“Rowe—” I'm laughing and crying and shaking. “I can't?—”
“You can. One more.” He presses a kiss, soft and deliberate, to the inside of my thigh, over the softness I've apologized for my whole life. “This one's mine.”
He starts again. Slower. Devastating. And I let my head fall back and give up steering anything, and somewhere in the honeyed blur of it, I realize what I need, and I need it more than air.
“Rowe.” My voice doesn't sound like me. “Touch yourself. Please. I want—come with me. I want you to come too. Please, please?—”
The groan he makes into me nearly finishes the job by itself.
I hear his belt. His zipper. Then the rhythm changes—his mouth on me and his shoulder working, his fist on himself between my feet, and I prop myself up because I have to see it: Rowe Holloway on his knees at the edge of our bed, face buried in me, hand flying over the ink of his cock, completelyundone.
“Fuck,” Logan says reverently from the chair. He's spent and softening, and he's leaning forward anyway, elbows on his knees, bottom lip caught between his teeth, watching his twin like he's witnessing a double rainbow.
“Together,” I gasp. “Rowe—together?—”
He moans into me, and the vibration is the last straw, and the third one takes me apart at the seams. I come sobbing his name, thighs locked against his head where he holds them, and beneath me, against me, I feel the exact moment he follows—his rhythm shattering, his groan breaking open against my pussy, the splash of his release striping the floor and the bed frame while his mouth rides me through every last wave.
We end in a heap. Him with his cheek resting on my thigh, breathing like he ran here from Thistlewood. Me flat on my back, one arm over my eyes, tears drying at my temples, my whole body humming like a struck bell.
“Hi,” Rowe rasps against my leg.
“Hi,” I whisper back, and we both start laughing, helpless, stupid with it.
Logan tucks himself away and stands, stretching until his spine pops, looking between the two of us with an expression that's ninety percent smug and ten percent something softer he'd likely deny under torture.
“For the record,” he says, sauntering to the door, “that was the best show this outfit has ever produced, and I've seen Elias fuck Jules in front of everyone in the Big Top and then the whole thing devolved into an orgy.” He pauses with his hand on the latch and points at me. “Miracle, my ass. He's the lucky one. Whole lot knows it.” The grin goes wolfish. “Invite me back sometime. I'll bring notes.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
Rowe lifts his head from my thigh. His hair is a disaster.His mouth is swollen. He looks up the length of my body—all of it, every soft inch he just spent an hour worshipping—and raises one eyebrow.
“Argument settled?”
I reach down and, careful as a feather, brush a strand of hair off his forehead with one fingertip. He lets me.
“Settled,” I say.
28
EPILOGUE – ROWE
Jules gets married in her biker boots.
The dress is real enough—ivory, long, slit high so she can move—but when she walks down the center aisle of the Big Top on nobody's arm, because Jules Beck belongs to no one she didn't choose, the boots flash under the hem with every stride, and Elias looks at her like a man watching his whole religion arrive on schedule.
The tent is ours tonight. No crowd. Two hundred folding chairs full of carnival family, strings of warm bulbs looped between the rigging, and the ring floor swept and scattered with petals that Nova insisted on and Silas pretended to argue about while ordering three more boxes. Cole officiates, because the threat turned out to be a promise, and he's taking it seriously in the way only Cole can—dead solemn delivery, a knife tucked into his cummerbund, and a ceremony he wrote himself that includes the phrasetill death, which is negotiable in this family.
Wren sits beside me and cries through the whole thing.
I can't stop looking at her. Her dress is deep green,gathered at the waist, and it holds her the way I want to—snug at the hips, generous everywhere she is, the neckline framing collarbones I've traced with a feather and, lately, with my own fingertips. She caught me staring while she got ready and turned pink from her hairline down.
"Do you, Elias Vale," Cole intones, "take this terrifying woman?—"
"I do."
"I wasn't finished."
"I do anyway."