Page 40 of Guarded By The Alpha

"Nova." His voice was wrecked. "Say it again."

"Mine."

He made that inhuman sound again.

His hands found the hem of my shirt and then it was gone, and his mouth was at my collarbone, my sternum, the curve of my breast. I arched into him and felt his control slipping—the careful discipline he kept around me fracturing at the edges.

"I've been—" He broke off, his mouth at my shoulder, exactly where the mark-site pulsed with heat. "Since the warehouse. Since before I had any right to want this."

"I know."

"The bond isn't—it doesn't make me feel this. It just shows me what was already there."

His hand slid between my thighs and I stopped being able to form words.

The cold rooftop beneath me. The heat of his body above me. His fingers working me through fabric first, then skin, then nothing at all—methodical, devastatingly attentive, reading my responses like he read everything else.

"There," I managed. "Right⁠—"

"I know."

He did know. He knew exactly where, exactly how much pressure, exactly when to slow down and when to speed up. He brought me to the edge and held me there, his mouth at my throat, his voice low and certain in my ear.

"Come for me."

I shattered.

He caught me through it, his hands steady, his mouth gentle now where it hadn't been before. I was still trembling when I reached for him, pulling at his waistband, needing him closer, needing him everywhere.

"Nova—"

"Don't stop."

He didn't stop.

When he pushed inside me, we both went still for a moment that felt like forever—the completion of something that had been building since a warehouse on a Tuesday night, since a corridor outside a medical bay, since every moment we'd spent circling each other while the world tried to pull us apart.

Then he moved, and there was nothing left but this.

His rhythm was controlled at first—that discipline he couldn't quite let go of even now. But I pulled him closer, deeper, said his name against his jaw in a way that made something in him snap.

After that it was not controlled at all.

The bond between us sharpened into something that felt less like gravity and more like completion. I could feel the edges of his feeling pressing against mine—relief so large it shook him, and beneath it something that was beginning to know it was loved.

He said my name at the end. Wrecked. Reverent. Like it was the only word he was sure of anymore.

He stayed over me in the cold air with his forehead against mine and his breathing unsteady.

Through the bond—warm and present and alive between us—I felt what he'd been carrying alone. The terror of almost losing me. The weight of every time he hadn't been able to save someone. The profound disorientation of a man who'd built his life around being the one who protects, finally having someone choose him back.

I put my hand flat against his chest.

His heart. Steady. Certain.

Here.

Gideon's comm broke the quiet with a two-word alert in Roan's earpiece.