk; fucking the shit out of each other on the couch in the BSU basement, on some white-sand-perfect-turquoise-water-beach, in the back of a stakeout car; the man murmuring something against Frank’s ear—staying his bonding bite.

The sudden flash is so intense, for a fraction of a second, I could swear that I can actually feel the pleasure Frank was experiencing in each of these moments—until another memory explodes into view; Frank, Dennis, and the mystery man from the bureau—a tangle of limbs, cocks, lips, tongues; then aplunging coldness—a cutting pain; one last glimpse of Frank and Dennis together.

The two of us, our bodies winding together—moving in time with our mounting desire—return to the moment, if only for the blink of an eye.

Along our shared connection—scraps of sensation, sights, sound, and color wash over me; Caz and I in the bath, the first time Q took Frank’s knot—the first time I locked Quentin, heats past—long before The Saints considered stealing me away. The first night in the cabin—all of us together.

Frank and I both exclaim our pleasure as the sun sinks behind the horizon, Frank’s knot disappearing inside me like the golden orb of light disappears beneath the surface of the frozen lake—deep fuchsia where the skyline meets the curve of the earth; bruising blue purples fading to velvet darkness above—twinkling stars glittering to light as Frank and I shudder against one another—his hot seed filling me to my core.

Frank’s eyes lock with mine—our breaths ragged, our teeth bared.

The moment kicks off sideways, stretching and elongating in an unspoken question.A bite? A bond?

Any risk of us being taken by the intensity of the moment—of the enigmatic visions and sensations we’ve just experienced pulling us beneath the undertow of the heat is cut short by the emergence of Caz from the hunting lodge.

“Ah, ah, ah! None of that, you two,” Caz scolds in a playful tone.

“Y’all have been in that hot water too long,” he pipes in nonchalantly, shuffling out into the snow in his boots, sweats, and parka—a spliff hanging lazily from his bottom lip; closing the door behind him.

“Yeah well, we’re going to be here a little while longer,” Frank grouses, his demeanor sliding back toward the familiar gruff exterior everyone comes to expect of Francis Stone.

“I can see that,” Caz clucks his tongue appreciatively—leaning on the edge of the large wooden tub to get a better look at Frank and I—our bodies still fit together beneath the water’s rippling surface.

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