Page 97 of Knot the Plan
She pushes at my shoulder, urging me onto my back, and I go, and she climbs over me, straddling my hips, slick and flushed and gone to instinct. My hands come up to her waist to steady her, shaking, and I look up at her over me like this and I lose whatever words I had left.
“Josie—” It scrapes out of me. “You don't have to—I can?—”
She's past hearing it. She reaches between us, lines me up, and sinks down onto my cock in one slow slide until I'm buried to the hilt, and we both cry out. The heat of her, the wet grip, five years of never-letting-myself and now she's taking me like her body was made for it.
“Move,” she breathes, barely words, hands splayed on my chest. “Please—need?—”
So she moves, riding me, chasing what her body needs, and I let her set it, my hands on her hips helping her take it deeper, my head going white with every roll of her. She's above me, flushed and beautiful and wrecked, taking exactly what she wants, and I'm shaking apart underneath her.
I pull her down enough to press my face to her throat, to breathe her in where her scent is sweetest, maple and cedar tangling into her brown sugar until I can't tell where she ends and I begin.
“That's—” My voice breaks. “God, you're—so good—Josie—that's it—take what you need?—”
The words fall apart the way they always do, and for once I let them, let her hear the whole wanting mess of me while she rides me faster, slick everywhere, the wet sound of us filling the nest, her cunt gripping me tight. The heat crests one final time, higher than all the others, and she clenches around me and sobs.
Deep in me the knot begins to swell, thick and certain, catching at her rim as she takes me, pulling. And something rises up in me I've never once let out — some low primal thing buried all these years under careful and quiet — and it comes up my throat as a growl I don't recognize as mine, rough and possessive and helpless, and I feel her shiver at the sound of it.
“Logan—” She's shaking, grinding down, chasing it. “Knot—please—yours?—”
I plant my feet and thrust up into her as she drops down, and the knot pushes past her rim and seats, filling her, locking deep with a pop that tears a cry out of us both.
Her cunt closes around the lock and milks me and she comes apart on top of me, and I let go into her, spilling endless, five years of held breath released all at once, and I feel the heat break at last, draining out of her like a tide going home.
I pull her down against my chest, her throat at my mouth, and I set my teeth to the last unclaimed place there, the space Finn and Hudson left me, and I close my teeth until the skin gives beneath them.
The bond completes.
I lick over the mark to seal it, and a purr rolls up out of me, deep and shaking and endless, the sound I've never once let anyone hear, and she sinks down onto my chest with a sigh like she's finally set something down.
I wrap both arms around her and hold her there, still tied deep inside her, my nose buried in her hair, breathing her in, and I purr her through the last of it while the heat drains away and leaves her soft and sated in my arms.
Finn holds the water for her and she swallows in slow sips. Hudson draws the blanket up over us both. Nobody says much. My purr does the talking, low and steady and hers now, and she settles into it, into all of us, safe in the middle of the nest.
I have spentfive years imagining what it would feel like to be let in.
I was so far off.
The bond doesn't open like a door for me. It's more like I've been standing outside a lit house in the cold all my life, and someone finally opens it and saysyou live here, you always did, come in.
Josie pours through the completed bond and I get all of her at once, the full weight of her, and woven all the way through it, meant for me, quiet and huge. She loves me. Not the fixing. Not the fence. Me. The one who could never say it back.
She heard every word I never managed and she loves me anyway, loves mebecause.And five years of stuck-sideways silence finally comes loose in my chest, and I press my face into her shoulder, and I can't speak, and for once I don't have to.
Because she feels it. All of it. Everything I could never say is pouring down the bond into her and she's crying and laughing and holding my head to her throat and saying “I know, I know, I've got it, I've got you, I heard you, Logan, I heard all of it.”
And the other two are there, hands on both of us, and I feel them through her now, Finn's steady warmth and Hudson's bright noise, the whole pack lit up and humming, four people who took the long way round and arrived at exactly the same place at exactly the same second.
The heat's gone. Broken clean, for the first time in days, and what's left underneath is just her, sated and bonded and ours, tucked in the middle of a nest built of our shirts with three fresh claiming marks on her throat and a bond running four ways like current through a wire.
“Hi,” she says again, to all of us, wrecked and radiant and not afraid, not anymore.
I find my voice. It only takes me a second this time.
“Hi,” I say. “Welcome home.”
Chapter 35
Josie
