His stomach tightens under my knuckles. Hard muscle, sudden flinch. I stop with my hand half under the fabric and make myself wait.
His eyes are wide, fixed on mine, and for a moment, the cave disappears from his face. Wherever he’s gone, it isn’t here. It isn’t with me.
So I give him stillness.
No pushing. No coaxing. No pretending I haven’t felt the way his body braced for harm.
Just my palm against his stomach and the fire working gold over his skin.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Yeah.” His voice is thick. “Just…not used to it.”
I keep my hand where it is until his breathing changes. Not calm exactly, but willing. His abdomen eases under my palm, one guarded inch at a time.
Then I push the shirt up.
He lifts his arms and lets me pull it over his head.
Firelight spills over him: scars, muscle, shadows, the dark line of hair disappearing beneath his waistband. I know this body by wound and fever and sedation charts. I know the map of damage they left behind, and the places where healing has begun to knit over it.
But I have never had him looking back at me while I touched him.
I press my palm to the center of his chest.
His heart slams against it.
Beneath the heartbeat, the other current wakes. I’ve felt traces of it before in sickroom silence and drugged sleep, but here, with his skin hot under my hand and his eyes open on mine, it rises with a different shape. Quieter. Deeper. Drawn toward me instead of pushing me away.
It travels through my wrist, up my arm, and settles low in my body.
I lean forward and press my mouth to his collarbone.
His breath hitches.
My lips move along the ridge of bone to his shoulder, and I feel his hand come up, hovering near my waist, not quite touching, the restraint costing him.
“Touch me,” I murmur against his skin.
His hand settles on my waist. His thumb finds the strip of bare skin above my waistband and moves there once, slowly enough to make my stomach tighten. The gentleness of it sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with cold.
I straighten and take his hand, guiding it to the top button of my shirt.
He understands before I say anything.
The first button opens under his fingers, and his knuckle brushes the hollow of my throat. He pauses there, watching my face, then moves to the next. Fabric loosens by inches. Firelight slips beneath cotton. His thumb follows the edge of my bra, not quite crossing it, and that single touch makes my breathing catch.
By the fourth button, my shirt hangs open, and his fingers are moving over the newly bared skin with the concentration of aman learning a language by touch: sternum, rib, the soft place between my breasts where my pulse seems to have moved.
By then, my breathing is ragged.
He pushes the shirt off my shoulders. It falls. The cold air hits my skin, and I shiver, but his hands are there, warm, broad, sliding up my arms and over my shoulders and down to the clasp at my back.
He undoes it. His hands are steady. When the fabric falls away, he goes still.
His eyes move over me. Not the wolf’s hard stare. A man looking at a woman he wants, and the naked hunger on his face makes my nipples tighten.
“You’re lovely,” he breathes, and I swallow hard.
