His hand came up to her jaw, tilting her face toward his. His mouth was warm against hers, tasting of the evening, and the particular salt of a man who'd spent the day on the water. The kiss was slow at first. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that saidI heard every word you just said and this is my answer.
Then his hand slid from her jaw to her neck, tightening, and the slow turned into something else. She pressed into him, her hands fisting in the front of his jacket, pulling him closer, and she could feel the growl building in his chest before she heard it. Low, vibrating through her own body where they were pressed together. His other hand found her waist, gripped hard, and pulled her onto his lap.
She straddled him on the flat rock with the lake spread out behind them, her knees on either side of his hips, her hands in his hair. He kissed her neck, her collarbone, the spot that made her grind against him involuntarily. He hardened beneath her, the length of him pressing against her through the fabric, and the heat that flooded through her was immediate, total, the kind that wiped out every thought except more.
35
RAFE
She was in his lap with her hands in his hair and the taste of her mouth on his tongue and his wolf was screaming.
Everything about her was heat. Her thighs gripping his hips, her weight shifting against him as she rocked forward, her fingers pulling at his hair with a roughness that went straight to his cock. He was hard against her, straining through the denim, and every time she ground down against him the friction blurred his thinking by another degree.
He kissed her neck. Her collarbone. Found the spot below her ear that made her gasp and hips buck involuntarily, and the sound she made was enough to nearly end the conversation before it started. His hands were on her waist, his thumbs pressing against the bare skin where her shirt had ridden up, and the warmth of her under his palms was making it very difficult to do the thing he knew he had to do.
He pulled back. She made a sound of protest that almost broke him.
"Wait," he said. "Isla. Wait."
"If you tell me to stop I won’t just push you into this lake."
"I'm not telling you to stop." He held her face in both hands. Her eyes were dark, pupils blown, her lips swollen from kissing. The starlight caught the silver in her hair. She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. His wolf was howling at him to stop talking, to take her, but he needed thirty seconds of coherent thought before that happened. "I need to tell you something first."
"You already told me you loved me."
"This is different." He kept his hands on her face. Steady. Holding her eyes. "If we do this tonight, I need you to know what I am and what I'll want. Because my wolf is closer to the surface than it's ever been with you and if I don't say this now, I won't be able to say it later."
She went still in his lap. Her hands stayed in his hair but her grip softened. She was listening.
"The mating mark," he said. "I told you about it at your kitchen table. Recognition doesn't equal bond. The bond only exists when both people choose it. When it happens, it happens during intimacy. A bite, placed here." He touched the curve where her neck met her shoulder, his fingers tracing the skin so lightly she shivered. "It carries my essence into your blood. Once it's done, the connection is permanent. You feel what I feel. My presence, my emotional state, a pull toward me when we're apart. It goes both ways. I'd carry you the same."
"And it can't be undone."
"No."
"You're asking my permission."
"I'm asking you to understand what it means before you give it. Because once I'm inside you with my wolf this close to the surface, I may not have the control to hold back. I need your yes now, clear, before we go further. Or I need your no and I'll hold the wolf down if it kills me."
Her hands moved from his hair to his jaw. She held his face the way he was holding hers.
"Yes, Rafe."
"You're sure."
"I've never been more sure of anything." She kissed him. Soft. Brief. Her lips barely touching his. "Mark me."
His wolf surged so hard his vision went gold at the edges. He pulled her shirt over her head and she helped, arms up, the fabric clearing and dropping somewhere on the rock behind her. Her bra followed, her fingers quick on the clasp, and then she was bare from the waist up in the starlight, her skin luminous, her breasts rising with each breath. He put his mouth on her. Kissed the curve of one breast, then the other, his tongue tracing the underside while his hand cupped the weight of her. Her nipple hardened against his lips and he drew it into his mouth, sucking, grazing with his teeth until her back arched and her hips rolled against him hard enough that he groaned against her skin.
She worked his jacket off his shoulders. Pulled his shirt up. He broke contact with her long enough to yank it over his head, and when their bare chests pressed together the skin-on-skin contact was electric, her warmth against his, her heartbeat rapid where her breast flattened against his chest.
She reached between them. Got his belt open, his zipper down, her hand inside his jeans. When her fingers wrapped around him, firm, knowing, he dropped his head to her shoulder and let the groan roll through him. She stroked him, her grip tight, her thumb sweeping over the head on each upstroke, spreading the wetness that was already there.
"I need you," she said against his ear. "Right here. Right now."
He lifted her. She rose on her knees while he shoved his jeans down far enough to free himself, then worked her pants andunderwear down one leg while she kicked them off the other. It was ungraceful, the mechanics of two people who couldn't wait long enough to do this properly. She settled back onto his lap, bare, the cool night air on her skin, and when she sank down against him, the slick heat of her pressed along his length, he had to lock every muscle in his body to keep from thrusting up into her.
She was soaked. He could feel it, the wet heat of her coating him where their bodies pressed together, and the knowledge that her body wanted him this badly, that she was this ready for him, made him as hard as a rock.
