Page 69 of Shifters Reckoning

And then I couldn’t stop shaking. Not from cold. From the after.

From nights of dreams full of Riley’s stolen face, from a council that had nearly come apart, and from a monster five days south feeding on the gash in the seam of the world. It all arrived at once, the way it always had the second I finally stood somewhere safe enough to feel it.

“Hey.” Logan caught me in his arms, and his scarred palms scraped my skin. “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”

“I don’t want to be the person they’re scared of,” I rasped. “Tonight, I wore all of them like gloves, Logan, just for a minute, just to stop the shouting, and…” I dragged in a ragged breath. “I need you to remind me I’m still Emma. The vet. The one who avoids the composting toilet. Because I’m losing track.”

Logan didn’t tell me I was being ridiculous. He didn’t tell me it was fine. He studied me, his eyes stormy. Finally, he said, “Then let me remind you.”

It wasn’t gentle, not at first. I didn’t need gentle. I needed to feel human hands, human mouth, and wholly human lust. I needed to be wanted by somebody who knew every ugly corner of me and stayed.

I grabbed his borrowed gray sweats. I dragged them over his hips and pushed them off him. He stepped toward me, his dick already hard, and I pressed my palm to the pinkish scar over his heart. Tenderly, my mouth grazed his chest. Then I circled him, touching my lips to the damaged skin.

Heat gathered in my middle. Not the terrible frequency-reading blaze, the ordinary kind, the fire that had nothing to do with being the multimorph and everything to do with being a woman whose man had come home alive.

Carefully, I touched his wounds. Rainbow light seeped between my fingers where they spread over the burn. I felt the hurt of it recede.

“Don’t spend yourself on me,” he murmured, echoing Marcus, echoing everyone. He twisted and caught my wrist.

“It’s mine to spend.” I looked up at him. “Let me. I want to. That’s the whole difference, remember?”

His face relaxed, and he stopped arguing. He allowed me to heal the worst of the damage with my mouth and my hands. Then, my healing turned into something else, the way it always did with us. My lips tracked down his hard plane, his breath coming in stutters until he made a low sound deep in his chest, and the alpha came up in him, and the reins changed hands.

He lifted me off my feet. I wrapped my legs around him, and he carried me the few steps to our bed. He laid me down on the quilt, and he followed me down.

My shaking finally slowed to a stop.

I’m still here. You’re still you. I’ve got you.

I don’t want to be alone.

You’re never alone, love.

Then I pulled him into my mind.

Everything I’d been holding poured between us, and he absorbed it, all of it, the fear and the guilt. None of it scared him off. None of it ever had.

Back the other way, he met me, steady, vast. There was only his mouth on my throat, his hands traveling over me, and the blessed, drowning relief of being touched by someone who was not afraid.

“Say it,” he growled against my skin, working lower, and I knew what he wanted.

“I’m Emma,” I gasped. “I’m yours. I’m…”

He dropped kisses on my abdomen, and his tongue circled my belly button.

“Logan,” I breathed.

“That’s right.”

His mouth found the rainbow tattoo on my hip, the one he’d traced a lifetime ago, and then lower. My hips came up off the bed, and he hooked my legs over his freshly healed shoulders. My hands fisted in his hair, and my last coherent thought dissolved into color.

“You’re mine,” he rumbled against me, vibrating the hidden parts of me. “You’re Emma, and you’re not going anywhere I can’t follow.”

We let the whole terrible clock of the world stop for one more stolen night, and when he took me over the edge the first time with his tongue, I came apart with his name in my mouth, the earth shaking beneath us. Then he reared back and plunged into me, barreling toward his own release. We were bonded. We were us.

Just him. Just me. Just this.

The war could have the morning. Tonight was ours.