Page 60 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

“Your turn,” Robbie chirped, breaking the tension. Esther laid her palms flat on the table, and Robbie reached for one, gathering Esther’s hand carefully in his before swiping the polish brush down her thumbnail.

“I’ll think about it. But I won’t like it.”

20

Callum had been awake long before his alarm told him the sun had set. He’d been working with one of his biotech contacts to cultivate a list of researchers and had taken a call with one of his realtors about manufacturing locations. It was quite likely that they would have to build from scratch. When his alarm rang, Callum finished the email he was typing before neatly snapping his laptop closed and climbing the steps to unlock the vault.

The cabin was dark and empty. Often, when Callum came up at night, Robbie was puttering around the kitchen or watching something on his laptop or doing something in his room that sounded an awful lot like phone sex. But a quick glance down the very short hall showed that Robbie’s door was open, the lights off. The car he’d leased for Robbie, a small, hybrid SUV, was missing from the parking area.

Callum had been alone before. For months sometimes. Only casually encountering people. Or feeding from them. But he found that it had been comforting to know that Robbie was rattling around upstairs while Callum was sleeping during the day or, at the very least, that someone else was living there. Filling the house with their scents, their sounds. He never had liked living alone.

Callum walked to the bathroom in the silent, dim cabin. He wanted to shower before going to Jory’s. On the counter was Robbie’s old phone that he used to play music through a waterproof speaker that he’d suction-cupped to the shower wall. He swiped the phone open and turned the music on shuffle, curious about what Robbie liked to listen to. As he stripped off his sweatpants and T-shirt, Johnny Cash’s “The Highwayman” crackled through the speaker. After shucking his boxer briefs, a miraculous invention in his opinion, he stepped into the tub shower and directly under the hot water. He ducked his head and let the water cascade over his hair and down his body.

He had four chances. Four chances to get it right. That was all she’d agreed to. He might be able to convince her to see him more often than that over the next month but the only guarantee he had were those four meetings.Definitely not dates, she’d insisted, although she might argue that tonight’s activity was a little too close to one.

He’d reserved an entire restaurant for the night, a little French restaurant two towns over that was romantic and had excellent reviews on TopTable. It was far enough away to give them time to talk on the drive to and from, to stretch the evening, but not so far as to be inconvenient.

But what was most important, the owner was a French sprite and friend of Nat’s, so they would be able to talk freely. He had wanted to take Jory to a restaurant with wine and dessert and bread with compound butter and black cloth napkins and a wine list that needed its own book. He couldn’t enjoy any of that, of course, but he knew that watching Jory work her way through the menu as she licked deep, red wine off her lips would be more pleasurable than any meal had ever been. He wondered if she still made happy noises when she ate something particularly good.

Once, she’d made a berry pie of sorts and had hummed and made little squeaks and moans of pleasure while she’d eaten it. And then louder sounds when he’d licked the syrup from her lips, tasted it on her tongue.

Easy, he thought, reaching down to squeeze at his groin, although he couldn’t quite decide whether it was to encourage or discourage his growing erection. A bit of both, probably. But the image was now vividly playing in his brain—Jory licking sticky, sweet berry juice off of a spoon and then her fingers after she’d swiped them across the bottom of her bowl, not willing to leave a single morsel behind.

Callum groaned as he remembered snatching her hand away just before her fingers reached her mouth, sliding them one at a time into his own. Her eyes had flashed with both agitation and arousal, and what he wouldn’t give to see her look at him like that again. He wrapped his fist around his cock as he pictured what had come next. He’d stripped her loose shift off, whipping it over her head, and taken the spoon she’d used to serve the pie, dragging it in a line down her torso from her sternum to her sex. He’d followed the spoon with his tongue, licking and sucking the syrup off her body while she’d writhed beneath him.

His hand shuttled faster and he braced his other hand against the wall under the steaming spray of the shower as he remembered. Laying her down on the wooden table, dropping to his knees and licking a stripe that covered the length of her cunt, tasting her sharpness overtop of the sticky sweetness of the berries lingering on his tongue. His hand was agony and ecstasy all at once as he wished it was hers.

Once he’d made her come, he’d stood, gripped her thighs in his rough hands, and pressed into her center with short, intense pumps of his hips while she had choked on a moan. But before long, he’d been thrusting into her heat so hard and with such intensity that the pie had begun sliding across the table. Just before it had careened over the side, he had scooped her into his arms and spun quickly. She hadn’t missed a beat, wrapping her legs tightly around his hips and clutching her arms around his neck as he’d pressed her against the door of their cottage, fucking up into her as the wind howled outside and the fire crackled and the smell of baked pastry filled his nostrils, along with the smell of her.

With a gasp and a long groan, Callum came so hard that his vision went spotty. Long ropes of his release splashed against the wall of the shower as he stood panting and gasping beneath the spray, feeling like he had no strength left in his body but at the same time feeling as if he could lift the cabin off its very foundation with his bare hands.

As he came down from his orgasm, he remembered that night. After he’d finished, after he’d tucked his forehead into the crook of her neck, so close that he could feel the pulse in her neck against his skin. How she had traced swirls and patterns against his skin with such a light touch that it had given him shivery goosebumps. She’d whispered how much she loved him. How good he made her feel.

In the now, Callum felt a shiver wrack his body from nose to toes as he remembered that feather-light touch, those whispered words that had knocked him off his feet.You are so good, mo ghraidh. You are my whole heart.

He rinsed his hands and then the wall, cupping water in his palms and splashing it against his mess, letting the water carry it down the drain. He dragged his hands down his face, his chest aching from the memory.

He could not fail.

Because the truth was that she was, and had always been, his entire heart. A thousand years hadn’t changed that. A thousand more wouldn’t either.

And so he finished his shower. Turned off the shower speaker, which had shuffled from “The Highwayman” to “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band to a grinding, driving rap song that had a bass line Callum felt behind his ribs. He left the steamy bathroom and made his way back down to the basement.

As he put on his underwear, then shirt, then pants, shoes, cufflinks, tie, and suit jacket, he remembered the numerous, meticulous steps to putting on armor. He straightened his tie in the full-length mirror that hung on one wall before swiping his phone, keys, and wallet off the desk and climbing the stairs.

His SUV ate up the short drive to Jory’s house, and before he was quite ready, he was knocking on the door, wishing like hell that he’d remembered to bring her flowers. Footsteps scuffed, and the deadbolt turned. The door opened to reveal Esther, her wild, red curls glowing in the fluorescent light of the kitchen.

Esther smiled widely before whistling. “Somebody went all out.”

“Aye. Well, I figured I’d give it my best shot.”

“I’d say you succeeded. And then some. Come on in. It’s freezing.”

Was it? Callum didn’t feel a thing. But he followed her into the kitchen. Robbie was frying eggs in a skillet on the stove, and Callum smelled toast.

“Over medium, Est?” Robbie asked, and Callum couldn’t help but snort a laugh, because why wouldn’t Robbie be making an egg sandwich in someone else’s kitchen? It was the most Robbie thing in the world.

“Over medium!” Esther confirmed.