Page 25 of It’s You

She swallowed, her heart fluttering at the earnestness of his words, at once captivated and frightened by them, by the faith he seemed to have in them, the absoluteness of his regard for her.

She rested her head on his chest, and he resumed rubbing her back.

Could she trust him? History proved otherwise.

“But you left me,” she argued quietly. “Where did you go when you left me?”

“I got in my car that night as soon as the play was over, and I drove north. I went straight to the pack elders in our Bloodlands north of Quebec.”

“Bloodlands?”

“It’s what we call our native land, our homeland.

I asked about the binding. How it was possible that I should be bound to you when tradition states I should be bound to one of my own.

I knew it had happened. But I didn’t trust it.

I didn’t understand it. I’d never heard of one of us becoming bound to one of you. ”

“Should I be offended?”

“Why?”

“You talk about us like we’re a whole other race or something.”

“It just had never happened before…that I knew of.”

“No Métis ever married a?—”

“Stop interrupting.”

She furrowed her brows, snuggling closer to him.

“But to answer your question…Sure, you can ignore the binding, but you can’t choose for yourself, and you can’t change it once it happens. It’s for life. And if you ignore it, you, um…You miss out on, um…some things.”

“Like what?”

“Like eyespeak and, um…you called it soul flight and going inside. Like the connection I have with you, Darcy. Like last night when you…”

Darcy jerked her head back to look at him, eyes wide.

When you climaxed. You’ve never experienced that with anyone else before, have you?

No. Wait, Jack…Have you? Have you ever had an orgasm?

She cringed against the bald delivery of her rushed thoughts, but held his eyes bravely.

Maybe on my own…but, no. Not with a woman.

Never?

He shook his head, his cheeks coloring pink under his thick, black stubble.

Can you…with me?

He glanced down at his abused lap and made an annoyed face before catching her eyes again.

I think so. But we’ll have to wait just a little longer to find out.

Darcy’s heart pounded as she leaned her head back down on his chest and felt his hand stroking her back.

His belief in this binding was so firmly founded that he didn’t believe he could climax with another woman other than her?

Again, she was simultaneously enchanted and terrified by the absoluteness of his beliefs, but if she hadn’t had enough reasons to want him, now her body ached to fuse with his, to find out if she could give him something that no other woman had ever been able to.

It was heady, this power she had over him, whether it was actual or in his head.

It made her heart beat faster and her belly leap with excitement.

He continued, “Anyway, sure, I’ve heard of others marrying, or just sleeping with, someone they aren’t bound to. But I’d never heard of anyone being bound to someone different from us. Until you.

“The elders didn’t like it. They acknowledged it, but they didn’t like it. They encouraged me not to see you again, and they felt sure that my infatuation with you would calm down. Even if it took a while, they were sure I’d eventually forget you.

“I tried. Oh god, Darcy, I tried. I tried so hard to forget you. I practiced meditation and self-control, and sometimes I even felt like I was making some headway. But the binding’s forever. In my heart, I always returned to you. I learned that early on. I?—”

“What do you mean, early on ?”

“It was a few months after we kissed. Right around Thanksgiving. Suddenly, it felt like someone had reached into my chest and was trying to rip out my still-beating heart. I couldn’t breathe, and I was starting to lose consciousness when I concentrated on the memory of your face, and I…

I don’t know. Yeah, I do. I can’t totally explain it, but I smelled coconut.

I smelled disinfectant and coconut. I know it sounds crazy.

But I smelled those things, and I could feel you.

I could feel your heartbeat somewhere in the world.

I could feel how sad you were in that moment, and even though I felt sad too, I could breathe again.

I could breathe because I could feel you. ”

“I know what you’re talking about. I remember that day,” Darcy murmured as she remembered sobbing on Willow’s shoulder in her high school bathroom. “It was the first time I went inside. I could feel you too.”

“I tried to love other women. It was no good. I finally realized that if you weren’t in my life, it was meaningless.

And I didn’t understand how we were bound to each other, but I decided to stop fighting it.

So I made a plan to come back to Carlisle.

To find you. And it took twenty years, but here I am. ”

The rain still hadn’t let up, and the sun was lowering in the sky. It was late afternoon now. The fire, immune to the racing time around it, still crackled and snapped, burning with strength and power, casting the room in a warm, golden light. Darcy leaned back to look at him.

“You came back to Carlisle for me?”

“ Only for you. I would never have returned if not for you. But I’m bound to you, Darcy Turner. I belong to you. Until I die.”

Darcy’s skin rippled, a physical manifestation of the pleasure of his words. The last of her resolve melted away as her brain finally accepted what her heart had always known. The binding was real and true, and she belonged to Jack with the same force and depth that he belonged to her.

“Jack,” she whispered, holding his eyes. “Make love to me.”

A dozen emotions shifted across his face: elation, anguish, hope, despair… want . His tongue darted out to wet his lips. Want. “Are you sure?”

She scooted away from him, lying back on the couch and pulling on the cord of the bathrobe until it opened loosely. She heard him take a ragged breath, and she smiled at him, holding his gaze.

I’m sure.

His eyes smoldered from his seat on the opposite side of the couch, but he didn’t move, as if frozen by the reality that what he wanted most in the world was now being offered to him.

Darcy could see his hesitation, so she leaned up on her elbows, putting her foot on his lap, gently grazing the growing bulge in his jeans, as if their mishap before had never happened.

As she leaned up, the bathrobe fell back from her shoulders, revealing her entire body, bathed in firelight, offered to him.

Jack shifted to a kneeling position between her legs and picked up her foot, kissing it, nibbling along the edges, up past her ankle to her leg.

Darcy took a deep breath, tingling with anticipation, and lay back, closing her eyes, trembling with her awareness of him, her need of him.

His lips slid, hot and wet, up her leg, occasionally blowing on a kiss, making shivers dart up and down her leg.

Past her knee to her thigh, he lay his cheek on her thigh for a moment, letting her get used to him moving toward her so intimately.

He kissed the skin high on the inside of her thigh, and she bucked.

“Jack!” she gasped, bracing herself up on her elbows.

He looked up at her surprised expression and grinned.

“You’ve never? No one’s ever?”

She shook her head, eyes wide. He leaned up, lowering his clothed body over the length of her naked one and kissed her lips, biting on the lower one, sucking on it, loving it, while she unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it down his arms, marveling at the thick, hard biceps she found underneath.

He pulled the shirt off and threw it on the floor.

She arched up so that her breasts were flush against his chest and felt his breath hitch. “You’re so soft, Darcy. So beautiful, so soft…”

He bent to take one pert nipple in his mouth, sucking on it until Darcy felt like she would scream with the pleasure-pain of the sensation, then moved to the other, sucking, then blowing on it until a strong, throbbing tension started building in her belly.

Her breathing was ragged, and louder cries and moans of pleasure filled the space between them, her fingers threading and twisting through his hair.

Jack’s lips moved lower until he kneeled between her legs again.

“Let me do it, baby,” he murmured in a thick, deeply aroused voice with his rough, bearded cheek against her belly. “Let me make you feel good.”

He kissed her thigh again, trailing feather-light kisses into the apex of her thighs, spreading her with his fingers, and finding her throbbing sex with his tongue.

As he licked, sucked, and kissed, Darcy clenched her eyes shut, making mewling sounds in the back of her throat, one arm thrown over her eyes, and the other cupping her own breast. She moaned loudly, a strangled, keening sound, then threw her head back and arched her body toward him, pressing her clit into his face.

“Jaaaaaack…” She gasped as her insides rushed hot and wet, and her muscles convulsed over and over again.

“Oh my god…Oh my god…” She sucked in air and panted, inert, riding wave after wave of pleasure.

Jack’s lips found hers as he slid back up her body, his chest lowering gently onto the sensitive tips of her breasts.

He brushed his lips across hers once, twice.

She wished she could move. She wished she could respond, but she felt like a ragdoll, like all of her muscles were temporarily unavailable.

“You okay, Darce?” he asked, brushing her hair away from her forehead.

“It just gets better…”

“Mmm,” he murmured.

She breathed in deeply and sighed, opening her eyes to look at him as her head finally started to clear. She gave him a lazy smile and leaned up to wiggle her arms out of the bathrobe and he watched her, nostrils flaring, breath audible.

She reached up to touch his face with her fingers, trailing them down his neck, over the hard muscles of his chest, leaning forward to suck on his nipples as he had sucked on hers.

He gasped, plunging his hands into her hair and throwing his head back.

She sucked and licked, gently using her teeth, until he put his hands under her arms and pushed her away.

His eyes were melted gold when she looked at him.

Take off your pants.

He was up in a flash, unbuttoning his jeans and shucking them to the floor.

He stood before her, completely naked, godlike in the firelight, evidence of his passion for her rampant and ready.

She reached out her hand, grasping on to his sex, feeling the hot, satiny, muscled strength of him against her hand.

He was big. He was so big that she worried for a moment until he distracted her with a sharp intake of breath and she wondered if her hands were too cold.

“Cold?”

He opened his eyes and tried to smile, but failed and grimaced instead. “Hot, Darce.”

“It’s you, Jack.” She took his hand and pulled him down on top of her. “I want you.”

“You’re everything to me, Darcy. Everything.”

She lay back on the couch, and he covered her naked body with his, flesh to flesh, hot, and perfectly fitted. He nudged her legs apart as he held her face between his hands, pressing his lips to hers.

The weight of his naked body on hers was incredibly erotic. He was hard and toned every place she was soft and pliant. His hard, muscled chest pressed against her breasts, his strong thighs draped against hers, his rock-hard sex intimately kissing her inner thigh.

He touched his lips to her eyelids and her nose, and trailed kisses down her cheek to her ear.

He bit the lobe, and Darcy bucked up lightly against him, moving her hands slowly down his back.

She wanted him to know she was ready, that there was nothing else she wanted in the world than to feel him inside of her.

She raised her knees up to cradle him, locking her ankles behind his back.

He leaned back to look at her.

“You’re sure, Darce?” he asked, panting. “Are you…I mean, do you use?—”

I’m on the pill , she confirmed.

Her fingers kneaded his backside, pushing him forward.

“We’ve waited long enough. I want you. In my whole life, I have only wanted you.”

He braced himself over her, and she felt him start to enter her, more and more, inch by swollen inch, until his massive shaft was buried inside, and then he paused.

She gasped with the fullness of having him inside of her body, the heat and strength of him stretching her, filling her, the otherworldly swirling in her belly making her dizzy, making every nerve ending beg for release.

He groaned, then stilled, putting his hands on either side of her face, making her look at him.

I love you, Darcy Turner. Forever.

Closing her eyes, she arched her back to meet him and felt his cock sink into her to the hilt.

He found her lips in the near darkness, moving rhythmically inside of her slowly, in and out, in and out.

She closed her eyes and rose to meet him, lifting with every thrust to guide him deeper, to feel him deeper, to be one with him, bound to him.

Her eyes filled with tears from the intensity of her feelings, the perfection of being joined with him.

She moaned into his mouth, the sweetness almost unbearable, the tension in her body building and building until she ached for its climax.

She arched her back higher and higher and felt his hands under her backside, keeping her tightly, mercilessly bound to him until something inside of her exploded, shattered into a million pieces that could never be put back together again.

She dragged her nails across his back, crying out “Jack!” as her muscles released like tightly compressed springs, spiraling up and away, to the moon and back, making her body buck and ripple with pleasure and abandon.

She felt him pull back, and her eyes fluttered open.

He seized them with his, liquid, molten gold, and she heard him in her head.

You belong to me, and I belong to you.

Then he closed his eyes and plunged back into the depths of her body, thrusting against her womb one final time, and growling “Darcy!” as his body tensed then shuddered, the scorching heat of his come offered in tribute as Jack Beauloup climaxed with a partner for the first time in his entire life.