The kind of hands that know exactly what they’re doing and do it without apology, mapping the curve of my waist, my ribs, traveling upward with a focus that makes me press harder into the tree behind me and reach for him at the same time.
“You’re incredible,” he says against my mouth, low and rough, like the words were dragged out of somewhere he keeps things he doesn’t usually say out loud. “You know that?”
“I’m a disaster,” I breathe the words back.
“Yeah.” His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, and I feel him smile against my skin. “My disaster.”
My palms press to his chest, warm, solid, marked with scars that feel like history under my hands, and I want to follow every one of them. The scar on his left shoulder is the one my fingers find first, tracing its ridge in the dark. He goes still for a half-second when I touch it, a barely perceptible pause, and the weight of what that scar represents settles between us without either of us naming it.
“Does it bother you?” I ask, my fingers resting over it. “That I’m touching it?”
“No.” His voice is quieter for a moment, stripped of everything else. “Nothing about you touching me bothers me, Charlie.”
His hand slides up my naked back. I haven’t been able to wear a bra since I got here, because it is stained with blood. The cold night air that meets my bared skin lasts about three seconds before his mouth replaces it. The sound I make is entirely undignified, and I do not care in the slightest. His hands find my hips, ripping off my shorts and panties with ease, his lycan strength making a small sound of surprise escape me as I stand naked before him.
My eyes instinctively drop to check out his cock, and I am not disappointed.
Rogue moves back toward me, his grip tightening on my hips with a force that would leave spectacular bruises on anything human, and does nothing to my vampire body except make every nerve I have stand at attention. He lifts me with a casual demonstration of lycan strength that should not be as appealing as it is, and my legs wrap around his hips and lock, the position bringing us flush together in a way that leaves absolutely no ambiguity about where this is going.
“Hold on,” he says, his voice a low command against my ear, and the authority in it sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, and tighten my legs around him to prove it.
The sound he makes at that is deeply satisfying.
He’s thick and warm where he presses against me, and when he thrusts forward, I breathe out a sound against the side of his throat that the trees probably hear. His answering sound is lower, rougher, the wolf in it unmistakable, and his hips pull back and drive forward again in a rhythm that is unhurried and devastating in equal measure.
The bark at my back, the cold air on my skin, and the scorching, overwhelming heat of him everywhere else create a collision of sensation that my vampire-sharpened nerves translate into something so vivid it borders on unbearable. Every nerve ending in my body is operating at a sensitivity I am only now beginning to understand the full implications of.
“R-Rogue.” His name comes out ragged, and I don’t try to smooth it out. There is no point pretending to be composed right now.
“I’ve got you.” The words are low, pressed against my temple, unhesitating. “I’ve got you, Charlie.” He moves, and I move with him, and the tree behind me doesn’t stand a chance. Bark splinters under the pressure of his hands, braced besidemy shoulders. My own fingers dig into the muscle of his back and leave marks that his lycan healing will close in minutes. The knowledge of that, the ability to hold on without managing myself, without throttling back, without the constant anxious monitoring of a body that might break under too much, loosens something in me that has been coiled tight since before the turning. My hips roll to meet him, and the rhythm between us sharpens, becomes something urgent and specific, and his breath against my temple turns ragged.
“Don’t hold back,” he says through his teeth. “Not with me. Never with me.”
“I’m not,” I manage, and prove it.
“Good girl.” The words come out guttural and low, scraped from somewhere primal in a way I was not prepared for.
“Say that again…” I growl, “… and I’ll bite you.”
“Charlotte.” His hips drive forward hard, slow and deliberate, making his point with considerably more eloquence than words. “Go ahead.”
My head bows back. My fangs have been down for the last four minutes, and I haven’t been pretending otherwise.
“That’s not the threat you think it is,” I tell him, breathless.
“Wasn’t meant as one.” His voice has gone rough in a way that tells me the man is losing ground to the wolf by the second, and he doesn’t sound remotely sorry about it. “Been waiting days, Charlie. I’m not in a hurry.”
“You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It is.” His forehead drops to mine, gold eyes burning through the dark from an inch away, and there is nothing calculated in them, nothing guarded, just the wolf, present and certain, and the man underneath it wearing the same expression. “Everything that’s mine is yours to take. You understand that?”
My insides clench at his words, my head bows forward in delight, and my fangs find the curve of his shoulder where it meets his neck, the thick muscle, and I sink in.
The taste of him runs through my veins, electrifying every nerve ending.
Not the bloodlust.
