“Stop.” Her voice is quiet. Hard. “Stop telling me what you are. I know what you are. I’ve known since the moment they brought you to my quarters for healing.”
Her eyes hold mine. The brown is dark in the low light, the pupils wide.
“Take what you need from me,” she says.
The words hit my chest like a hand pressed flat.
“I mean it,” she says. “You’ve had nothing that was yours. No name, no body, no choice. Everything taken, everything decided for you.” Her hand slides from my neck to my jaw. “I’m givingthis to you. Take what you need. I’m not afraid of anything you might do.”
My wolf surges. The man holds—barely—because the man needs to understand what she’s offering before the wolf accepts it.
“Sable,” I whisper.
Before she can respond, I kiss her.
Not carefully. I kiss her the way the wolf wants to, my hand twisting into her hair, pulling her head back, my mouth on hers hard enough that she makes a sound against my teeth. A good sound. The kind that makes my stomach tighten and my hips press forward.
“Mmmm…” she moans against my mouth. Her hands grip my shoulders, pulling me in. Her nails dig through the borrowed shirt, and the sting of it is bright, clean, nothing like the pain I know. This pain belongs to her. I want more of it.
I back her toward the bed. Her calves hit the frame, and she sits. I follow her down, one knee on the mattress, my mouth never leaving hers. The jacket she’s been wearing—the tactical jacket, too big, zipped to her throat—is between us. I reach for the zipper.
My hand is steady. The zipper goes down, and the jacket opens, and she’s bare underneath. The sight of her skin in the yellow light makes my breath stop.
I know her body. I’ve watched it move through locked rooms and containment cells and mountain snow. She bathed me, shaved me, dressed my wounds with hands that knew every scar. But I’ve never seen her like this: on her back on a motel bed, looking up at me with her hair spread on the quilted spread and her chest rising fast.
My mouth finds her throat. The skin there is warm, thin, and I can feel her pulse against my lips. Fast. Matching mine. My teethscrape the tendon, and she arches. The sound she makes runs through my chest and down my spine.
I move lower. Her collarbone. The hollow between her breasts. The curve of her ribs. I run the tip of my tongue between each one, feeling her twitch, feeling the gooseflesh rise on her silken skin.
Her hand is in my hair. Not guiding. Gripping. Letting me go where I want, how I want, because she told me to take what I need, and what I need is every inch of her that I was too drugged, too broken to properly learn the first time.
I pull the jacket off her arms. She lifts to help. The shirt I’m wearing goes next; she strips it over my head with efficient hands, and then her palms are on my chest, my shoulders, the scars she’s touched a hundred times with gauze and antiseptic.
Now her hands are just hands. On a man’s body. In a room with a locked door and no glass.
“Come here,” she says.
I go. My body covers hers, and the full-length contact is a shock, the way it was in the cave—skin on skin, her heat against mine. My mouth finds hers again, and her legs open around my hips, and the borrowed pants are the only thing between us.
“These need to go.” Her voice is hoarse. She reaches for my waistband. Her fingers are efficient. She doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t slow down. She pushes the pants down, and I kick them off, and then there’s nothing.
Just us. Just skin.
I settle between her thighs. The heat of her is against me, the slick warmth where her body is ready, and my hips rock forward without permission; not entering, pressing, the length of my shaft sliding against her wet flesh. She inhales. Short. Sharp.
“Yes,” she says. “Like that.”
I do it again. Slower. Watching her face. The way her eyes half-close, the way her lips part, the way her hips lift to meet mine.My wolf is close to the surface—closer than he should be—but he’s not fighting the man for control. He’s with me. Both of us focused on the same thing: the woman underneath us and the sounds she makes when we move.
I reach between us. Find her furred mound with my fingers. She’s wet, swollen, and when I touch her clit, her whole body jerks.
“There,” she manages.
I stay there. My fingers move with patience, reading her response, adjusting pressure, learning the rhythm her body wants. She’s gripping my forearm, her nails leaving marks. When her breathing fractures, I slide a finger inside her, curling, pressing the spot that makes her hips come off the mattress.
“Stop holding back,” she says. Her voice is rough. Her eyes are open, locked on mine. “I told you. Take what you need.”
I take.
