Page 72 of A Witchy Spell Ride

“Yes,” she said, not pleading, promising. Her legs bracketed my hips, her heart knocking wild where our chests pressed. “I want something that’s mine.”

“You have it,” I said, and meant more than I should.

She tugged me back to her mouth, fierce and sure, and the room narrowed to the span of her hands and the deliberate slide of her skin against mine. Fabric gave. Buttons surrendered. Clothes fell like secrets we’d carried for years, each one landing at our feet with the quiet shock of truth.

She wasn’t fragile.

She wasn’t breakable.

She was fire with a spine and a will made of tempered steel.

“Not his,” I growled, jaw against her jaw, a vow more than a warning. “You were never his.”

Her body arced, heat rolling off her like summer air on a road. “Say it again.”

“Not his,” I said, slower, like a litany. “Never his.”

I scooped her up and set her on the edge of the dresser. Wood creaked; she laughed breathless and defiant, palms cupping my face like she’d decided where I belonged and dragged me there. I traced a path down her throat with my mouth, a prayer said in a language older than either of us. She shivered, nails biting my shoulders, and every muscle I’d trained to stay quiet sang at once.

“Tell me what you want,” I said, voice gone smoke. “All of it.”

She looked me dead in the eyes. “You.”

“Then look at me,” I said. “And take it.”

She did. The world blurred at the edges and sharpened where we met. I let her lead and then I led her, a give-and-take that felt like a storm we’d been warning the horizon about for years. When I lifted her again, she anchored herself around me without hesitation, as if she’d been made to fit right there, exactly like this, at exactly this time and maybe she had.

I carried her to the bed and laid her out like something I’d worship if I believed in gentler gods. She pulled me down and I went willingly, letting the mattress take my weight when her mouth dragged me deeper into the kind of kiss that resets a man’s clock.

“Ghost,” she whispered, and it wasn’t a question. It was my name given back to me clean.

“Yeah,” I said, forehead to hers. “I’ve got you.”

The rest blurred on purpose. I made it slow where it should be slow, certain where certainty mattered, careful where a bruise already lived beneath the skin. I learned the pace that unraveled the tightness in her shoulders and built the heat in her voice, and when she reached for me with a sound like relief finally catching up to want, I met her there, not rushed, not rough, just right.

She held on like she’d decided falling wasn’t a risk anymore.

“Say you’re mine,” I told her, not to brand, never that but to remind her which story belonged to us.

Her mouth tilted into a reckless smile. “I’m yours.”

Something detonated quiet inside my chest. I didn’t say the word that wanted to follow. Not yet. But I gave her the shape of it with every breath after.

When she broke apart against me, she made a sound I’d never forget if I lived another hundred years, a cracked-open, rebuilt kind of sound and when I followed, I buried my face in the warm curve of her neck and let the last of the restraint I’d been white-knuckling slide out of my hands.

Fear.

Lust.

Rage.

Something bigger that I wasn’t ready to name.

I breathed it all out into her skin.

After, the room held the kind of quiet that feels earned. Her pulse fluttered at my mouth; mine steadied against her ribs. I felt the moment her body decided to trust sleep again and I held her through it; palms spread over the small of her back like a promise I had every intention of keeping.

She drifted for maybe an hour, curled into me like she’d always slept this way. When she stirred, warm, flushed, eyes heavy with something fiercer than exhaustion, I could feel it. The shift.