Chapter 81 — "Legacy"

Spring comes to Cedar Hollow Farm the way it always does — all at once, like it could not wait another day. The north pasture has gone green overnight, a green so vivid it almost hurts to look at, and the orchard is a froth of white blossoms that drops petals on every breeze. The fence lines gleam where the women whitewashed them in the long warm afternoons of the last week. The pond has thrown off its winter skin and gone glassy, and the ducks are back, loud about it.

And in the yard between the main house and the Quarters, seven children laugh.

Elena stands at the bedroom window with Sage asleep against her shoulder — six weeks old, six weeks of this perfect weight, this milk-smell, this tiny fist curled against her collarbone — and she watches them. Wren toddling after a ball bigger than her whole body. Cassian shrieking with delight as Sable swings him in a circle by the hands. Darian, her boy, her firstborn son, sixteen months and already steady on his feet, carrying a stick like a sword. Ivy and Ash in the sandbox with Tessa between them, making mountains. Lark staggering after a butterfly with the single-minded devotion of the very young.

Eight women. Seven children. One man.

Legacy, Elena thinks, and the word lands in her chest like a stone in still water, rippling out and out. This is what they built. Not the ranch, not the barn, not the ledger in the study with its careful inked lines — this. The laughter. The green. The whole breathing living weight of it.

Behind her, the bed is empty. Damion rose before dawn the way he always does, and she can see him now from the window, down by the north pasture gate, talking to the foreman about the spring rotation. He stands the way he stands in her dreams — tall, shoulders broad under the work shirt, dark hair catching the morning light, that stillness in him that has never once been anything but command. He glances up. Even from this distance, even through the glass, his grey eyes find her window unerringly. He lifts one hand, two fingers, a small gesture nobody else would even notice.

Later, it says. You and me. Today.

Her knees go weak. Six weeks of healing. Six weeks of him worshipping her with his mouth and his hands and his voice, holding back the one thing — the main thing — because the midwife said wait, because he said my queen, let me keep you safe, because he has the discipline of a saint and the patience of a mountain. Six weeks of him inside her only in the ways that wouldn't hurt her, and her wanting — god, wanting — the rest of it. The fullness. The stretch. The deep, claiming, undeniable fill of him.

Sage stirs, makes the small rooting sound, and Elena crosses to the rocking chair in the corner — the one that has rocked four of these babies now, hers and the sisters' — and settles her daughter to the breast. The latch is practiced now, easy. The milk lets down with the familiar sweet ache, and Elena closes her eyes, and she lets herself do what she has done every day for a week: she plans it. How she'll come to him. What she'll say. Where her knees will land on the rug beside the bed.

She has been ready for days. The midwife cleared her yesterday — all clear, mama, you're healed beautiful — and Elena nearly wept with relief right there in the examination room, because she has been aching. Not metaphorically. Physically. A deep, low, hollow ache that nothing but him can fill, that his fingers have edged around and his tongue has soothed and that has only grown worse with every careful, reverent, incomplete night.

Today ends the waiting. She decided it at dawn, watching him sleep, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, watching the shape of him under the sheet. Today.

· · ·

She waits until the afternoon. The children go down for naps — a staggered, negotiated miracle orchestrated by all eight women with the precision of a military campaign — and Sage nurses and sleeps and nurses again, and Elena hands her to Vivian with a kiss on the soft crown of her head.

"She'll want the other side in an hour," Elena says.

"I know what a baby wants," Vivian says serenely, settling Sage against her own shoulder with the ease of a woman who has done this a thousand times. Wren is asleep in the cradle beside her. Vivian's eyes are warm and knowing. "Go. He's been waiting for this as long as you have."

Elena's face flames. "How did you —"

"Honey." Vivian smiles. "The whole farm knows. You've been walking around like a woman starving at a feast for a week. Go be fed."

Elena goes upstairs on legs that barely feel like hers. The bedroom door is closed, and she can hear him inside — the scratch of his pen, the ledger. He keeps the breeding ledger in the study, but the farm ledger lives up here, and spring means numbers: feed, fencing, the new calves, the orchard yield. She knocks once, softly, and opens the door.

He looks up. The pen stops.

She has worn the dress. The purple one, the dark plum silk that clings and slides, the one with the neckline that dips low enough to show the top swell of her breasts — fuller now, heavier, still tender at the nipples — and the skirt that moves like water when she walks. No underwear. He taught her that years ago: my queen doesn't hide from me. Her hair is loose down her back, dark and long, and she has put on the perfume he likes, the one that smells like night-blooming jasmine.

"Elena." His voice is low. Careful. He sets the pen down. "What's —"

She crosses the room and sinks to her knees on the rug beside his chair.

The silence that follows is absolute. Even the clock on the mantel seems to hold its breath.

"Please," she says, and her voice doesn't shake, because she has rehearsed this, because she means it down to the marrow. "Please, Damion. I'm healed. The midwife cleared me yesterday. I've waited six weeks and I can't — I can't wait anymore. Please breed me."

His grey eyes go dark, darker than she has ever seen them, and his hand comes down to cup her jaw, his thumb stroking along her cheekbone. "Look at me."

She looks up at him. Kneeling. Offering. His.

"Say it again," he says quietly. "Slowly. Tell me exactly what you want, my queen."

"I want you inside me." The words come out on a breath. "I want you to fill me. I want —" She presses her forehead to his knee, and the denim is rough against her skin, and she can smell him, soap and leather and him, and it makes her dizzy. "I've been empty for six weeks and I'm aching, Damion. Please. Take me to the bed and breed me like you mean it. Bred once more. Your queen. Please."

His hand tightens in her hair — not hard, just sure — and tilts her face up. "Stand up."

She stands. Her legs tremble.

"Turn around."

She turns. His hands find the zipper at the back of the dress, and he draws it down with excruciating slowness, the silk parting, the cool air of the room touching her spine inch by inch. The dress slides off her shoulders and pools at her feet, and she steps out of it, and she stands naked in the afternoon light with her back to him, and she hears his breath catch.

"God," he says, very quietly. "Look at you."

She knows what he sees. The body that has carried two of his children now — the softness at her belly that wasn't there before Darian, the fuller hips, the breasts heavy with milk, the faint silver lines at her hips that he has kissed, every one, and called beautiful. She used to be shy of it. She isn't anymore. He made sure of that, with his mouth and his hands and a hundred whispered perfects.

"On the bed," he says. "On your back. I want to see all of you."

She lies back on the quilt, and the afternoon sun comes through the window in a long golden bar across her body, and he stands at the foot of the bed and undresses with that maddening deliberateness of his — boots, shirt, belt, jeans — and she watches every inch of him revealed, the broad chest, the flat stomach, the dark trail of hair, and then him, already hard, already heavy, and her mouth waters and her thighs press together involuntarily because six weeks, god, six weeks.

He comes to the bed and kneels between her legs, and his hands slide up her thighs, and he looks at her — really looks, his eyes moving over her breasts, her belly, the dark curls at the apex of her thighs — and what she sees in his face stops her breath. Reverence. Worship. This man who owns her completely, who could take whatever he wants, looking at her like she is the altar and not the offering.

"My queen," he says, and bends his head, and kisses her belly — right over the softness, right where Sage grew — with such tenderness that tears sting her eyes. "You gave me a daughter six weeks ago. You're glowing, Elena. Do you know that? You're glowing like the whole farm runs on you."

"It does," she whispers. "I mean — you do. You run on —"

"Hush." He kisses lower, just above the dark curls, and she gasps. "Let me look at you. Let me relearn you. It's been six weeks since I've had you like this, and I want to do it right."

His mouth finds her then, and Elena cries out, her back arching off the quilt. He is careful — she can feel the care in it, the restraint, the way he keeps it soft and slow when she knows he wants to devour — his tongue parting her gently, finding her clit with unerring memory, circling it with the flat of his tongue in the slow rhythm that has undone her a thousand times. His hands hold her thighs open, thumbs stroking the creases where thigh meets hip, and she is already shaking, already so close, because six weeks of almost has wound her tighter than a spring.

"Damion —" she gasps. "Please — I need —"

"I know what you need." His voice is rough against her. "Come for me first. Let me feel you come on my tongue, my queen. Then I'll give you the rest."

He slides two fingers inside her — slowly, so slowly, crooking them up against that spot that makes her see stars — and his tongue works her clit in tight, relentless circles, and Elena shatters. It rips through her like a wave, her whole body bowing off the bed, her hands fisting in the quilt, a cry tearing out of her throat that she doesn't even try to muffle. The farm has heard her louder. The farm knows.

She is still trembling when he moves up her body, kissing her belly, her ribs, the underside of each breast — lingering there, his mouth warm and reverent on the heavy, aching fullness — and then her mouth, and she tastes herself on his tongue, and she moans into the kiss, and his cock presses against her entrance, hot and hard and huge, and she goes still.

"Easy," he murmurs against her lips. "I've got you. We'll go slow. You're healed, but I'm not rushing this. Not this time."

He pushes in — just the head, just the broad crown of him — and Elena whimpers, because the stretch is there, the familiar burn-pleasure of him opening her, and it's been six weeks, and her body has to remember, and it does remember, it remembers him like a song. He holds still, buried just barely inside her, and kisses her — deep, slow kisses — and strokes her hair back from her face, and waits until her body softens around him, until she is rocking her hips up in tiny, involuntary pleas.

"More," she breathes. "Please, more."

He gives her another inch. Then another. Each one with a kiss, each one with a whispered word — that's my girl, that's my good girl, take me, let me in — until he is fully seated inside her, buried to the root, and they both go still, breathing each other's air, and Elena can feel him everywhere, the deep fullness pressing up against everything inside her, and it is so right, so unbearably right, that fresh tears spill down her temples into her hair.

"Damion," she whispers. "Oh god. Oh god."

"I'm here." His voice is thick. "I'm right here, my queen. Feel me. Feel how deep I am."

He starts to move — slow, deep rolls of his hips, each stroke dragging along every nerve inside her, each one ending with him grinding deep, pressing his weight into her, letting her feel the full thick length of him. His hands cradle her face. His eyes never leave hers. This is not the wild claiming of the barn, not the bent-over frenzy of the Claiming Circle. This is worship. This is her husband taking his healed wife in their bed in the golden afternoon, and it is somehow the filthiest, sweetest thing he has ever done to her.

"You're so tight," he groans, his rhythm faltering just slightly. "Six weeks and you're still mine, still gripping me like — fuck, Elena —"

"Yours," she pants, wrapping her legs around his waist, her heels digging into his back, pulling him deeper. "Always yours. Breed me, Damion. Please. I want to feel you fill me. I want —" She arches, and her breasts press up against his chest, and a drop of milk beads at one nipple from the pressure, and he sees it, and his eyes go absolutely feral.

"Oh," he breathes. "Oh, my filthy beautiful queen."

He bends his head and takes her nipple into his mouth — gently, so gently, just the warm suction — and milk lets down, sweet on his tongue, and Elena sobs with pleasure, because his cock is driving deep inside her and his mouth is on her breast and she is being taken in every way a woman can be taken, and it is too much, it is perfect.

"Come for me," he growls against her breast. "Come on my cock, my queen. Let me feel you."

She does. It takes her like a storm — her inner walls clamping down on him in rhythmic waves, her whole body seizing, her nails raking down his back, her cry muffled against his shoulder. And he groans, long and low, and his rhythm breaks, and he drives deep — so deep, impossibly deep — and holds there, buried to the hilt, and she feels it. The first hot pulse. Then another. Then the deep, flooding fullness of him emptying inside her, pulse after pulse after pulse, filling her, claiming her from the inside out.

"Bred," he breathes against her neck, his whole body shuddering. "Bred once more, my queen."

They lie tangled, breathing hard, his weight on her a delicious heaviness, him still inside her, still half-hard, and Elena laughs — a wet, wrecked, blissful laugh — and wraps her arms around him and holds on.

"Again," she whispers into his hair. "Later. Again."

He lifts his head and grins at her, that rare, boyish, utterly his grin. "Greedy girl."

"Your greedy girl."

"Always." He kisses her, slow and deep, and rolls them so she is sprawled on top of him, and his hands stroke down her back, over the curve of her ass, and he is already stirring inside her again. "The farm can wait. The ledger can wait. Right now there's nothing in the world but this bed and my queen and the fact that I am going to spend the entire afternoon reminding you exactly who you belong to."

Outside the window, the children's laughter drifts up from the yard — bright, distant, happy. Background music to the life they built. Elena closes her eyes, and rocks her hips, and takes him deeper, and thinks: legacy.

This. This is legacy.

· · ·

Dinner is a loud, sprawling affair in the main house kitchen, the way it always is when all eight women are home. The long table is crowded — high chairs and booster seats wedged between the grown-ups, bowls passed hand to hand, Sage asleep in the sling against Elena's chest and Wren in Vivian's lap stealing peas off her mother's plate. Damion sits at the head, and Elena sits at his right hand, and her thigh presses against his under the table, and every so often his hand drops to squeeze her knee, and she has to bite her lip to keep from smiling like an idiot.

Mara is enormous — thirty-six weeks and glowing, her belly leading her everywhere like a proud ship's prow — and she eats with the single-minded focus of a woman feeding two. Roxy is telling a story about Cassian and the goat kid that has Tessa laughing so hard she snorts. June is cutting Ash's food into tiny pieces with infinite patience. Sable and Odette are arm-wrestling over the last biscuit, and Odette wins by cheating, and Sable howls betrayal, and the children shriek with laughter.

Elena looks down the table at all of them — her sisters, her family, every one of them round with his children or nursing his children or carrying the memory of his children in the curve of their bodies — and she catches Damion's eye, and he smiles at her, slow and private, and mouths two words:

My queen.

Later, when the dishes are done and the children are bathed and bedded and the house has gone soft and quiet, he takes her hand and leads her back upstairs. And he breeds her again — slower this time, deeper, on their sides with her leg hitched over his hip, his hand spread wide over her belly, his voice in her ear telling her exactly what he's going to do to her, exactly how full she's going to be, exactly how many more babies he's going to put in her before he's done.

She falls asleep with his seed warm inside her, his arm heavy around her waist, his breath in her hair.

The farm is complete.

For now, whispers some deep, greedy, endless part of her. For now.

Because spring is just beginning. And the rituals are waiting. And her body — healed, glowing, his — is already, already aching for more.

Chapter 82 — "The Old Rituals"

The milking rotation is farm law, older than half the buildings on Cedar Hollow, and it begins the way it always begins: at dawn, in the Breeding Barn, ...