I stop there a moment, just to look at her. In the den there was little time to look. There was the rut, and the cold, and one eye always on the entrance. Here there’s a locked door and nowhere either of us has to be, and I use it. I take in the line of her collarbone, the rise and fall of her breathing, the flush already starting up her chest.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I am.”
I go down on one knee for her boots. I unlace the left, work it off, then the right. She keeps her hand on my shoulder the whole time for balance and leaves it there after, warm through my shirt.
Her jeans next. I open the button, draw the zip down slow, and ease the denim over her hips, along with her panties. She braces a hand on my forearm and steps out of them, first one foot, then the other.
When I stand, she’s bare in the lamplight, and I make myself slow down again, because the animal in me wants to rush now and she deserves better than rushed.
I spend a minute just taking her in: the soft curves of her shoulders, the pert swell of her breasts, the line of her belly down to the curls over her pussy. I reach out and trace my fingertip over a tight pink nipple, and she sucks in a breath.
“You’re doing it again.” Her voice is taut.
“You’re so damned pretty,” I murmur, knowing that barely covers it.
She makes a sound of frustration and pushes me, both hands flat on my chest, walking me backward until my knees hit the bed.
“Sit, bear,” she says. “My turn to be in charge.”
I sit and kick off my boots. I pull my shirt over my head and let her push me back. Then she’s over me in the lamplight, knees either side of my hips, working my belt open with steady hands, and I lie there under my little wolf and let her have all of it.
This is new. Every time before this, I’ve been over her, around her, driving. The rut ran it that way, and I never asked if it should.
Now she’s undoing my jeans, working them down my legs and over my feet. She settles over my thighs, straddling me, hands roving over my chest and shoulders.
“You’re so damn pretty…for a Grizzly,” she teases. My chuckle is cut off when she reaches between us, wraps a warm hand around my shaft and guides me where she wants me. The bear has never been under anything in his life. He ought to be fighting this. He isn’t. He goes still and hot and lets her, because she’s the one deciding, and nothing in him wants to stop her.
She’s already slick when she lines me up. I feel the first give of her wet flesh against the head, and then she sinks down and takes me in by inches, and neither of us is quiet about it.
“God, Decker!” Her sound fills the room. It rolls out of her, no hand over her mouth, no teeth holding it back, and it hits me harder than the heat of her does. She’s tight going down. She works me deeper on each small drop of her hips, her breath catching every time she takes more.
When she’s seated completely, she goes still, palms flat on my chest, head dropped forward.
“Oh, that’s… That’s different like this.” Her chest is heaving, skin flushed pink.
“Deeper,” I manage. Her weight has me to the root, further than I get any other way. I feel every shift she makes clear up my spine.
“Yeah.” She rolls her hips once, testing, and gasps at what it does. “Yeah, it is.”
Then she rides me, and I get to watch.
She sets her own pace, and it isn’t mine. Slower. Deeper. Greedier, grinding down hard at the bottom of every stroke, chasing angles I couldn’t find for her. The light slides over her skin, over the sheen coming up on her chest and throat. Her breasts move with her rhythm. I bring my hands up to them, and she pushes into my palms without breaking stride.
Her sounds are raw and unrestrained; only I can hear them, and that makes them mine. I keep my hands on her, but I don’t steer. It costs me, but I still don’t steer. All those months she made herself small in these corridors, and here she is on top of me, taking exactly what she wants at exactly her speed. I could lie still under that all night.
“You’re watching me,” she breathes.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She plants her hands on my chest and moves harder, and the wet sound of it fills the space between us. “Watch.”
So I watch the climax climb into her by degrees. The flush spreading down her chest. The shake starting in her thighs where they grip my sides. Her rhythm going ragged, her mouth falling open. She drops down over me, hands in the bedding by my head, hair falling around us both, and rides out the last of it chasing her own finish. I feel her go tight around me a breath before it takes her.
She comes apart on me with a cry the empty rooms swallow whole.
“Decker!” she chokes out, clamping down in waves. That’s what ends me. I grip her hips and follow her over, spilling deep with a sound I don’t try to stop. It goes on and on, and when it finally lets us down, she sags onto my chest, boneless, both of us slick and breathing hard.
