Twenty minutes later, Dr. Edelstein left, having given Jean Luc a clean bill of health. Then and only then did Celia allow herself to really feel how badly her hands hurt.

“Okay,” he told her, rising up from his chair. “I’m good. Now, it’s your turn.”

Their friends were still conversing in the living room, but neither had it in them to check in. They just walked, side by side, down the hall to Jean Luc’s room. His strength had recovered some, but he knew he needed a night’s rest right about now. But not more than he needed Celia. Not more than he needed her to be okay.

He closed the bedroom door behind them and then the bathroom door. He immediately stripped off his sopping wet undershirt and shucked off his briefs. Celia was tangled in her wet camisole, gingerly trying not to upset the wounds on her hands.

Jean Luc stripped it clean off of her and then her boxers and panties as well. Everything fell to the floor in a heavy, wet sop. Then he picked her up and stepped into the empty tub. He arranged them with her between his legs and her back to his front before he leaned forward and, with those very long arms of his, turned on the water and plugged the drain.

It didn’t take long for the warm water to fill around them. “I’ve learned,” he told her, “not to fill the tub before I get in.”

She turned her head and he caught just a scant half of her smile. “I imagine you’ve overflowed a few bathtubs.”

“Pretty much every time.” He leaned forward again and turned off the water.

Then he took her hands in his and gently dunked them under the clear water. She hissed, at first in pain, and then in relief as the stinging electricity in her burns slowly subsided. It was like the warm water was leaching the pain from her hands. They both watched as the wounds on her hands slowly but surely started to knit themselves back together.

“Jesus,” she murmured, watching it happen in stunned amazement. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all…”
“You turn into a bear shifter and then your girl’s hands heal before your eyes.”

Jean Luc clunked his head back onto the tiled wall behind him. He didn’t notice that Celia’s eyes were humongous and round with shock. His girl? She was his girl? She let out a long, unsteady breath that, with his eyes still closed, he mistook for something else. His arm clasped around her and he pinned her to his chest.

“It’s okay, baby,” he murmured tiredly. “We’re all okay.”
She let her weight sink into him. Her eyes squeezed shut as she attempted to remember every single detail of what it felt like to be pressed up against him like this. His chest hair scratching at her back, his huge legs, bent and surrounding her on either side. His cock pressed at her ass. She couldn’t tell if he was half hard or if that was just the natural state of things. Neither would have surprised her, she supposed. The man was kind of a miracle.

“I’m so sorry I left tonight,” she whispered. It had already occurred to both of them that if they’d been together, this might not have happened.

She leaned forward off of him and pressed her eyes to her knees. Jean Luc drew a pattern over her lovely back.

“You had to do what you had to do,” he told her. “And then you saved my life. So, no hard feelings on my end, baby.”

She didn’t say anything, just stayed curled in on herself like that as he drew a picture of a sun on her back with his fingertip. He added waves beneath it.

“Can I ask, though, why you left?”

Celia tightened up and then let out a small sigh. She turned her head to one side, peered out at the bathroom. “Maybe I should be coming up with a cooler answer than this, but it’s four in the morning, we almost died and I’m exhausted. I guess the truth is that I was freaking out. And I thought that I was supposed to leave.”             

“Supposed to?” His hand went still on her back. He’d somehow given her the impression that she wasn’t welcome in his room?

“Well,” she shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve never slept with a famous athlete before. I just kind of figured that spooning wasn’t on the menu for tonight. I… didn’t want to crowd you.”

He was speechless. If he was reading between the lines correctly, then Celia had some very big misconceptions about what had just happened. 

“Celia,” he said slowly. “Are you imagining that what happened between us tonight has happened to me before?”

Still in a stiff little grip with her knees, Celia went even stiller for a moment before she shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You’ve been around the block more than I have and I just thought—”

“Baby, that has never happened to me.” In a move that surprised them both, he leaned forward and laid his forehead against her back. “Sex like that. I mean. Damn. You don’t kick that out of bed. I’m not gonna kick you out of bed. I like you in my bed. Or your bed, I don’t care.”

She tried to move but he kept her there, his forehead between her shoulder blades, his arms all the way around her.

“Tonight, you crouching next to me, telling Martine that I needed a doctor, it reminded me of something. You reminded me of Hugo. He used to fight with my agent and manager over what was best for me. There was one game, in my first season, where I got tackled. Hard. They sent me back for concussion protocol. I didn’t have one, or a bad one at least, and they were about to send me back into the game, until Hugo came storming over. He threw such a fit over me that they kept me out until I could get cleared for sure. He didn’t care about anything other than my health and safety. Just like you, tonight. I haven’t had that for a long time. I… didn’t think I could have that after Hugo died. It was really nice.”

Celia didn’t say anything. She didn’t think there was anything that she could say at that particular moment, with a golf ball in her throat and this gigantic man pressed around her on every side. So she held still, let him press against her, let the water soothe them both. When her breathing was returning to normal, she turned halfway in his arms, caught his eyes with hers. “Bedtime?”

He nodded and the two of them, though their pain had subsided, gingerly stepped out of the tub. Celia was so exhausted and overwhelmed that her legs were shaking as Jean Luc wrapped a fresh towel around her.

“I have to go get pajamas from my room,” she told him as they stepped out into his bedroom.

His response was to toss her a clean T-shirt of his that when she pulled it on, went to about mid-calf on her. She eyed the hem in amusement and looked up at him. “You think there’s a chance that we’re not the same species?”

He laughed and pulled back the covers. He was about to respond, but she was crawling in after him, warm and soft and perfect. Then she was pulling the covers up and over them, the way he’d done before, turning in the circle of his arms so that they were nose to nose. Their eyes fell closed and they were out.

 

 

***

 

Jean Luc woke up the next morning to Celia crawling back into bed, which he didn’t like because it meant that she’d crawled out of bed at some point. But then she snuggled up to him and started kissing along the back of his neck, which he did like.

“Wuhtimest.”

“I’m sorry, was that English?” she asked, giggling.

He could smell coffee and figured she’d brought some in. He put out an arm and searched around on the end table for the mug. He found it. Eyes closed, he propped himself up and took a steaming sip. His eyes opened a crack and he tried again. “What time is it?”

“Noon.”

He almost aspirated the coffee. “Noon? Jesus. Haven’t slept till noon since high school.”

“Well, a battle with an otherworld demon’s right-hand man will make you sleepy.”

He grunted as the events of the night before washed over him and he took another gulp of coffee. Jean Luc sat up another inch and his eyes opened a little more and he saw that Celia was sitting there in his T-shirt, her legs tucked under her and her own mug of coffee in her hands. She was holding the cup of coffee between her palms, so he could only imagine that her injury wasn’t bothering her too much.

“How you feeling?” he asked, shifting around so that the covers pooled at his waist.

“Um. What?” Celia’s distracted gaze was traveling slowly down his chest. Her eyes bottomed out at the very tented sheet at his hips.

He couldn’t help but chuckle as he took another healthy gulp of coffee. “Hold that thought.”

Jean Luc slid out from bed, naked as the day he was born, and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He didn’t mind a little morning funk on a woman, didn’t mind one bit. But she was sitting there looking all perfect and cute and he just wanted to brush his teeth before he put his hands all over her.

He came back out of the bathroom a second later and she was sitting in the same position, watching him. Jean Luc wasn’t entirely sure which version of Celia he was dealing with at that moment, but he was very aware that there were many versions of her. There was confident Celia, bookworm Celia, nervous Celia, cynical Celia, funny Celia, self-conscious Celia, warrior Celia, sex goddess Celia. He liked them all, for sure. But he didn’t know her well enough to be sure which one was sitting on his bed.

“You know," she said cocking her head to one side, “you’re breathtakingly beautiful.”

He paused in his prowl back toward her and looked down at himself. He was standing there, fully naked, sporting some pretty persistent morning wood. Sure, he was built, it was kind of his life’s work. But beautiful? Nah. He felt a blush start to work its way over his skin.

“Seriously,” she said, her eyes on his body. “You’re built like Hercules or something. I mean I always thought you were really hot, especially with your football gear on, but seeing you here like this? I mean, it’s something else.”

Hoping to find any other topic of conversation, Jean Luc crawled across the bed and set her coffee aside. “You watched me play football, huh?”

She rolled her eyes, like his question was dumb. “The entire nation watched you play football. But yes, I was known to tune in.” He pushed her back onto the bed and rested his head on her stomach. The sweetness of the gesture softened her even further. When she thought about it, it was kind of cute that he wanted her to compliment his football skills. “You were pretty much my first celebrity crush when I discovered you in seventh grade.”

His head popped up. “Seventh grade? Wait. Jesus. How old are you?”

She couldn’t help but laugh at the look of abject horror on his face. “Don’t worry. I’m 26. My brothers followed your college career, too. So I watched you from when you were a freshman.”

“26,” he squinted down at her. “That’s still pretty young.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re only eight years older than I am, Jean.”

“Yeah.” He lowered his head, overwhelmed for a second. Life was so flipping strange. He turned his face toward the softest part of her belly. Something in the set of his shoulders must have told her the wheels were really turning in his head.

“What is it?” she asked.

He could hear the faint tightness in her voice. Like she expected him to refuse to answer or to ignore her. He realized, with a strange little tension in his gut, that it was taking courage for her to ask him a simple question like that. Something clicked into place for him. He wouldn’t know without asking, of course, but suddenly he thought he might understand the many sides of Celia. He might understand the reason all those sides clicked together in the pattern that they did.

A moment passed before he answered her question. He gathered his thoughts. He’d never been very good at this and he had about a thousand press conferences on YouTube to confirm that. But Celia wasn’t expecting a certain answer, she wasn’t being nosy. She was trying to know him. To soothe him. He searched for the words. “Hard to explain, I guess. But I’m just sort of spinning. I mean, a month ago I was alone and miserable. Today I’m part of a bear shifter brotherhood on some sort of cosmic mission and my girl is a 26-year-old, punk rock librarian with a Brooklyn accent.” He looked up at her, bemusement written all over him. “It’s a lot to take in.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I do not have a Brooklyn accent.”

“Oh?” he laughed, relieved that the tension of the moment before was draining away. “You do nawt have a Brooklyn accent?” he imitated her.

“Trust me, you meet my aunts, you’ll hear Brooklyn. This is nothing. And,” she insisted, “‘punk rock’ is a very reductive way of describing my personal style.”

“Hmm,” he grunted. “I think I’m gonna need another look at your tattoos.”

He slid down and put his head under the T-shirt she wore, not bothering to take it off. She gasped and gripped the sheets when he took one of her nipples in his mouth and then the other. He took long, slow pulls at her breasts that had her hips wiggling and little noises coming out of her that she couldn’t have stopped if she’d tried. She didn’t try.

When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she reached for the hem of the shirt and ripped it off of herself. She took as much of his hair in her hand as she could and yanked him up, slamming her mouth to his. He fell over her, on top of her, giving her a hell of a lot of his weight in his surprise. She groaned into his mouth, clamping her legs around him, loving it. Their tongues slipped and found each other, pressing and pushing.

She tipped her hips up and her wetness found the base of him, both of them naked and wanting. He lifted up enough to get a hand between them, slicking his middle finger through her wetness, teasing her.

Witnessing her passion in the dark room of the night before was one thing. But seeing her here now, noon light through the window, all laid out and panting for him, was truly something else. The color was high in her cheeks and her eyes were darker than he’d ever seen them. She spread her legs for him in that way that he was coming to truly love. Spreading herself so wide for him.

“You want this, baby?” he asked her, practically panting the words into her mouth.

“Please,” she begged him, her head tossing to one side.

He dropped his mouth to her throat as he pressed a finger inside her, stretching her, preparing her for his size. His thumb worked soft, lazy circles around her clit while he pumped his finger inside her.

“Please,” she begged him again. “I want you. Please.”

He scrambled off the bed and grabbed the box of condoms. His shaking hands tore at the box and the condoms flew in an arc, spilling across the sheets. He grabbed one, tearing it open and slicking it onto himself. She was still on her back, spread for him when he settled himself on his knees in front of her. He yanked her hips toward him, sliding her a foot across the bed, her arms flung over her head. She was so gorgeous he had to shake his head. All those colors across her chest, her messy pixie hair, that fierce/pretty face. It was too much. She clamped her ankles around his waist and the movement had the tip of his cock pressing inside her.

They both groaned when he was a full inch inside, his hands grabbing at her ass, his hips pushing forward a touch.

He froze. “Fuck. Shit.”

Her eyes flew open. “What?”

He let out a gasping breath. “I totally forgot, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“What?” she asked, this time in alarm.

“The boys,” he nodded his head backwards, toward the rest of the house. “We’re connected emotionally, you know? They’re gonna know. They can tell when we have sex.”

Her blurry eyes stared at him for a second. “Oh, who the fuck cares.” She anchored her heels at his back and pulled herself forward, impaling herself on his cock.

“Fuck,” he hissed, every muscle and tendon in his body pulling impossibly tight at the wet hot treasure that she was.

She was arched and gasping, her arms out-flung and her eyes unseeing. “Please, Jean, more.”
He gritted his teeth. She was so tight, he didn’t dare move. Instead, he held her solidly with one hand and found her clit with the other.

Her eyes flashed to him and he knew she was grappling with her old worry about coming. Whether or not she could.

“Gotta get you nice and wet for me, baby.” He grunted as she tightened on him in a quick little spasm that could only mean good things were ahead for them. “You don’t have to come. Just get wet for me. Make it nice and soft for me.”

It was almost like he’d said the magic words because a flood of moisture released from her and had him hissing again. “That’s right,” he soothed her as she spasmed around him again. “Nice and wet so you can take me. Take me all the way, as deep as you want it. That’s right.”

He’d never been much of a sex talker before, but with Celia, it seemed he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut. It was like soothing a wild animal, coaxing her out into the open. She was hiding from him, straining away. He thought, for a second, about pulling out and going down on her. But then she made a gasping noise, her eyes slammed closed, and her pussy clamped down around him.

Celia could not believe this was happening again. What was it about this man and his wizard dick? She’d never come in the broad daylight before, but here she was, baring everything for him, including whatever O face she was currently not in control of. But she didn’t care how she looked, all she cared about was withstanding this orgasm that was rolling her eyes back, shaking her out, threatening to toss her cells into the universe like confetti.

It finally let her out of its grip and she fell back to the bed, sweaty and shaking.

“Oh, God,” she murmured, pushing her hair out of her eyes and looking up at him. He was blurry through the lens of her passion. There was so much wetness between them that she felt her thighs slip where they clasped his waist so tight.

Instead of staying reared back over her, he fell forward, catching his weight on his forearms. She laced her arms around his neck and did the only thing she could do, which was to spread those legs to make room for his huge body. Her pussy jumped in aftershocks, sending electricity through her body and stealing her breath.

He put his mouth at her ear and pushed forward, inside her. “Hottest little piece of ass of all time,” he whispered in her ear.

She wondered for half a second if she should be offended or turned on. But she didn’t dwell on it long, because she was currently a first-hand witness to Jean Luc LaTour turning himself loose on someone. And she was that someone.

It was kind of like fucking a tsunami, she figured. He was humongous and everywhere and surrounding her, taking her under in his passion. His hips thrust forward, smooth and sharp at the same time. He fucked her all the way up the bed, until their heads knocked the headboard and he planted a gigantic hand and shoved them back down. And then the process started all over again.

If she hadn’t been miraculously rising, tightening for him again, she might have worried about the state of the bed frame. It knocked hard against the wall, creaking on its hinges. But she didn’t think at all about it. All she could do was cling to him, tip herself in an attempt to take him deeper, any way she could.

His breaths were punctuated with the thrusts of his hips, the scratch of his chest hair against her breasts driving her wild.

He was lost to this feeling inside him. Gone. Never coming back. The only thing that drew him back to earth even a little bit was her voice in his ear.

“Yes, baby. God. Just like that. Please. Don’t stop. Just like that.”

Was she about to come again? Hell fucking yeah. He shoved down his own race toward ecstasy and concentrated on hers again. He followed her directions to a T, doing her just like that until he felt her clamp down around him, scratch the hell out of his back and make the sexiest noise he’d ever heard. When she fell limp again, his brain switched back to his cock and he raced himself to the end.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuh-ck. Celia, baby.” And then he was over the edge, holding her so tight, trying to get so far inside her he’d never have to come out. His feet scrambled in the sheets. Her hips came up as his jammed down and they were locked like that, sealed together as he spilled all his passion for her.

Knowing exactly how heavy he was and exactly how little she was, he rolled to his side, holding the condom and pulling out of her. Then he scooped her close and kiss kiss kissed her. He couldn’t stop kissing her. She made sweet, exhausted, sated little noises against his mouth. After a long while, their breaths returned to even and their hearts stopped clanging every bell in their chests.

He swept a hand against her back and laughed when he realized that two unopened condoms were stuck there.

“Whoops,” he said, peeling them off her. “I forgot I spilled them on the bed.”

She picked one up and studied it for a second. She opened her mouth and closed it. Opened her mouth, started to say something, and then closed it.

“Celia. Spit it out.”

She held up one of the condoms thoughtfully. “When did you buy these?”

“When I bought your boxers.” He answered truthfully but cautiously, considering he had no idea what answer she was looking for.

“Oh. Right.” She twiddled the unopened condom in her hands. Her eyes stayed suspiciously low. “Because you knew I was going to sleep with you.”

He growled a little bit, gripping her gently by the chin and tipping her head up so she’d look at him. He searched hard for the words to explain himself. He felt like he was digging them out of some deep mine and not all of them wanted to come out of where they’d been buried. It wasn’t easy for him to explain how he felt. And he’d had to do it a lot over the last few days with her. But this chick was determined to take his actions the wrong way!

“No, Celia. I bought them because I really wanted to sleep with you.” He took a deep breath. He was in this far, might as well explain the whole thing. “And for the first time in a long time, I let myself have hope for something. So, I bought the condoms, figuring it couldn’t hurt to have them on hand.”

An expression crossed her face, one that made his stomach flip to see, but just as she was opening her mouth to respond, someone knocked on their door, hard. Celia jumped and Jean Luc tucked her quickly into his side.

“Get decent, kids,” Jack’s voice called through the door. “We got a family meeting on our hands and we figure we gave you two lovebirds enough time to—cough—recover.”

Celia blushed and Jean Luc shook his head at the ceiling. “Out in ten,” he called across the room. He looked down at Celia who was sitting up and searching around for his shirt. “What are you blushing about so hard?”

“Nothing. Just—” she bit her lip and tugged the humongous T-shirt over her head. “I just remembered what you said, about Jack and Tre knowing, um, what we were doing.”

“Right.”

He watched her, slightly perplexed as she crawled out of bed.

“I’m gonna go get ready, okay?”

“Right,” he repeated, even more perplexed than a moment before. He watched as she slipped out of his room. Jean Luc showered and dressed in record time. He knocked lightly on her door less than four minutes later. He ducked in and saw her room was empty.

He was sitting on her bed when, two minutes later, she came back from the shower, her hair dripping in a silver slick flopped over to one side.

“I’m not good at this,” Jean Luc told her. “Guessing what you’re thinking.”

She leaned over her suitcase, her towel clamped around her breasts, and chose clothes. “You’re trying to guess what I’m thinking?”

“Yeah.” He waited for her to supply some thoughts. Nope. She said nothing. So he tried again. “See, I’m confused. Because you’re blushing about the group knowing what we were just doing. Which is fine, modesty is fine. But I’m left in my room wondering if you’d rather that this thing between you and me stayed a secret.”

“Oh, Jean,” she turned to him, pink from the shower, damp and lovely, with something like regret in her eyes. “I didn’t mean—”

“Because the way I see it,” he talked over her because he wasn’t sure he was going to like what she had to say and he wanted all of his part said. “You tore the shit out of your hands saving my life last night. You almost drowned hauling me out of the water. You fussed over me while the doctor did his exam, you defended me to Martine. Baby, I don’t think any one of our friends doesn’t know what we’ve been doing in my room. I think it’s obvious at this point.”

“Right.” She cleared her throat and turned back to her suitcase, pulling out a toiletries bag. “It’s obvious.”

He caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror and saw that to her, all of this was anything but obvious. He growled and fell back on her bed. When he looked over, he saw that she was watching him, perplexed and a little nervous. “You know, baby, sometimes I wonder if you and I are speaking two different languages.”             

Celia frowned and slipped her towel off, hanging it on the hook at the back of her door. She reached for her lotion and made quick work of slicking it over her skin. “I’m not trying to be difficult. Or obtuse. I… I’m just trying to keep up. And not assume stuff.” She turned to him, hands on her hips and was startled by the expression on his face. Heat, she’d have expected, she was naked and rubbing on herself after all, but there was something else on his face as well. It was happiness. He was happy to be in that room with her, arguing and attempting to communicate and watching her get dressed.

She cleared her throat and grabbed her underwear and bra, making quick work of them. “I’m just trying to be smart about this,” she said, choosing her words carefully as she pulled a tight black T-shirt on, dragged her ripped jeans on after that. “Because when all this is over, I just don’t wanna be…”

He never found out what she didn’t want to be. Because she sighed, pumped a little product through her hair, and came over to kiss him on the lips.

“They’re waiting for us,” she whispered.