Page 29 of The Shield
“Right there,” I breathed, shocked by the nakedness of how quickly my body admitted what it wanted now that it had reason to. “Don’t—oh—don’t get clever. Just—” I broke, laughing, wrecked. “Just like that.”
“Just like that,” he repeated, and set a rhythm that felt like an answer to a question I hadn’t let myself ask.
He kept one hand at my hip and slid the other up to lace our fingers again, pinning them above my head. Stretched and anchored, owned and free, I met him, hips answering, breath stuttering. He didn’t speed up to show off. He pressed deeper, adjusted a fraction, found that exact angle again and held it like a line under fire.
“Natalie.” The way he said my name roughened into something that made me feel more naked than the shower did. “Look at me.”
I did, and something in his face—want and reverence and the kind of focus that made my throat go tight—pushed me hard to the edge again, faster than I’d thought possible. He caught the surprise in my eyes and smiled like a man who’d planned this.
“Yes,” he said, voice a rasp. “Let go again. Don’t think. Just take.”
I shattered on the word.
It was different this time, wider, a long rolling break that took me apart slow and then slammed me all at once. Sound blew out of me. I felt him groan against my mouth, not from what I did to him but from what he’d done to me, and the knowledge that this wrecking blessed him, too, sent another hard pulse through my body that made me cry out.
“God, Natalie,” he said, not to the air, to me.
When I came down the second time, he finally let go, burying his face against my neck, his breath ragged, his body tensing in my hands. I held him like I meant it. I didn’t just receive. I wrapped and pulled and gave him my mouth and my voice and the long, low encouragement of a woman who had finally learned whatyesmeant.
He shuddered and went still, heat spilling through me, his hips locked to mine, a sound tearing loose from him that I wanted to keep somewhere under my skin.
The rush of his come inside me triggered something wild, unexpected.
The pulse of his release filled me so deep that my body clenched down on instinct, greedy, pulling him further in even when there was no further to go. It was primal, electric—the way my walls gripped him, the ache that sharpened into something hotter as I felt him spend himself.
The sensation alone sent me over again, sharp and consuming, another orgasm breaking open with a ferocity that startled me. Every spasm dragged more of his come deeper, my body milking it, needing it, aching like it had been waiting all my life for this exact claiming. Pleasure burned through me in waves, leaving me boneless and raw, but still clutching at him, not wanting to let go.
We stayed like that until the water went from scalding to merely hot, then warm. He eased out of me, hands firm at my waist as if he didn’t trust my legs yet—and he was right. My laugh came out hoarse and incredulous. He kissed my cheek, my mouth, my shoulder, each touch a punctuation mark on a sentence I hadn’t believed I’d ever get to read.
His lips brushed my ear, rough voice cutting through the steam. “You’re mine now.”
No question. No apology. Just fact, spoken like the sky naming itself blue.
The words should have bristled, should have had me rolling my eyes or pushing back, but instead they seared down my body and lit me up all over again. Something in me liked it—liked being claimed by a man who had just shown me what it meant to be wanted completely. It startled me, how much. I let the shiver run through me, not fighting it.
In the quiet that followed, I let my head fall against his chest. The chain of his tags was cool against my temple, the bear claw heavy between us. Outside, the rain thickened, a steady drum that sounded less like warning now and more like witness.
“I don’t know how to go back from that,” I said, voice small and wrecked and happy.
“You don’t,” he said simply, as if this were logistics. “Forward only.”
I snorted a laugh, which turned into a gasp when he picked me up and stepped out of the shower. He wrapped me in a towel, rough cotton dragging over skin still hypersensitive, and rubbed warmth back into my arms the way a man treats a horse after a hard run. The thought should have made me laugh. Instead, it made something sweet and foolish bloom under my sternum.
On the counter, my phone buzzed with rain alerts. He glanced at it and then at me. “You need to work.”
“I need water,” I said faintly, which was true and not what he meant. He handed me a glass and a grin that did something terrible to my knees, then reached for his own towel. Watching him move—unhurried, thorough, all that mass contained again—made my body tighten like I could go back for more and more.
We padded to the bedroom. He found a t-shirt of mine and pulled it over my head like he’d done it a hundred times for a woman, except the tenderness in the way he tugged my hair free told me he hadn’t, not like this. I sat on the edge of the bed and finally looked at the phone. Messages from Owen. From Huck.From Kimmy, with a storm-drain photo and three exclamation points.
“Work,” I said again, brain reassembling.
“After,” he said, like he had any right to call time in my life.
I looked up. He wasn’t issuing orders. He was offering a boundary I could step back into without sacrificing anything I’d just found. For once, the idea didn’t rankle. It steadied.
“Five minutes,” I bargained. “To text and set up pop-ups and tell Huck where to put cones. Then we can—” I flushed to the roots. “—get dressed like normal people.”
He kissed the top of my head. “Five minutes,” he agreed, and went to the window, thumb parting the slat to look at the sky like a man reading wind. “Tell them to watch the Market corners first.”
