Page 45 of Crave

I read once that the average person falls in love five times before they meet their soulmate. Human or shifter, we’re fractured beings with fragile hearts, each of us wandering through life in search of that singular connection, that one person who can make our heart race from the moment they enter a room. The person for whom you’d go out at 2 a.m. in the rain just to find Ben and Jerry’s and a bottle of painkillers on nights when being a girl sucked. The person who would spend four hours hunting down the biggest spider ever in your kitchen. And never tell your brothers when it turned out to be dryer lint.

The first time I knew I loved Lacey Blair, it was on a warm April night sitting out on the back tailgate of my truck. Her hair was pulled up into one of the high ponytails I loved twirling my fingers through, and we were eating chocolate dipped cones from the Dairy Queen in the next town over because I couldn’t afford for us to be seen together. Thousands of stars blanketed the sky overhead. The air smelled of dewy spring wildflowers. Like hope.And if ever I’d believed wishes might be granted, even impossible ones, my sixteen-year-old self believed it there under that canopy of stars.

But I didn’t tell her. Not that night, and not any of the nights that followed. Love meant a thousand promises I couldn’t keep, and I didn’t want to say the words until there were no more lies between us.

Only by then, it was too late.

“Should we be doing this?” Lacey breathed, fingers tangled in my hair. Moonlight hummed wild and electric across our exposed skin. Our clothes were gone, her nipples wet and swollen from my lips and tongue. “If someone catches us—"

“You worried about the naughty list?”

“As if. I happen to know you and your brothers once went streaking across the football field in broad daylight on a dare—

”

“Okay, one, that was just me and West. Two, neither of us wanted to, and it’s a good thing they’re cracking down on hazing now, but I see where you’re going with this—”

“—and your family wants me gone.”

“Forget about them.”

I tugged the luscious pink tip with my teeth. She gasped, arching beneath me on the grass, and I bent to press my lips to the hot skin of her pulse point. Her fingertips skimmed the thin scar she’d left at my bicep, opening the bond between us. A wave of sensitive, tingling heat washed over my skin, roaring all the way to the tip of my swollen cock. With a groan, I buried myself in her sex, knowing I wasn’t going to last long, not this time.

“Dallas,” she whispered, my name soft, almost breakable, the way that drew a shiver up the back of my neck every time.

There was something about stripping yourself bare for a person that brought out every last insecurity you’d tried to hide under layers of bravado and snark. My lips mapped the curve of her collarbone, nibbled the ticklish spot behind her ear that made her toes curl against the back of my calf, savoring every inch of her skin. She tasted of coconut shampoo and sage, woodsmoke and sex, a wild, heady scent I couldn’t get enough of.

I bent to take one dark rosy nipple in my mouth, tugging at the other. Lacey’s breath caught, our link through the bond causing mine to still. I growled, feeling the needy ache between her thighs sharpen with every pull of my lips, felt my thrusts between her legs driving her to a precipice there was no going back from. Sensation exploded across my skin, a carnal shiver crashing between us like a wave breaking against the shore. I couldn’t stop, needed the raw intimacy of this moment, the addictive pain and pleasure of her teeth at my throat while I fucked her with raw abandon. Lacey’s eyes fluttered closed. I groaned, driving deeper, losing myself in her.

“Fuck, I can’t stop. I’m going to come inside you—"

“Yes,” she breathed, gripping my shoulders so hard it hurt, forcing me deeper. Delicious, primal pain twisted up my cock, driving my hips faster. “Dallas, I’m close.”

Moonlight blazed over my skin, fueling the wild, animalistic heat raging between us. A low purr vibrated in my chest. I sucked rough marks up the column of her throat, the wolf inside of me needing to mark, to claim, to mate. I threw my head back, drugged by her scent, by the feeling of her around me, and the wild, heady heat of our coupling. She bit my shoulder and I growled, palming her breast.

Mine.

The second time I knew I loved Lacey Blair, I was on a plane flying over Denver, the vast blue sky outside the window causing my heart to race as I thought of the miles increasing exponentially between us. The bruises my father had left were gone from my skin, erased by my shifter blood, but I could still feel every one etched indelibly on my soul. Lacey was my mate, and according to both my parents, I was toxic for her. The best thing I could do now was to disappear.

Her release came hard and fast, a roar through the bond that left me gritting my teeth, unable to contain what was coming. I wasn’t gentle. She didn’t stop me. We twisted and grappled down in the grass, biting and claiming, bodies wholly human even as I felt myself giving over control to the wolf. And when I finally let go, her nails digging into my back like she wanted to keep me there, linked with her forever, I felt something inside me shatter just as it was made whole.

After that we went slow. There under a canopy of stars, with moonlight warming our naked skin, I fell in love for the third time. This time it was with my best friend, who just that morning had traded out all the aprons in my restaurant for hot pink ones from Blair’s, weighed our cat obsessively on a food scale, and always seemed to have my favorite cherry pie and a carton of ice cream on hand when I snuck over across the street to her kitchen in the middle of the night.

And as she lay her head against my shoulder, I realized it was possible to love a thousand versions of a person. That love wasn’t a singular moment, a first kiss, a first dance or a first time making love, but endless and infinite as there were stars in a wide-open Texas sky.

“You’re perfect,” I whispered against the soft hollow of her throat, kissing a pale freckle that rested just over her collarbone.

Her eyes widened. Swallowing, she stared down at me, expression guarded, vulnerable. Her hesitation hit me like a gut punch. I might be ready to say the words, but she wasn’t ready to hear them. Not yet. Not like this. I would have to find a way to fix everything still standing between us so that we could have the future she deserved.

* * *

FriesWithThat: Okay lovebirds. I reactivated your vests. Two life bar penalty.

BabyGotBake: Looks like we got caught.

Me: Not too late to check out of this Caldwell exercise in madness early. I’m thinking cheesecake. We can see how much of your apartment Fancy’s destroyed.

BabyGotBake: Are you seriously trying to woo me by renaming my cat? Is that even a thing?