No warning. No build. One second I’m losing myself in her, and the next, a drive comes up through me with one target: the side of her neck, low, where it meets her shoulder. Teeth in. Deep. Held until it’s done and can’t be undone.
Mark her.
The force of it locks my jaw. It’s not a want. Wants can be refused. This is my whole body already moving toward one spot on her skin, and I’m a half-second from putting my mouth there.
I wrench back.
Off her. Up. I sit on the edge of the cot with my hands braced on my knees and breathe like I’ve run the mountain.
Nothing like it has ever come up in me. Not with any female. Not once. Not close. I’ve heard males talk about the drive to mark—how it takes you, how there’s no arguing with it—and I decided it was something that happens to other people. I’m solitary. Built that way. Chose it.
I’ve known this woman days.
Days. And the bear is ready to put a claim in her skin that outlasts both of us.
Her hands have gone still. She’s reading me. I can feel it without looking.
“Decker.”
“Yeah.”
“What—?”
“Give me a second.”
She nods silently. The quiet sits heavy.
I get off the cot and put stone floor under my feet. Cold air on bare skin. It doesn’t touch the heat, and it doesn’t touch the other thing either. The urge hasn’t gone. It’s pacing.
She sits up behind me. When I turn, the fur has fallen off her shoulders, and she’s left it there, pooled around her hips, breasts in sweet silhouette. She watches me, working me out.
“It isn’t that I don’t want you,” I say.
She waits.
“The bear.” I look past her at the wall, because looking at her isn’t helping. “There’s a thing it—” I stop, not sure how much of this I can tell her. That the bear wants to claim her, mark her, and keep her as his own. It’s too much. My thumb presses hard into the stone shelf. “Things are complicated right now, and…” I make myself stop there. “You’re dealing with a lot, and I don’t want to be the thing that adds to it. When this happens, I want it to be for the right reasons, and I want you to be sure.”
Silence.
“You’re not saying no,” she says.
“I’m saying not yet.”
She takes that in. Then she reaches for the fur and draws it up over her shoulders.
“That’s the most words you’ve used all week,” she says. “Are you going to start talking like a normal person now?”
“Don’t count on it.”
She gives me a little smile, and I melt just a little.
There’s more I didn’t say. That the thing the bear wants scares me more than the dragon did, because the dragon I understood.
This thing that’s happening... This, I don’t understand.
No, that’s not it. I understand it perfectly.
I just don’t understand how it could happen to me.
