Page 52 of Legacy Elite

"Which rib?"

"The right ones. All the right ones."

"Okay." He's up on one arm. "Okay, hang on—"

"If you say we should stop I will end you."

"I wasn't going to say that." He gets an arm under my knee and shifts me over onto my good side, and comes in behind me, chest against my back, and drapes his whole weight along behind me. "Better?"

"Better."

"Yeah?"

"Yes, Torres—"

He pushes into me and we both stop talking.

It's slow for about three seconds, which is all the patience either of us has, and then his arm locks low around my waist — carefully, which I notice and can't do anything about because his mouth is on the back of my neck and I'm already coming apart.

"Don't stop."

"Not going to."

"Don't stop, don't stop—"

I come with his arm crushed around me and my hand fisted in the sheet, and I hear him say my name, wrecked, into my hair, and then he goes too, hard, hips stuttering against me, his arm tightening around me.

Afterward neither of us moves for a long time.

He's still curled around my back with his face somewhere in my hair and his hand resting flat on my stomach, and all I can hear is my heartbeat thundering and us breathing.

Eventually he props up on an elbow and starts examining me, because he can't help it. His thumb finds a mark on my hip. Then another on my upper arm.

"You're going back out there in the morning?"

"First thing."

He puts his mouth on the bruise on my arm, once.

"You really felt it?" he says. "Your wolf."

"Yeah."

And it comes out differently than it did earlier, because earlier I was furious about it, and now I'm not.

I found it again.

"Then you'll get there," Torres says.

"Voss said basically the same thing."

"Yeah, but you like me more."

"That's true." I turn over — carefully — and put my face in his shoulder.

He gets an arm around me.

Then he reaches over my head, picks my alarm clock up off the nightstand, looks at it, and sets it down again.