Page 264 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

“Touch me like I came back,” I whispered. “Not like I am about to disappear.”

The bond changed and his breath left him. Then Ian touched me. No hesitation. No crisis. No grim edge of death sharpening every need. He undressed me slowly at first, as if learning me without injury, without bandages, without fear forcing time short. His hands found skin that had healed, scars that had silvered, places that remembered him and opened under the memory.

When his mouth followed, I stopped being funny.

There were limits.

He learned that too.

He learned the sound I made when his teeth grazed the inside of my thigh. He learned how quickly I forgot language when his mouth settled between my legs. He learned that I was very willing to curse him, praise him, and threaten his life in the same breath if he stopped too soon.

He didn’t stop too soon. By the time he moved over me again, I was shaking for reasons that had nothing to do with pain. His body pressed mine into the mattress, and the bond opened wide enough that I felt his pleasure before he had even entered me.

He paused. A question. Always a damn question. I answered by hooking my leg over his hip and pulling him closer.

“Ian.”

He pushed into me slowly, watching my face like my expression was the only law left in the world.

Maybe for him, it was.

The stretch was deep and perfect and ours. I held his gaze through it, refusing to look away when the bond filled with both of us at once. His restraint. My want. His awe. My impatience. The old fear trying to rise and being washed under by the simple, devastating fact that this was not survival.

This was joy.

I moved beneath him and his control frayed.

“Cassie.”

“Yes.”

His forehead pressed to mine. “I love you.”

“I know.”

He laughed then, low and rough, and I smiled because he had learned that too. How to laugh while inside me. How to be wanted without bracing for the cost. How to let happiness touch him without searching for the knife.

Then he moved.

The world narrowed to his body and mine, to the rhythm we found without needing the moon to tell us how. He was careful until I told him not to be. Gentle until my nails in his back made him understand I wanted the man and the wolf, the control and the hunger, the tenderness and the teeth.

When I came, the bond lit gold. Ian followed with my name against my mouth, his body shuddering over mine, his heart pounding under my hands.

For a while afterward, neither of us moved. I was warm, boneless, and deeply uninterested in cardboard. Ian lay partly over me, careful not to crush me and still somehow surrounding me completely. His fingers traced slow lines over my hip.

“You are quiet,” he said.

“I am having a religious experience.”

His mouth touched my shoulder. “Should I be concerned?”

“Only if you stop doing whatever you just did.”

“I will make a note.”

“You do that.”

The apartment was silent around us, half packed and waiting. My old life in boxes. My new one breathing against my skin.