Page 13 of Big Bad Wolf

Still, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give complete control over to a beast of Blackmoor because he thinks he can have it—and me.

CHAPTER 5

GIVE AND TAKE

“You don’t just…” I gesture vaguely between us, heat creeping up my neck as I try to find a way to explain something that feels very obvious to me and apparently not at all obvious to him. “You don’t just do whatever you want because you feel like it.”

His brow furrows, a low sound rumbling in his chest again. “Wolf wants Red.”

“I gathered that,” I mutter.

His gaze drops, following the line of my body in a way that makes my stomach flip despite itself, and then he looks back up at me, completely serious. “Red is mine. Wolf found her. He knows she is mate. The forest brought her to Wolf.”

There’s no hesitation to his words. He honestly believes that, because I promised to spend three days in the enchanted woods and he’s the beast that stumbled upon me, that makes me his… and if he wants me, he gets to take me.

Something about that should piss me off.

Something about that should make me push him away, remind him exactly how this works, remind myself that I am not about to get claimed by some half-feral wolf-man in a cabin in the middle of the woods.

Instead, my pulse pounds a little harder.

“That’s not—” How to make him understand? “That’s not how people work.”

“People?” he echoes.

“Humans,” I clarify. “You don’t get to just decide that someone is yours and then… you don’t get to take.”

His golden eyes darken at that, something shifting behind his eyes as he processes it.

“Take,” he repeats slowly.

“Yeah,” I say. “Take.”

He thinks about what I said for a moment, before he runs the back of his fingers along the side of my calf. “Not take,” he says, quieter now. “Give.”

My breath stutters.

Okay, true. He was trying to give me pleasure, but that’s not what I mean.

“That’s not—” I start, but the words falter when he dips his head, his tongue tracing a slow, deliberate path up my shin, past my knee, toward my thigh. The sensation has my back arching before I can stop it even as I say, “What are you doing?”

“Red likes it.”

I’m not Red, I’m Charlotte, but, fuck, I do.

It makes no sense, but my traitorous body is reacting to his every touch. The heat pooling low in my stomach is impossible to ignore now, a slow, steady burn that builds every time he caresses me, every time his mouth kisses my skin like he’s hungering for my taste in a way different from a wild animal.

That’s the man part of him, I guess. And so is the hard-headed way he’s just not listening to me.

“That doesn’t mean you get to keep going. I didn’t say you could.”

Wolf—and, yeah, I can see how his name is Wolf—goes still. Once again, he climbs up and off of me, resting on his big ol’ paws.

“Red says?”

Hang on… does he finally get it? Well, not the part where I corrected him that my name is Charlotte, not Red, but still…

I sit up, resting on my elbows. “Yeah. I say.”