It feels like I’ve claimed her while she’s claimed me at the same time. She’s been marked by me in a temporary sense, but this is still entirely and fiercelyherdominion. And the thing that gets me, the thing my photographic memory will preserve in crystalline detail until the day I die, isn’t the act itself.
It’s that shechosethis. Choseme.
My legs are still shaking when she rises. I catch her waist and pull her against me before she’s fully upright, my arms wrapping around her, her bare skin pressed flush against mine from chest to hip. She’s warm — impossibly, feverishly warm.
Rhiannon leans into me, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, and for three breaths we just stand there, skin to skin, pulse to pulse.
Her arousal radiates off her like heat from sunbaked stone. The mate bond — this impossible thread binding us together — carries it straight into my chest. Iknowher wanting. But it’s not just something I recognize in her. It’s a physical ache that isn’t mine but exists within me.
The thoughtful part of my brain, the part that never fully shuts off even when the rest of me is all but obliterated, does the math on how I should respond.Give her what she deserves.
I walk her backward toward the bed. She lets me. That alone is a small gift I don’t take for granted.
When the backs of her knees hit the mattress, I ease her down and settle over her, my weight propped up on my forearms. Her dark hair fans out across the pillow, and I lower my mouth to her throat, pressing an open kiss against the pulse point that jumps under my lips.
“The first time I saw you, you had me pinned against a wall in Thea’s apartment. Your hand was around my throat. I wasgenuinely afraid you were going to kill me.” I kiss the cluster of freckles that scatter across her breasts like a constellation I’ve already mapped. “And the entire time, the only thing I could think was that you were the most extraordinary woman I’d ever seen.”
A laugh escapes her — short, startled, genuine. There’s a note of surprise in her laughter, like I’ve picked a lock she didn’t remember she’d thrown away the key for. Thesoundof her laughter, though—I’ve heard music in two worlds, and nothing in either one comes close.
“You’re insane,” she says.
“Probably.” My mouth closes around her nipple, my tongue circling the stiffened peak. “But I’m accurate.”
There’s no need to rush. Not tonight. I explore each little detail, recalling the difference between what makes her sigh and what makes her gasp. When I find the places that undo her, I lock them into my memory.
Then, I shift lower.
My hands slide down her hips, my thumbs pressing into the hollows of her inner thighs, spreading her open. She lets me settle between her legs and press my mouth against her.
The first stroke of my tongue draws a sound from her that hardens my cock all over again.
I remember everything from that night by the pond: the exact rhythm and pressure and angle that made her grip the earth with both hands while I fucked her. For once in my life, my memory is a genuine superpower.
I use every piece of it.
My tongue works in tight, patient circles around her clit while two fingers slide inside her, curling forward against the spot that made her come apart under the trees. She’s so wet my fingers glide without resistance, and the heat of her —God, the heat — must be otherworldly.
Through the bond, I feel it. There’s an echo. Her pleasure flows into me like ink spreading through water, pooling low in my core and radiating outward. When my tongue flattens and drags upward, I feel the ghost of that pressure in my own body. A phantom sensation with no physical source, bright and disorienting.
It feeds back into her. I feelthattoo. The loop is building on itself, each circuit winding tighter.
Her claws puncture through the bedding with the sound of shredding fabric. The mattress beneath my palms thrums with the low, continuous growl rolling from her chest. Something territorial and satisfied, yethungryfor more, travels through my hands where they grip her hips. The vibration climbs up my forearms and seeps into my bones.
Her eyes blaze full amber when I glance up. It’s pure wolf, watching me from behind Rhiannon’s face with an intensity that should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
I curl my fingers harder. Press my tongue flat. Give her everything I remember and everything I’ve learned since.
“Ethan—” My name splinters in her throat, giving way to a sound that’s guttural and ancient, a sound that belongs to forests and moonlight and the space between human language and animal instinct.
She comes against my mouth with her claws buried in the ruined sheets and her back bowed off the mattress, and the orgasm cascades into me, a wave of sensation that isn’t mine but registers in my body as if it were.
It rolls through my nervous system and settles between my legs with an urgency that has me throbbing with the need for release again before the aftershocks have finished rippling through her thighs.
That’s not biologically possible, at least not for a human.
Interesting.The bond has changed my recovery time, ensuring I can match whatever she needs.
