Page 79 of Devoured

She looked up at him now. Same man. Same word. Everything else in the world different.

"I'm your darlin'," she said.

She watched it hit him and his eyes went bright, and he couldn't say anything for a second, and then he kissed her again like the kissing was the only answer big enough.

He took her to bed in his own room, in their house, with the door shut and the kids asleep down the hall.

He undressed her like he had all the time in the world, because he did now, kissing every inch he uncovered, and when she reached for him he caught her hands and pinned them gently and said, "Let me. I've got four days of being a fool to make up for," and she let him, lying back in the dark with his mouth moving down her body and his hands learning her all over again like the first time hadn't counted, and she was already coming apart before he ever moved up over her.

When he finally did, he braced above her and stopped, and looked at her in the dark a long moment, and she looked back, and neither of them said anything because everything was already said. Then he came down and into her slow, watching her face the whole way, and she got her hands in his hair and her ankles locked around the backs of his thighs and held him there, held all of him, and it wasn't want anymore, it was the other thing, the bigger thing, the thing with no ceiling on it at all.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said against her mouth, moving in her slow and deep and certain. "You hear me? Not ever. I want all of it with you. The whole life. Every day of it."

"I know," she breathed. "I know. Dean —"

"Say my name like that again."

She did. He groaned and dropped his head into her neck and she felt him fight for control, and the slow built into something that wasn't slow anymore, the two of them moving together in the dark, and the want in her wound so tight she couldn't get a full breath, and finally, with her hands fisted in his hair and her whole body strung taut beneath his, she said the thing she had never once said out loud to anyone in her life, quiet and ragged against his ear:

"Please, Dean. Make love to me."

He went still. Lifted his head. Looked down at her in the dark, something blown wide open in his face.

"Lara."

"Please," she said.

He didn't say anything else.

He did exactly what she asked, and she came apart underneath him with his name in her mouth and his arm locked under her back holding her up into him, and he followed her over with his face buried in her hair saying her name like a prayer he'd only just learned the words to.

After, they lay tangled in the dark, her head on his chest, his hand moving slow up and down her bare back, the house quiet around them in the good way now, the way it was supposed to be.

"I'll spend the rest of my life deserving you," Dean said into the dark, quiet, like a vow. "I mean it. Starting tomorrow. Every day."

Lara smiled against his chest, and pressed a kiss over his heart, and felt his arm tighten around her.

"You already started," she said.

And she lay there in his bed, in his house, their house, with his children asleep down the hall and a ring she didn't need yet on its way and a whole future opening out in front of her with not one wall left standing anywhere in it, and for the first time since a man on a porch told her her shoes wouldn't last a week, Lara Baxter was exactly, entirely, and on purpose where she wanted to be.

Home.

For good.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

She went up the rise alone the first morning she could.

Nobody sent her. She just woke before the others — old city habit, the body not yet trusting that mornings here were hers to keep — pulled on a jacket, and stepped out into the cold.

The south rise was silver-gray in the early light. Frost still clung low in the grass. By the time she reached the big live oak at the top, dawn had started to spill gold across the far sections.

She'd been up here once before, with Dean. He'd shown her the stones then, quiet and matter-of-fact, like a man teaching somebody something they'd need one day.

This was the first time she'd come alone.

The Royston graves sat beneath the oak in its patch of shelter from the wind. She found the one she wanted immediately.