You’re not wrong there. “I know. So… do you want me to say I wanted it too? Or do we end it here and never mention it again?” Lynn watched Skeever swallow the bird in large chunks. The gruesome display did nothing to distract her from the conversation.
“Is that what you want?”
“What I want hasn’t changed.” Lynn licked her lips and tasted Dani. Need flared. “It just got more…” She trailed off. “More.”
“For me to come with you. To travel together.” Clearly a statement this time.
With a casual shrug, Lynn tried to make this conversation less of a walk through a wolves’ den. “It’s why I came after you.”
“If I say that you can say that you wanted to kiss me too—” She spoke slowly as if to construct the sentence correctly in her head. “Then does that mean I’m promising to stay?”
“No.” But I’d like it to.
“Then you can say it.”
Lynn swallowed down a lump of nerves and looked back at Dani. “I wanted to kiss you too.”
Dani didn’t outwardly react to that. She paused for a few seconds, seemingly pondering something. Then she drew her gaze up and locked it with Lynn’s. “Do you want to do it again?”
When they shut the bedroom door on Skeever, he whined loudly, but Dani smiled.
Lynn turned toward her. It was awkward now, mostly because they hadn’t actually discussed what would happen next but also because preparing the camp for the night had taken enough time for Lynn’s mind to provide her with enough scenarios of doom to make a second round of kisses—or maybe even more—a very bad idea.
She had romantically kissed exactly one person in her life—and that person was in this room. She hadn’t felt the need to be close to another human being since everyone she’d considered family had died. Lynn didn’t touch others, and others didn’t touch her; that was how it had been for more than half her life.
Dani stood in the center of the room, didn’t move, and just… watched. She didn’t give any indication of what she was feeling or thinking.
Clearly, Lynn would have to make the next move, which was terrifying. She wanted to kiss Dani again. Even if Dani went back to the Homestead, even if she lost her some other way, she had enjoyed kissing Dani and the way kissing her had made her feel. There was hesitance now too, though. Despite what Dani had said earlier—that Lynn admitting she had wanted to kiss her wouldn’t affect Dani’s decision once they made it back to the Homestead—it undoubtedly would, and Lynn felt the pressure to perform.
She’d also had plenty of time to think about why Dani had kissed her. The most logical conclusion was that Dani had been confronted with the reality of death in a very brutal and personal way today, and she was just kissing her because it chased the fear of dying and the memories of Richard’s corpse away. Lynn hadn’t thought of dying when they were kissing. In fact, she’d never felt more alive. If they both felt better while kissing each other, then there was really only one thing to do, right?
While Skeever scratched at the door to be let in, Lynn closed the distance between her and Dani and kissed her again, squarely on the lips.
It wasn’t exactly a skillful or gentle coming together. Dani’s eyes widened just a touch before Lynn closed hers, but she took a hold of Lynn’s shoulder to keep herself from swaying and just… connected. Then she wrapped her other arm around Lynn’s back and pressed herself against her.
They were of roughly equal height, so Dani’s breasts pressed against Lynn’s and her pelvis connected with her too. Even their legs brushed; Dani was that close. It felt very odd, and Lynn had to fight off insidious thoughts like that Dani could reach for her tomahawk and brain her with it. Once she succeeded, Lynn exhaled and relaxed.
With Dani’s hand on her arm, the hand of that arm could only go to Dani’s hip or side. She settled on her side. The other one could go anywhere. She chose to trace the braid in Dani’s hair after lifting it from the curtain of her hair. It felt smooth and tight, with a small bone bead at the end that she could feel was engraved, but she couldn’t visualize the pattern. Dani’s tongue slipping over her lips and drawing her attention away might have had something to do with it. She parted her lips, but Dani had broken the kiss already.
Lynn chased those lips blindly and met them again, this time instantly connecting with Dani’s tongue. The sudden touch had her whimper—which was a sound she had literally never heard herself utter.
With an appreciative hum, Dani rolled her tongue a little more firmly along the edge of Lynn’s.
A shiver coursed down all the way to Lynn’s toes. When she gently tugged Dani’s braid, Dani tilted her head and their mouths connected fully, parting wider instinctively to allow a very real, very firm, very nice kiss.
Another million thoughts popped up, but far less intrusively this time: Is my tongue cold too? What’s that taste? Should I do something else? They popped up at the rate of one per heartbeat, but once her heartbeat slowed to a regular pace and she could no longer keep track of the times they’d broken apart and come back together for more, they disappeared. Kissing Dani became familiar and fun faster than Lynn had thought possible.
Dani stroked her arm with her fingertips, so Lynn used her thumb to stroke Dani’s side. She discovered little kisses anywhere on Dani’s lips made her smile. Teasing the corner of her mouth with her tongue made her moan.
Lynn discovered things about herself too: the back of her elbow was extremely ticklish, for example, something Dani noted with glee. When Dani traced her top front teeth with her tongue, she developed goose bumps, but she instantly hated it when Dani pushed her tongue under hers and against the connective tissue between her tongue and the floor of her mouth. She wasn’t quite sure how to tell Dani that, so she just sort of fumbled her tongue under Dani’s when Dani’s tongue seemed to go for the spot. These minor inconveniences did nothing to dampen her enjoyment of the activity. She was probably doing things Dani didn’t like and misinterpreting the signs, but Dani didn’t seem to mind either.
Slowly, Lynn broke another kiss.
After pecking Lynn’s bottom lip, Dani leaned back and continued to scratch the nape of Lynn’s neck, where her hand had ended up. “My feet are killing me.”
It took a little time for Lynn to realize they were no longer kissing. She enjoyed the rasp of Dani’s nails on her skin very much, she’d discovered. When she opened her eyes, enough time had passed for the world to darken considerably since the last time she’d had her eyes open. “Oh.”
Dani very distinctly giggled, which was such a foreign sound to Lynn that she dropped her gaze to Dani’s lips to watch it happen. They were puffy and red and curved into a big smile.
“Oh?” Dani shook her head, but her eyes were filled with mirth.
Lynn’s sluggish brain picked up speed, but not fast enough to come up with anything useful. “Sorry. Um… food?”
Dani watched her for a five count, then burst into laughter. She hugged her, which was somehow a completely different experience than kissing. “Yeah, Wilder, let’s eat.”
CHAPTER 17
“IS THIS SOMETHING WE HAVE to talk about?” The long, intense kissing session in question made Lynn dangerously giddy whenever she thought of it, but if they talked about it, they would have to face the consequences of this sudden shift in their relationship. She didn’t feel emotionally steady enough to listen to Dani repeating it didn’t change anything between them—because their kissing had changed a lot for Lynn, even though she wasn’t entirely able to grasp how and how much, nor did she want to.