I pull out at the edge, fist my cock, and finish on her back—thick ropes of it across the dimples above her ass, up her spine, my scent going back where the water stole it. The sound that comes out of me is long and low and has nothing to do with the man.
She stays bent over the stone, catching her breath, while I drag my fingers through it and work it into her skin. Up her spine. The back of her neck.
She turns her head against the slate. “What are you doing?”
“You smelled like pool water.”
A laugh breaks out of her, breathless. “So now I smell like bear cum?”
“Like me.” I turn her over.
She settles onto her back across the slate, hissing at the cold, pale against the dark stone and flushed everywhere else. I put a hand flat on her belly and run it up—between her breasts, around one, my thumb dragging over her nipple until her spine bows off the rock. Then back down, the heel of my hand pressing low over her mound, where she’s swollen and open from me.
“That hurt?”
“In all the best ways.” She says it watching my face.
I’m hard again. I barely went soft—the rut doesn’t care what it’s already had, and with her laid out like this, neither do I. She reads it in me and spreads her thighs wide across the stone. Plain as words.
“More,” she whispers.
I tilt her hips up in my hands and push back into her, and it’s tight again, almost too much again, and again she takes it all and asks for more with her body. I watch where we meet, where she stretches around me. She watches me watch it.
“We shouldn’t fit,” she whispers. Her eyes come up to mine. “But we do.”
“Yeah,” I say, and it isn’t enough, but I don’t have more words in me right now.
She drives up off the stone to take me deeper, arms thrown out across the slate, and when I’m buried to the root she comes apart—head thrown back, her voice shredded.
“Decker—yes—don’t stop—”
I put my thumb on her clit and give her the last of it hard, and she goes over again. I go with her, bent down over her body with one hand braced by her head and choking out her name.
When I pull out, she reaches between her legs, wets her fingers in the mess of us, and draws them up her belly and over her chest—slow, eyes locked on mine the whole way. Marking herself with me.
It’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever watched. And under the wreck of it, a fact settles in and stays: I’m never letting her out of this. Whatever it takes.
Her hand comes to rest between her thighs, and she winces, then gives me a slow, wicked look. “You’ve ruined me, bear.”
I smile at that, then I pull her up off the stone and into my chest, both arms around her, and she folds in against me, soft and warm and breathing deep. My hands cover most of her back. All over again I’m aware of how easily the world could break her, and how it’s not going to. Not while I’m breathing.
“No, sweetheart,” I tell her. “You’ve ruined me.”
She huffs against my chest and stays.
The bear goes quiet for the first time since the call—sated, scent-settled, her heartbeat slowing against my ribs. And where the rut was, there’s something else now, lower and steadier, and it unsettles me more than the wanting ever did. I’d put myself between her and anything with breath in it. I’d tear this mountain down first.
She tips her head back. “You went quiet.”
“I do that.”
“Not like this.” She studies my face, hunting for the thing out of place. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
My jaw locks. She catches it. Of course she catches it.
Her sister isn’t waiting in a cell for a door to open. She’s being bled, somewhere along a route that tonight grew towers and a direction, and one wrong move turns her from found into finished. And the same blood runs in the woman standing in my arms with my scent worked into her skin. If she knew what it’s worth, she’d be out there, handing herself over.
Not gonna happen.
