She slid her hand up the side of his neck, got a good fistful of his hair, and drew him down for a proper kiss.
The hand he held at her throat slid around, so he cradled the side of it, an echo of her touch, and he fell into the kiss with a palpable relief and eagerness. He adjusted the tilt of their heads, slipped his tongue between her eagerly parted lips, and set about pouring everything he’d struggled to say into the wet, slick meeting of lips, and teeth, and tongues.
I’m pretty sure I was in love with a photo on a billboard…and now I’m in love with you.
I’m in love with you.
I’m in love with you.
She’d wondered, and hoped, and even prayed a little, in her darker moments, but she hadn’t thought she’d ever hear those words from him. Or be touching him, breathing the same air as him when he did, so that there could be no doubt of his honesty, his body betraying every bit of the truth.
He loved her.
He loved her. She loved him, and he loved her back, and this was mad, absolutelymad. She was in love with a twenty-something Russian Lean Dog with a price on his head. Really, she didn’t know why she’d expected her romantic life to turn out anything but extraordinary and unlikely given the rest of her life, and her lineage.
She wassoaring.
Raven got her other hand in his hair, fingers knotting in, and swayed into him, opening beneath the press of his thumb at her jaw, tongue yielding to the hot stroke of his. She’d never liked submitting in bed, but it was so good with him; felt right.
But then he ripped away. Their lips parted with a wet, sucking sound, and she gasped. “Wait, wait, what–”
Toly drew a ragged breath, his mouth shiny with spit, his eyes white-rimmed as he glanced over her shoulder.
Then she heard what had startled him. A familiar voice was talking much too loudly, shouting, really. “Stay with her. I’ll go look.”
Tenny.
“Your brother,” Toly said, like a curse.
Having that kiss interrupted felt like being kicked off a ledge. “That bugger,” she swore.
Toly grabbed her hand. “Come on.”
There was no question of listening: she went.
The woods swallowed them whole in a heartbeat, and it wasblackbetween the tree trunks. Raven was wearing heeled-boots, and wasn’t an outdoorswoman at all, but she held fast to Toly’s hand and trusted he knew what he was doing. He moved near-silently, despite the thick leaf litter underfoot, nothing but a flicker of movement in the shadows, and a warm, sure hand wrapped round her own.
She waited for a root to trip her, a fallen log, a hole to snap her ankle. But they wove between trees, and hurried down a slight decline, and then Toly halted, and gathered her in close, bundled her around so she stood within the circle of his arms, with him at her back. Before she could askwhat, he took both her hands, and placed them on…a ladder. It was the rungs of a ladder.
“Up?” she guessed.
“Up.”
A long way up, it seemed, but maybe that was the dark, distorting distance. She went hand over hand, and finally felt an edge of some sort.
“Straight through,” he said, below her. “The floor should hold.”
A little patting around revealed that the edge had four sides: a square opening. Raven reached through with both hands, felt sturdy floorboards, and levered herself up and through.
Her eyes had adjusted, by this point, able to discern the moon-silvered air from trees and shrubs. She could tell they were in a treehouse, one with big cut-outs for windows that overlooked the forest. Back the way they’d come, she could glimpse that darting glow of the fire pits, peeking through the tree trunks.
A rustle and a scrape signaled Toly joining her, and then he was pressing up against her side on the floor of the treehouse, smoke-smelling, his breath warm against the side of her face.
“Where are we?” she whispered. She felt giddy, champagne bubbles popping in her chest, adrenaline coursing fast and pleasurable through her veins. She felt like akid, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had.
“Bennet built it for his kids when they were little,” he said. “The guys deer hunt out of it, now.” Then: “Shh.”
Raven closed her mouth, pressed her lips tight together to keep from smiling too wide – not that it mattered. She could smile. Helovedher. The novelty of that wasn’t going to wear off anytime soon, she feared.
