Page 48 of Guarded By The Alpha

She said it again. Right against my throat. "Mine."

My whole body shuddered with the effort of taking it in.

I lifted her onto the desk, files going to the floor unnoticed. Her legs wrapped around me, pulling me closer, and the bond between us sang with the specific frequency of two people who'd stopped pretending they had time to waste.

I came into her slowly. Watched her face as I did—the way her eyes went half-lidded, the way her breath caught, the way the mark at her shoulder pulsed with warmth as our bodies joined the way the bond already had.

"Roan." My name in her mouth. Not a question. A claim.

I set a rhythm that was deliberate, thorough, built to take her apart piece by piece and learn every sound she made along the way. She met me stroke for stroke, her nails at my shoulders, her hips rising to meet mine with the confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and had stopped apologizing for wanting it.

"Look at me," I said.

She did. Gray-blue eyes that had never once flinched from what I was, holding mine as I moved inside her. The bond carried everything between us—sensation and feeling tangled together until I couldn't tell where I ended and she began.

I felt her getting close. The way her body tightened around me, the way her breath shortened, the way the bond pulsed with building pressure.

"Come for me," I said, and she did.

Her climax hit her with a sound that bypassed every defense she'd ever built, her body arching beneath me as the bond amplified everything—I felt her pleasure through the connection, felt it resonate in my own chest, and the loop of it nearly undid me.

I followed her over the edge with her name on my lips. Said it twice, low, like it was the word that held everything else. The mark at her shoulder flared warm and certain as I spilled inside her, and the bond settled into something that felt less like gravity and more like completion.

Afterward, she traced the scar along my forearm—the one I'd never explained to anyone. I let her. The telling of it sat in my chest alongside everything else she'd seen tonight: the wolf, the restraint, the specific shape of a man who'd built his life around being the one who protects and had never expected anyone to choose him back.

"How did you get this?" she asked.

"Six years ago. Someone I couldn't save."

She didn't ask for details. She traced the scar's length with her fingertip and said, "You carry it."

"Yes."

"Show me the rest of what you carry. Eventually. When you're ready."

I breathed out slowly. Through the bond, I felt her certainty—not demanding, not pushing, simply present. Waiting.

"Yes," I said again.

Neither of us slept.

We lay in the narrow bed as the sky began to change color at the east window, her shoulder marked and my hands finally still. The bond was warm between us—permanent, present, the specific quality of something that had been straining toward this for ten days and had finally arrived.

I could feel my own waking attention through the connection—the sweep my mind ran even in stillness, marking exits and threats and the location of everyone I was protecting. And at the bottom of all of it, underneath every layer of command and responsibility, a certainty that was simply her.

She was the last thing I checked. The thing I checked last because it was the thing I most needed to confirm was still there.

"The contingency," she said eventually, her voice quiet in the changing dark.

I shifted—not pulling away, but turning toward the problem the way I always did. "We'll meet it."

Not I'll handle it. We.

She noticed. I felt her notice through the bond—the specific weight of that word landing in her chest.

She put her hand over her mark and the bond pulsed in answer: warm, certain, permanent.

At 0530, Gideon's alert hit the comm.