She laughs.
Genuine and quick, then her hands are on mine, lifting them off her, stepping sideways out of my hold. She turns, catches both my wrists, presses my hands together while she looks up at me.
“No,” she says. “I’m a little sore. You have had me four times since we woke up.”
“I’m aware.”
“You’re insatiable.” She says it like a fact, not a complaint. “Are you always like this?”
“No.” I step back. She lets my wrists go. “Only in the rut.”
Might as well tell her.
“The rut?” She looks at me. “I don’t know what that is.”
I find the edge of stone beside the shelf and sit. She stays standing, arms folded.
“Bear males rut annually,” I say. “A week, sometimes less. It’s a drive—not something I’d choose. It just runs. The urge to takea female to den. Keep her there.” I pause. “Take her again and again until it eases.”
She turns that over. “Like a wolf’s heat.”
“Similar idea. Different mechanism. Wolf heat is the female’s cycle. This is the male’s version. The compulsion is mine, not yours.”
“What do she-bears feel?”
“They become receptive,” I say. “But the pull to den, to keep going—that belongs to the male. She-bears don’t experience it the same way.”
She takes this in, quiet for a moment. “So any female could trigger it? Any bear female that happened to be nearby?”
“No.” The word comes flat. “It doesn’t work that way. It fixes on one female. Not just any—the one it’s running for. That’s the only one the male wants.”
She goes quiet. “And for you, right now?”
“You,” I say. “Only you.”
The truth locks in as I say it.
She holds that. Then: “And when I said sore. You stopped.”
“I would never hurt you, Grace.”
“But the rut thing… It’s still running?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes track down to my still-hard cock and back up. She isn’t coy about it—she just noticed, and she looked.
“Right,” she says. A pause. Then: “I need an hour before I’m up for another round. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything.” She looks at me. “I’m not going to let my bear go needing when I can do something about it.”
Her bear.
The words go through me. Two words—my bear—and she didn’t notice she’d said them. She wasn’t claiming me on purpose. She didn’t know it was already done. The bear settles, still and warm, around the two words.
She’s already moving toward me, reading whatever’s on my face as agreement, which I suppose it is.
“Grace—”
“Don’t overthink it.” She steps between my knees. Even with me sitting, her face comes to my chest—she has to tip her chin up to look me in the eye. She sets both hands flat against my belly and looks up at me. “I want to.”
