Page 42 of Truthfinder’s Promise

“Yes.”

Maybe there was a god after all.

Meredith took Jensen in to the hilt, and the aching emptiness that had plagued her since…well, since he’d left, finally abated. She was full of him, his shaft stretching her to her limits. She settled there, her hands on his chest, his gripping her waist, and let herself feel completed.

Just sex. It had never been just sex with him. But she needed to pretend it could be, needed to let herself have this, have something that felt right, after how wrong Julian had been. So she pushed the what-ifs and the fears away and just felt. Felt Jensen’s hands as they skated up her sides to cup her breasts again, felt every movement of his shaft deep inside her as she drove herself forward, riding him.

There was no finesse to the coupling, no slowness, because that wasn’t what either of them needed. She built a fast, hard rhythm, her fingers coming between her legs to work her own need, sending her skyrocketing up the slope of pleasure. She balanced there at its peak, listening as the sounds of Jensen’s breathing quickened, feeling it as his muscles grew taut beneath her. Another swivel of her hips drove him deep inside her again and when he jerked, spilling into her, another circle of her fingers sent her hurtling off that edge of climax after him.

There was no small part of Jensen that wanted to stay in this moment forever, with Meredith cuddled against his chest, spent and satisfied, his arms around her. In this moment, stuck in that sense of limbo pleasure brought on, they could both pretend there weren’t worlds and problems between them.

But those things were between them, and he knew she’d remembered it when she sat up, the easiness leaving her body as she slid off him. He wanted to pull her back to him, to kiss her, to tell her exactly how much he’d missed her. But her words, Just sex, whispered in his head.

He pulled on the clothes he’d brought and then darted out into the frigid December air to retrieve Meredith’s clothes from her trunk. She cleaned herself off with her old shirt, put the new clothes on, and then pulled the car back onto the road. Neither of them spoke until they pulled up to her estate.

Everything was in place, the front gates closed, but as she punched in the code and they drove through, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

“Could he have sent someone here while you were gone?”

Meredith shook her head. “You saw what it took to try and get through the wards. Exactly four people can pass through mine without alerting me, and I trust them all implicitly.”

She pulled into the garage. As she shut the car down and got out, he sprinted to the door ahead of her. He still couldn’t shake that feeling of wrongness. “Let me go in first.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not getting all protective on me, are you Jensen?”

It was so good to see her snappish and sarcastic again, instead of shaking and terrified, that he grinned at her. “And if I am?”

“Goddess, sex makes men stupid.”

No sense in denying the truth to a Truthfinder. He went in ahead of her. The house felt wrong, too, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. To his Shifter senses it smelled like home should: the lingering scent of breakfast, the smell of Meredith throughout, and Shifter.

Shifter. Shit. Meredith’s home shouldn’t smell like Shifter.

“Get out of here,” he ordered.

A furry shape hit him like a freight train, knocked him down and sat on his chest. Claws pierced his throat, not quite breaching the carotid, but close, while a second heavy form landed on his legs. It was a submission hold. He was stronger than an average human, but not enough to throw off the combined weight of the two Shifters holding him down. With the claws on his throat, if he Shifted, he’d cut his own carotid. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would knock him out of commission for a few minutes while magic sealed the artery and grew new blood cells.

Meredith didn’t have a few minutes. Jensen strained, knowing it was futile. “Get off me, Hel.”

The lynx snarled in his face, her claws inching a fraction deeper into his neck.