A/N: My apologies for the unusually long lag between updates. RL is a domineering mistress sometimes!

Thanks to MunkeeRajah and Evelyn-Shaye for betaing this chapter at warp speed. If you haven't checked out Evelyn's story "A Different Kind of Love," take a look. It's a lovely Jake/Renesmee story that really taps into what's so appealing about the characters.

And on a technical note, if you reviewed the outtake previously posted here as Chapter 18, you won't be able to leave a review for this chapter. The system will read that as an attempt to leave double reviews and won't allow it. This is entirely my fault, since I originally posted the outtake in place of chapter 18, and when it came time to post the real 18 my anal retentiveness just wouldn't let me live with the messed up order. So in trying to "fix" the order, I messed up the reviews. You can always just send me a PM to comment - and to tell me what a boob I am for screwing this up!

Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Leah's snarkiness, however, is all mine!

Chapter 18 – Strangers When We Meet

Leah POV

I'd never bought into that crap about karma balancing the universe.

It always seemed to me that the distribution of happy times versus shitty ones pretty much played out on its own, without any real rhyme or reason. But after Nahuel crashed into my life and woke me up from six years of self-imposed stagnation, I'd started to think that maybe there really was a cosmic scale-watcher keeping track of things.

Nahuel loved me, my mother had reconciled with him, Joham hadn't yet shown his face in Forks, and I no longer felt like I was walking around with a heart-sized hole in my chest. True, my life still wasn't all rainbow-farting unicorn happy, but the "good side" of my scale was definitely heaped high and riding low right now. With my life that far out of balance, I was worried that fate would soon step in to even things up.

From Joham's next move to the verbal ass-kicking I was pretty sure I would get when I finally talked to Jake again, there was a big, smelly wad of bullshit waiting to splat down on the "bad side" of my life's scale. Maybe if I took the initiative and started dealing with some immediate impending unpleasantness, it wouldn't be quite so bad when the whole mess finally did hit.

So I snuck out behind the woodshed while Mom and Nahuel were discussing the dinner menu for the coming Clearwater family summit. It was hilarious—and a huge turn-on—that my imprint was turning out to be so domestic. While he was happily distracted, I decided it was a good time to grab some privacy and call Jake. I didn't need anyone listening in on my end of the dressing down I was pretty sure my Alpha was going to give me.

He had every right to be pissed at me. Jake had been my dependable, supportive wingman through my emotional roller coaster ride over the past month—not to mention the past six years. He deserved better than to have me flake out and disappear on him for four straight days. Not to mention the fact that as his beta, making myself unavailable to him and the pack was stupid and irresponsible.

I leaned against the back of the shed and dialed his number. He picked up on the second ring.

"Leah."

That was it. Just my name. In a tone that clearly said he wasn't going to give me a free pass.

"Yeah. Uh, hi, Jake. Sorry I've been out of touch." I paused, waiting for him to jump in.

Silence. Shit.

"I guess I kind of wigged out there for a while. Uh, for a few days. The whole Seth-Anjali thing sorta freaked me out and .…" My blather tapered off again.

Still no response. Obviously, Jake thought I could do better. I sighed.

"Look, I know I've been a jerk," I tried again, doing my best to sound truly contrite. "I haven't handled things well for the past few days. Well, for the past month, really. I'm sorry."

I took a breath, giving him another opportunity to speak. He remained silent. Now he was starting to irritate me, and I couldn't keep my annoyance out of my voice.

"Alright, you were right and I was wrong! I should have told him. Okay? Is that what you want to hear? Jesus, Jake, don't make this easy for me or anything—"

"Leah?" I'd been working up a good head of steam, but the gentle and caring tone of his quiet voice locked my wheels.

"What?" I snapped back, not quite ready to give up my ire.

"Are you alright?"

He choked me up, damn his strong-but-sensitive ass. Nobody did the biceps of steel and heart of gold routine better than Jake. His voice was so meltingly sweet, so kind, that I could envision the revolting compassion I was sure filled his dark eyes.

I was getting really sick of all this girly emotion that had been welling up in me for the past few days. Why couldn't I go back to being the old cast-iron-bitch Leah and just keep the happy-in-love and having-great-sex parts of the new Leah? Was that too much to ask?

I took a moment to collect my thoughts and get a grip on my vocal chords. "Yeah, Jake. I'm alright."

"Good. I'm glad." Relief suffused his voice. Then, in quick succession, worry skulked in: "Is Nahuel okay, too?" The obvious concern in his tone made me chuckle.

"Oh yeah," I said, not even trying to hide my smugness. "I'd say he's very okay right now!"

That broke his tension and Jake hooted with laughter. I remembered what Nahuel had said about Jake being a good friend, and realized my Alpha would probably say that the feeling was mutual.

"Did he tell you how he found out?" he asked.

Nahuel had said that Seth let the truth slip in a conversation with Jake, Carlisle, Edward and Jasper; Jake blamed himself for not preventing Seth's slip-up. As if anyone could control my kid brother's mouth when he started his verbal dribbling.

"Yeah, he did. Don't beat yourself up over it. I wasn't real happy when he told me you guys fought, but I guess everything turned out for the best."

Jake's relieved breath made the cellphone crackle in my ear. "Thanks. But I need to talk to you about the rest of that conversation with Carlisle."

Now a distinct undercurrent of discomfort crept into his voice. I wondered what was up, because Nahuel hadn't really explained what everyone had been discussing when he interrupted them. Honestly, I'd been much more interested in the end result of the conversation than what had actually been said.

"Did Nahuel tell you anything?" Jake sounded hopeful.

"He said the conversation didn't really apply to us." Which, now that I thought about it, didn't make sense. Why would Seth have been talking about Nahuel and me at all if the discussion wasn't pertinent to us?

Jake sighed, his frustration sparking loud and clear across the airwaves. "Damn. I was hoping he'd tell you. I mean, he did say that he wouldn't," he babbled. Yeah, something was definitely up because Jacob never babbled. "He said he didn't want to upset you with it, but I was really hoping he'd rethink that."

He paused for several moments and I could imagine him furrowing his heavy brow. Finally, he blew another exasperated breath. "Look, I'm just going to poke my nose in and say this, okay?"

"Okaaaay?"

"Leah, I think you and Nahuel should …" he paused, and if a voice could convey a blush, his would have been crimson. "… I think you should use …" His voice dropped to a stage whisper. "… protection."

I actually held the phone away from my ear and stared at it for ten seconds. Maybe if I blinked rapidly enough at my phone, I could prove to myself he hadn't really said what I thought he'd just said. My silence must have worried Jake, because I heard him call my name several times.

Finally, I returned the phone to my ear. "What?" I gagged out eloquently.

Now, he was pissed. "You heard me! I'm not going to repeat myself."

"Okay, I did hear you. But why the hell are you bringing this up?"

Even though I'd all but admitted it to him not five minutes ago, I was still irked by Jake's assumption that Nahuel and I were having sex. And I was really cheesed that he would lecture me about safe sex. I mean, he knew more about my situation that just about anyone else besides my mother.

"Carlisle's got a theory and it's one that makes a lot of sense," he said. "He thinks these hybrid-werewolf imprints are all part of the genetic imperative to keep passing on the transformation gene. He suggests that the mixture of vampire and shape-shifter DNA could mean our kids would be able to phase at will, without having to wait around for a full vampire to activate the gene."

Icy pain, crisp and sharp, settled into my stomach. My legs began to feel watery, and I slid down the wall of the shed until I was crouching with my back against it. Anger and agony were duking it out in my gut; I didn't know which would win, but either way, I was the loser.

"Goddammit, Jake," I growled, clutching the phone so tightly my hand shook. "Why the fuck do you keep bringing this up?"

Confusion roughened his normally smooth tenor. "What are you talking about? We've never discussed this before. I didn't think anything of it when it was just you and Nahuel and me and Ness, but now with a third hybrid-wolf pair …"

The ice in my gut was getting heavier by the second, weighing down the warm buoyancy that had lingered from my day and night of passion in Nahuel's arms. Jake was delving—Again!—into the one topic guaranteed to unearth the last buried remnants of my bitterness. I didn't want to examine those fragments right now, didn't want to remember that for all the happiness Nahuel and I could give each other, there was one thing we couldn't do.

"I get it, asshole!" I was shouting now, loud enough that Nahuel's vampire-sharp hearing could probably hear me in the house. I didn't care. "You know that this doesn't have anything to do with me."

Jake's breath rasped in my ear. He was trying to keep his cool. It was good one of us could.

"Leah, I keep telling you that you don't know that for sure," he said with quiet intensity. "Better to be safe than sorry, right?"

I fired back without thinking.

"Who says I'd be sorry?"

I couldn't have taken a bet on which one of us was more astounded. I was pretty sure I actually felt the planet's revolution halt for a few seconds while our mental momentum caught up with the words that had just rocketed out of my big mouth. No surprise that Jake was the one who rediscovered his power of speech first.

"If that's what you want, then I'd be behind you a hundred percent, but I think this is something you should talk to Nahuel about before you take any more chances," he said. His quiet voice was calm and determined. "Don't you think he has a right to be in on this conversation?"

I dropped my forehead into my hand and shook my head, stupidly realizing as I did it that he couldn't see me. "Yeah, maybe," I sighed. "Look, can we not talk about this right now? I'd really like to enjoy being happy for a little while without having to think about this just yet."

Regret tinged his voice. "Christ, Leah, I'm sorry. You deserve to be happy, and I'm happy for you, really I am. But there's more that you need to think about."

I balled my hand into a fist and drummed my knuckles against my forehead a few times, grimacing at his words. "What?" I grumbled, frustrated that he wouldn't let this go.

"If Carlisle is right, then this is exactly the kind of thing that's going to make Joham even more likely to attack us," he said. "And if he finds out about all of us, he's going to be especially interested in the really unique couple in the group."

I didn't need a carefully drawn picture to see the ugliness of the situation. Until now, Nahuel's batshit-crazy DNA donor had just two targets: Renesmee and my imprint. But with Seth and Anjali's imprinting, his potential targets had tripled.

And the two that would most interest him, the mated pair that would have him wetting himself with glee, would be Nahuel and me—the only known male vampire-human hybrid and the world's lone female werewolf. Of course, once he discovered that his only male progeny was wasting his potential, not to mention his very unique vamp-boy sperm, on a barren, bitchy she-wolf, that glee would probably turn into something a lot less pleasant for all of us.

SSW/SSW/SSW

By the time our very strained and weird little dinner party was over later that evening, I was having a hard time deciding which father I liked least—Nahuel's or Bella's.

On the one hand, Joham was an evil, murdering, psychotic blood-sucker who had tried to torture the humanity out of the man who was the reason my heart continued to beat. On the other, Charlie Swan was the one sitting in my living room at the moment, so my dislike for him felt a lot more immediate.

Of course, I kept the mental comparison to myself because I was confident my imprint and my mother would be equally horrified by it. And in all fairness, Charlie was trying like hell.

He'd showed up precisely on time, beating Seth and Anjali by nearly twenty minutes. He'd shaken Nahuel's hand and stoically apologized for the misunderstanding that had nearly ended with Nahuel's teeth in his throat. He hadn't said a word about my brother and Nahuel's sister fondling each other throughout the evening. He'd complimented Mom's outfit and hair, eliciting a rare blush from her. He'd even asked my imprint if he liked football or fishing and had taken it upon himself to try to educate Nahuel when my vamp-boy admitted a total ignorance of both subjects.

Considering how far his head had been up his ass for the past six years, Charlie was doing a remarkably good job tonight of dealing with his severely altered reality. Still, I knew the other shoe was going to drop when the dinner dishes were all cleaned and put away. So I lingered in the kitchen doorway while my weird new family spread into the living room to drink after-dinner coffee and listen to Charlie and Mom finally clue us in to their big secret.

They sat side by side on the couch, and Nahuel dropped into the wing-backed chair at a right angle to the sofa. Seth parked his rump in Dad's arm chair, propped his Sasquatch-sized feet on the coffee table and tugged Anjali down onto his lap. Nahuel studied their pose and then shifted his speculative gaze to me.

I frowned and gave him a subtle head shake. There was no way I was going to sit on his lap, too. My fanny on top of his crotch would mean he'd be sporting wood the whole time, and there was no way I'd be able to focus on anything Charlie and Mom had to say with Nahuel's hard-on gouging my ass. Plus, I didn't trust him to keep his hands to himself, even with other people in the room. I compromised by perching on the arm of his chair, facing my mother and her boyfriend.

Nahuel promptly sandbagged my good intentions, not to mention my focus. His arm slid behind my butt and one long finger slipped under the waistband of my jeans out of sight beneath the hem of my shirt. Ballsy fucker.

Charlie took a swig of his coffee, then set his mug on the table near Seth's feet. He cleared his throat. Puffed air through his mustache. Stretched his neck with a popping sound, and glanced at my mother out of the corner of his eyes.

Oh, good God. Chief Charles Swan was squirming. I caught my mother's eyes and glared a mental message at her.

Bail the poor bastard out, for Pete's sake.

Mom winked at me and then glanced around the room, sweeping Seth, Anjali and Nahuel with her warm smile.

"I'm really glad we're all here together," she began. "We've all been through a lot in the past month. Our family has changed. It's grown." She reached over to pat Nahuel's right hand, oblivious to the fact that his left was now fully into my pants and massaging as much of my cheek as his fingers could reach.

"I want you to know that each one of you is an important, cherished part of our family." This was clearly directed at Nahuel and Anjali, and her words earned her a radiant smile from my imprint. Anjali's expression remained attentive but reserved. I'd been right that she lacked Nahuel's human appeal, but hopefully she'd develop some the more time she spent with Seth. After all, my brother was the poster boy for warmth and sweetness.

Now Mom turned to Charlie and picked up his hand in both of hers. "I asked for this family meeting because Charlie and I have something very important to tell you." She paused and looked at Charlie expectantly.

Here it comes. Wait for it. Wait for it.

Charlie cleared his throat again. I actually felt a pang of sympathy for the poor schmuck. He hadn't looked this scared when Nahuel's teeth were inches from his jugular. "I've asked Sue to marry me, and she's agreed."

It took Seth all of two seconds to leap to his feet, dump Anjali on the recliner and sweep Mom off the couch in a bear hug. He swung her around the living room, squealing like a cheerleader that had just laid the entire varsity team.

"I knew it! I knew it! That is so awesome!"

Anjali seemed a bit dazed to find herself sitting on the ripped vinyl of my dad's chair, but she still managed to muster a smile. Even with her limited experience of human interactions, she knew the appropriate response. "Congratulations Charlie, Sue."

Nahuel was grinning like a fool, too, and he rose to extend his hand to Charlie. "Yes, congratulations," he agreed. "I wish you every happiness."

By the time Charlie finished shaking Nahuel's hand, I'd remembered my manners and managed to give him a quick hug. I'd known for a while this was coming and had accepted that I needed to make my peace with it. Charlie wasn't a bad guy, and he made my mother happy. That's all that mattered, I reminded myself.

Seth finally put Mom down and it was my turn to hug her. "I'm happy for you, Mom," I whispered in her ear. "You deserve to be happy and loved."

She grabbed my face in her hands and kissed me full on the lips without hesitation or embarrassment. "So do you," she murmured emphatically. I grinned at her and stepped out of the way for Nahuel to sweep her into his arms.

Charlie was smiling broadly, relief radiating from every pore. I guess he'd been a bit worried about how their news would be received, and I couldn't blame him. In a rare moment of openness, he gazed at my mother with naked adoration shining in his brown eyes. For the first time in a long time, I felt an honest wave of affection for him.

Which he immediately killed by opening his mouth.

"You're all taking this so well, I guess we might as well tell you the rest of our news," he blurted out. "I'm going to take early retirement. Sue and I are leaving Forks. When Bella, Edward and Nessie leave with the Cullens, we're going to move with them."

His words imploded every molecule of good humor in the room.

Seth, Nahuel, Anjali, even Mom, all gaped at Charlie for a few seconds. Then every one of them looked at me, waiting for the tremors of anger shaking my body to blast into a full-blown eruption of rage.

I wanted to cut loose. I really did. Because even though I totally respected my mother's right to have her own life and make her own choices, I couldn't really believe this was what she wanted. I just knew that the impetus behind this decision was nothing more than Charlie's inability to let the fuck go of Bella.

And it was time for him to let go. More than time. I wanted to scream at him. Wanted to tell him that he shouldn't make my mother leave the home she'd lived in her entire adult life, where she'd raised her children, just so he could go chasing his immortal daughter around the world. I wanted to demand my mother tell me how she could agree to something so stupid and outrageous. How she could walk away from the life she had here. How she could be willing to leave her own daughter behind just so Charlie could stay with his.

And I wanted to choke the life out of both of them for making me feel like my options were narrowing even further. I hadn't yet decided for myself if I was going to go with Jake and the Cullens when they left Forks. Where did Mom and Charlie get off making that decision before I did?

But not one word of that would do me or anyone else any good. Not one word of it would do anything but hurt my mother, anger Charlie and possibly make Seth, and even Nahuel, pissed at me.

So instead of saying anything, I turned on my heel, marched down the hall to my room and quietly closed the door behind me.

SSW/SSW/SSW

Hours later, I woke in my moonlit room to the faint but distinct sounds of panting and moaning. I blinked blearily at the digital clock on my nightstand. Half past one.

After making my silent, overly dramatic exit from the horribly gone wrong Clearwater family meeting, I'd stayed in my room for the rest of the night. Yes, I knew I was behaving like a toddler throwing a tantrum, but I figured that was better than starting a fight that would resolve nothing and only leave me looking like an asshole.

No one had dared to come knocking on my door, not even Nahuel. I'd heard Charlie and Mom leave for his place hours ago, and I had fallen asleep to the muted tones of Nahuel, Seth and Anjali talking in the living room.

Now, Seth and Anjali were making entirely different kinds of noises in his room. Guess they'd decided to stay the night rather than make the trek back to the Cullen mansion. I lay quietly for a moment, wishing I could go back to sleep, but knowing it wasn't likely with the porn soundtrack playing across the hall.

I sighed and sat up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed and touching my toes to the cold wood floor. Without thinking, I reached behind me on the bed, but Nahuel's side was empty and the sheets were cool to the touch. Just as my heart rate started to ramp up with worry, I caught his spicy, sweet scent, and his warm, rich voice drifted softly across the room.

"I am here."

In the watery moonlight that trailed in the window, I could see that he'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor near the door wearing only his boxers. Now he rose and padded silently across the room. When he reached the bed, he knelt on the floor in front of me, nudging between my knees so that he could wrap his arms around me and cuddle me against his chest.

The emotional stresses of the day had left me feeling worn and weary. I wanted nothing more than to savor the comforting heat of Nahuel's smooth skin. I laid my head on his shoulder and yawned widely. "What were you doing?"

His large hands began to move up and down my back, gently rubbing and massaging. "I was thinking. I did not want to disturb your sleep, so I sat on the floor."

"What were you thinking about?"

His fingers pressed into my muscles as his hands moved in long slow strokes from my waist, up my spine to my shoulders, and then back down again. I hadn't realized how tense my body was until his magical fingers began their work.

"I do not wish to say right now," he answered, cautiously. "I am not finished with my thoughts."

I chuckled against the hot skin of his throat, then hissed in pain when his fingers found a particularly tense knot of muscle.

He began trailing soft, wet kisses along my jawline and his hands left off their massaging to slip under the hem of my T-shirt.

"Your muscles are tight. You have been unhappy today, and I do not understand what has made you so," he whispered. I could see only the outlines of his beautiful face, but I imagined the worry in his voice was also etched in his teak eyes.

"I do not know what to do to help you. I cannot erase the cause of your unhappiness, but perhaps I can make you forget for a little while."

I wanted to tell him that I was fine and that he should stop worrying. But I didn't want to lie to him. The truth was, my conversation with Jake and all its implications, and Charlie and Mom's revelations, were weighing heavily on my mind. While I searched for some soothing words that I wasn't uncomfortable saying, he pulled my T-shirt over my head and dropped it on the bed. I shivered when his long, clever fingers cupped my breasts and his thumbs began tracing feather-light circles around my nipples.

"Let me inside you, ñi piuque."

I draped my arms around his shoulders and arched toward him. My eyes drifted closed, and I almost forgot that we were not alone in the house. Until a particularly load moan and the wet sound of flesh slapping rhythmically against flesh from across the hall reminded me that Seth and Anjali were also here. And that no matter how much I wanted Nahuel, I was still way more inhibited than my baby brother apparently was.

I tried to swallow my groan as Nahuel lowered his mouth to my breasts and his fingers delved under the legs of my shorts. His breathing grew ragged when his fingers discovered I was already soaking wet. He gripped the waistband of my shorts and underwear and slid them both down my legs.

"Baby, stop. I can't," I whined. "I just can't. Not with them here."

Nahuel was off the floor in a second. In the next instant, he'd swaddled me in the comforter like an infant, scooped me up and was out my bedroom door. Still carrying me, he ghosted through the living room and slipped out the kitchen door. Maybe I should have demanded he put me down, or at least tell me where he was taking me. But the truth was I didn't care at all, as long as it was somewhere that we could be alone.

When he reached the driveway, he began to run at full vampire speed. Somehow, I always managed to forget how incredibly fast and strong he was. After a few moments of trying to make sense of the blurring scenery around us, I just gave up, snuggled my face into the crook of his neck, and closed my eyes.

I didn't open them again until his pace slowed and I felt the pavement beneath his feet morph into sand. He'd brought us to La Push. While the early days of autumn were still warm on the Olympic Peninsula, the nights were already growing cold. A breeze off the ocean made the beach even colder at night. While the temperature wouldn't faze Nahuel or me, there was no way any normal human would be on the beach in this chill and at this hour. But I wanted him so badly, I wouldn't have cared if the entire tribal council erected a prayer ring around us.

He lowered my feet to the sand, and I realized he'd brought me to the exact outcropping of rock where I'd found him broken, alone and suicidal a month ago. He peeled the comforter from around my body, shook it out and knelt to spread it over the sand. Before he was done, I was beside him, helping him smooth our makeshift bed. I finished flipping over a corner of the comforter and turned back to him.

His teak eyes were locked on my naked breasts, and his hard-on was already flying under full sail, so to speak.

I felt smugly satisfied. Even after spending so many hours in the past few days becoming intimately acquainted with my body, Nahuel still found my tits mesmerizing. I must have made some sound of amusement, because his eyes flashed to my face, widening slightly when he caught my smirk.

He grinned ruefully, silently acknowledging the power my body held over his. Then he upped the ante by abruptly shoving his boxers down his thighs. Now it was my turn to gape.

Before I phased the first time and started running with a pack of testosterone-crazed male wolves, I'd actually had girlfriends, like a normal woman. Over the years, I'd heard more than one of my female friends rhapsodize about the grandeur of her boyfriend's dick. I'd secretly thought they were all morons.

I'd seen my share of pictures, and I'd decided the male organ was funny looking at best and downright ugly at worst. Even after discovering the joys of sex with Sam, I'd kept my opinion that how it looked was not the appealing aspect of a guy's johnson.

Still, it didn't surprise me at all that I found Nahuel's erection beautiful. Everything about him drew me in, like the gravity of the sun plucking a helpless meteor from its orbit. As my fingers closed around him, I idly wondered if that poor, powerless meteor was as eager to incinerate in the sun's flame as I was to lose myself in Nahuel's sensual heat.

His entire body began to quake the moment I touched him. Still on my knees, I slid closer to him on the blanket, my hand never faltering in its slow, firm rhythm. I brushed my nose along the chiseled curve of his jaw, silently offering him my lips. His mouth seized mine roughly, evoking memories of the first time he'd kissed me on this very beach.

Of course, my vamp-boy was incapable of not touching me, and while my hand drove his excitement higher, his were roaming over my sides, my back, my breasts. I couldn't decide which I found more stimulating, the tremors in his hands as they touched me, or the way his hips bucked forward with every stroke of my hand. I felt incredibly powerful and sensual knowing that I could make him lose control so easily.

I was working his hard, heated flesh with both hands now, thrilled that I really did need both to do the job right. His groans and gasps were the sweetest symphony I'd ever heard. He'd brought me here with the intention of helping me escape for a while from what was bothering me. But suddenly, I wanted to push him over the edge, to give him this ecstasy. I wanted it even more than I wanted to feel him inside me.

"Let go, baby," I urged, quickening my pace and looking up to study his face. His head was titled back, his spine was arched and his eyes were clenched shut. He was clearly struggling to hold back his climax, and I felt a twinge of irritation. I wanted to be in control of his body at this moment. There was so much I couldn't control in our lives, that I was damned if I wanted to relinquish this sliver of real power, even to him.

"Come for me, baby," I demanded, raising my voice to compete with the crashing of the waves behind us. Thinking I wasn't going to get what I wanted, I began to kiss my way down his stomach with every intention of using my mouth to seal the deal.

When my lips reached the vicinity of my hands, his head snapped down and his eyes popped open, glittering diamond hard in the moonlight. I had no idea how the man could form a single coherent thought, let alone string it into a sentence, but a snarl ripped through his gritted teeth.

"Inside you," he growled.

It wasn't the first time he'd used that damned vampire speed on me. Before the tingling nerve endings in my hands could tell my brain that they were empty, he'd pulled me onto his lap. Suddenly an entirely different part of my body was reporting to my short-circuiting nervous system the exact location of Nahuel's beautiful hard-on. My entire body tightened around his erection as he pushed into me, slamming my pelvis down on his.

Acting entirely on their own volition, my legs wrapped around his back and crossed at the ankles. As I quivered in his arms, trying to keep control of my own body, he levered his legs up behind me so that I was sandwiched between his chest and thighs. The change in position pushed him even deeper.

I'd been wet and ready for him since he'd felt me up in my room earlier in the night. My body was primed, and the bastard knew it. His hot, powerful hands gripped my hips, forcing me to circle and grind against him. The orgasm I'd been trying to wring out of him seconds ago roared through me almost instantly. I was that fucking helpless meteor again, plunging blindly, fatally, into the heart of the sun, offering up my own paltry flame to be consumed by this all-powerful heat that was as old as time, as transcendent as the face of God.

As my awareness ignited and my body sizzled, I heard my imprint cry out. He flooded me with the heat of his release. The erotic thrill of knowing he would remain a part of me, even when our bodies separated, hurtled me into a second mind-numbing climax even fierier than the first.

When the conflagration finally died down to a mere smolder, I found myself entirely draped around Nahuel's sweat-slicked body. I felt limp and boneless, incapable of moving a muscle even if I'd wanted too.

"Oh my god," I sighed, my head lolling carelessly on his broad shoulder. "How do you do that to me every time?"

Of course, in typical Nahuel fashion, he didn't pull out of my body and his hands were caressing lazy patterns over my back. "Do what, ñi piuque?"

"Make me lose control," I accused, pushing back to glare at him. I was feeling playful, not pissed, and he knew me well enough by now to correctly interpret my mood.

"I brought you here to make you feel good," he replied, sliding both big hands up my back to tangle his fingers in the hair at my nape. He gently tugged my head back so he could have access to my throat. "I did not want to end things so quickly before you were satisfied."

His lips moved down my neck to my collar bone. "Besides," he grumbled against my damp skin, "I have had one hundred and fifty years of gratifying myself with my own hand. I refuse to waste even one opportunity to spend myself inside your body."

I snickered into his hair, savoring his delectable scent. How the hell can he still smell so incredible when the man is bathed in sweat?

"Are you seriously saying you'll refuse all future offers of getting off with a hand job or blow job?" I teased.

"Yes," he replied, immediately and emphatically. When I outright laughed in his face, he relented slightly.

"Perhaps I will feel differently in fifty years. We can revisit the idea at that time," he promised magnanimously. "Meanwhile …" Without withdrawing, he rocked forward and rolled me onto my back beneath him in a single fluid motion. "… I would like to take advantage of this opportunity again."

I'd started laughing when he flipped me onto my back, but when I felt him growing hard inside me again, my snickers choked off in a gasp. I wanted to tell him something before we moved on to round two, and from the feel of things I needed to talk fast.

I wove my fingers into his hair and gripped tightly to capture his attention. His teak eyes met mine, curiosity flickering in their golden depths.

"Nahuel, thank you for this. You were right that something's been bothering me today. I want you to know that it's nothing you did or said that upset me. I do want to talk to you about it. I'm just not feeling ready yet. Is that alright?"

His smile was sweet and tender. "Of course." He pressed a soft kiss to my lips at the same time that he nudged his hips forward, reminding me he wasn't finished with me yet tonight. It was the kind of move that pretty much ensured I'd be completely off-guard and barely able to focus on what he said next.

"I am ready to tell you what I was thinking about while you slept tonight."

His too-innocent eyes and distractingly sneaky, shallow thrusts should have tipped me off that he was up to something. But of course, I was totally dick-whipped by this man and I walked right into it.

"What were you thinking about, baby?" I squeaked out the last word as his hips slowly recoiled, drawing his length almost completely out of me. My breath stuttered into craven panting when he quickly slid back in, all the way, as deeply as he could go before my body just couldn't fit any more of him.

"I was thinking that I would like for us to do what Charlie and Sue plan to do."

What? What the hell is he talking about? Does he mean he wants to go with the Cullens? Or …

Coherent thought disintegrated as he drew my left knee up, draping that calf over his right shoulder so he could have even better access. He withdrew and pumped into me powerfully again.

"I want to marry you."

Christ on a crutch.