Page 29 of Claimed By The Tracker

"I know," I said. "I can feel it."

The admission wasn't small. Neither of us pretended it was.

We talked until the night thinned around us. She told me about the documents she'd found at nineteen—Gabriel Rowe's political correspondence, her name on a legal supernatural filing she'd never signed, the careful way she'd replaced every page exactly as she'd found it and said nothing, because she was nineteen and had no power she trusted enough to fight it. Nine years of carrying that alone.

I told her about the corruption case. The woman I'd tracked. The retrieval I'd finished before anyone told me the assignment was dirty, and what it did to a man to learn that his own instincts could be turned into a weapon by someone feeding him bad information. I'd stayed with the agency anyway. Taken every contract since with my eyes open and both hands on the paperwork, because trust, in my experience, was a way of handing someone the tool they'd use against your own nature.

They weren't the same wound. We looked at each other across the dark porch and recognized each other in it anyway.

When her mug was empty she set it on the rail and said, "You've kept your distance since the other night because you think it's what you owe me."

"I've kept my distance because I didn't want you to feel cornered into more than what already happened between us."

"I'm asking now." Her voice dropped, but it didn't waver. "Not for the floor."

The words landed between us with the weight of something that couldn't be taken back.

I went very still. Not the predator's stillness—the stillness of a man who'd been holding something enormous and had just been handed permission to set it down. My wolf surged up behind my eyes, gold bleeding into the dark of them, and this time I didn't push it back.

"Are you sure?"

"I've been sure since the porch." She turned in her chair to face me fully, and what was on her face wasn't the smile, wasn't the armor. Just her. "I'm telling you now."

I was across the space between our chairs before I'd finished deciding to move. My hands found her face—reading the truth in her eyes for one last second before I closed the distance.

The kiss was not soft.

It was four days of restraint breaking at once—four nights on the floor with her scent in every room, watching her magic reach for me while I forced myself not to reach back. She made a sound against my mouth, not surprise, something nearer to relief, and her hands fisted in my jacket and pulled.

We made it inside without coming apart. Through the front door, past the couch where Tara slept with the deliberate stillness of someone who'd decided not to notice, up the narrow stairs to the room that had been hers since we got here. I kicked the door shut behind us.

"Jace." My name in her mouth did something four days of proximity hadn't managed. Her back met the wall and she pulled me in instead of pushing me off, her hands already at the buttons of my shirt. "I need⁠—"

"Tell me."

"You." She got the last button free and shoved the shirt off my shoulders. "Just you."

Her scent was everywhere now—warm skin and the bright ozone edge of her magic—and it went straight to the animal in me. I got the flannel over her head and onto the floor in one motion, and then my hands were on bare skin and my wolf was so close to the surface I could feel the heat of it coming off me, running hotter than any human body could.

She felt it. Her palm flattened against my chest and her breath caught. "You're so warm."

"That's him," I said, low. "He's close."

She traced her fingers along my jaw, to the corner of my eye where I knew the gold was burning through. "I can see it. Your wolf."

"Does that scare you?"

"No."

I kissed her again—harder, deeper—and lifted her onto the low dresser against the wall. Her legs came around my hips and her hands found the waistband of my jeans, and I had to drag my mouth from hers just to breathe her in, the want coming off her skin sharp enough that the wolf snarled low in my chest, a sound that wasn't quite human leaving my throat.

"You're thinking too loud," she said, rough, her pupils blown wide. "Stop."

So I stopped. I got the clasp of her bra and it gave, and then there was nothing between my mouth and her skin, her nipples drawn tight, and I lowered my head and drew one between my teeth.

She gasped. Her hips jerked against mine.

"There," she breathed. "God—right there⁠—"