Page 53 of It's You
He continued, “Anyway, sure, I’ve heard of others marrying, or just sleeping with, someone they aren’t bound to. But I’d never heard of anyone beingboundto someone different from us. Until you.
“The elders didn’t like it. They acknowledged it, but they didn’t like it. They encouraged me not to see you again, and they felt sure that my infatuation with you would calm down. Even if it took a while, they were sure I’d eventually forget you.
“I tried. Oh god, Darcy, I tried. I tried so hard to forget you. I practiced meditation and self-control, and sometimes I even felt like I was making some headway. But the binding’s forever. In my heart, I always returned to you. I learned that early on. I?—”
“What do you mean,early on?”
“It was a few months after we kissed. Right around Thanksgiving. Suddenly, it felt like someone had reached into my chest and was trying to rip out my still-beating heart. I couldn’t breathe, and I was starting to lose consciousness when I concentrated on the memory of your face, and I…I don’t know. Yeah, I do. I can’t totally explain it, but I smelled coconut. I smelled disinfectant and coconut. I know it sounds crazy. But I smelled those things, and I couldfeelyou. I could feel your heartbeat somewhere in the world. I could feel how sad you were in that moment, and even though I felt sad too, I could breathe again. I could breathe because I could feel you.”
“I know what you’re talking about. I remember that day,” Darcy murmured as she remembered sobbing on Willow’s shoulder in her high school bathroom. “It was the first time I went inside. I could feel you too.”
“I tried to love other women. It was no good. I finally realized that if you weren’t in my life, it was meaningless. And I didn’t understandhowwe were bound to each other, but I decided tostop fighting it. So I made a plan to come back to Carlisle. To find you. And it took twenty years, but here I am.”
The rain still hadn’t let up, and the sun was lowering in the sky. It was late afternoon now. The fire, immune to the racing time around it, still crackled and snapped, burning with strength and power, casting the room in a warm, golden light. Darcy leaned back to look at him.
“You came back to Carlisle for me?”
“Onlyfor you. I would never have returned if not for you. But I’m bound to you, Darcy Turner. I belong to you. Until I die.”
Darcy’s skin rippled, a physical manifestation of the pleasure of his words. The last of her resolve melted away as her brain finally accepted what her heart had always known. The binding was real and true, and she belonged to Jack with the same force and depth that he belonged to her.
“Jack,” she whispered, holding his eyes. “Make love to me.”
A dozen emotions shifted across his face: elation, anguish, hope, despair…want. His tongue darted out to wet his lips.Want.“Are you sure?”
She scooted away from him, lying back on the couch and pulling on the cord of the bathrobe until it opened loosely. She heard him take a ragged breath, and she smiled at him, holding his gaze.
I’m sure.
His eyes smoldered from his seat on the opposite side of the couch, but he didn’t move, as if frozen by the reality that what he wanted most in the world was now being offered to him. Darcy could see his hesitation, so she leaned up on her elbows, putting her foot on his lap, gently grazing the growing bulge in his jeans, as if their mishap before had never happened. As she leaned up, the bathrobe fell back from her shoulders, revealing her entire body, bathed in firelight, offered to him. Jack shiftedto a kneeling position between her legs and picked up her foot, kissing it, nibbling along the edges, up past her ankle to her leg.
Darcy took a deep breath, tingling with anticipation, and lay back, closing her eyes, trembling with her awareness of him, her need of him. His lips slid, hot and wet, up her leg, occasionally blowing on a kiss, making shivers dart up and down her leg. Past her knee to her thigh, he lay his cheek on her thigh for a moment, letting her get used to him moving toward her so intimately.
He kissed the skin high on the inside of her thigh, and she bucked.
“Jack!” she gasped, bracing herself up on her elbows.
He looked up at her surprised expression and grinned.
“You’ve never? No one’s ever?”
She shook her head, eyes wide. He leaned up, lowering his clothed body over the length of her naked one and kissed her lips, biting on the lower one, sucking on it, loving it, while she unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it down his arms, marveling at the thick, hard biceps she found underneath. He pulled the shirt off and threw it on the floor.
She arched up so that her breasts were flush against his chest and felt his breath hitch. “You’re so soft, Darcy. So beautiful, so soft…”
He bent to take one pert nipple in his mouth, sucking on it until Darcy felt like she would scream with the pleasure-pain of the sensation, then moved to the other, sucking, then blowing on it until a strong, throbbing tension started building in her belly. Her breathing was ragged, and louder cries and moans of pleasure filled the space between them, her fingers threading and twisting through his hair.
Jack’s lips moved lower until he kneeled between her legs again.
“Let me do it, baby,” he murmured in a thick, deeply aroused voice with his rough, bearded cheek against her belly. “Let me make you feel good.”
He kissed her thigh again, trailing feather-light kisses into the apex of her thighs, spreading her with his fingers, and finding her throbbing sex with his tongue. As he licked, sucked, and kissed, Darcy clenched her eyes shut, making mewling sounds in the back of her throat, one arm thrown over her eyes, and the other cupping her own breast. She moaned loudly, a strangled, keening sound, then threw her head back and arched her body toward him, pressing her clit into his face.
“Jaaaaaack…” She gasped as her insides rushed hot and wet, and her muscles convulsed over and over again.
“Oh my god…Oh my god…” She sucked in air and panted, inert, riding wave after wave of pleasure.
Jack’s lips found hers as he slid back up her body, his chest lowering gently onto the sensitive tips of her breasts. He brushed his lips across hers once, twice. She wished she could move. She wished she could respond, but she felt like a ragdoll, like all of her muscles were temporarily unavailable.
