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“Every reason I had for staying away from you was wrong,” I said against her throat, and meant it, hips punching a harder rhythm that had her nails in my back.

“Yes. Yes, you were so wrong.”

When she started to fray — breath catching, body clenching around my cock in that flutter that meant she was close — I pulled her up with me until she was in my lap, sitting against the headboard, her hands on my shoulders, her body moving over mine. She found the angle she needed and used me for it, breasts against my chest, mouth open.

“There. Right there. Don’t move. Don’t—”

I held still and let her take it. One hand splayed on her lower back. The other between us, thumb on her clit. She came apart with a cry she muffled against my shoulder, clenching so hard around me that my own control snapped.

I flipped her back down, drove into her hard and deep, chasing it now, and when I came it tore through me in a shudder that left me shaking over her, forehead on her collarbone, both of us breathing like we’d run the ridge at a sprint.

“Wilder,” she said into the quiet, fingers in my hair.

“Give me a second. I don’t think I remember how words work.”

She laughed, soft, and held on.

I made myself get up before we drifted. I washed up, then brought her a warm cloth and a glass of water. She took both with a small pleased sound that undid my chest all over again. I checked her with my hands, gentle, making sure nothing hurt that shouldn’t, and she caught my wrist and kissed my palm like the checking itself was tenderness she wanted to keep.

I pulled her against my chest, her back to my front, one arm banded across her stomach, and said the thing I hadn’t planned on saying tonight.

“I’ve wanted you since the alley. Since before I had any business wanting anything. I don’t know how to make this casual, Autumn. Every time I think of you, of us, I keep getting the same answer. I don’t want casual.”

She turned in my arms, serious now, the heat settled into something quieter and more certain.

“I didn’t come here for casual.”

“Good,” I said. “I wasn’t offering it.”

She fell asleep first, breath evening out against my chest, one hand curled on my sternum like she meant to keep a claim even while unconscious. I lay awake a little longer, my thoughts racing, focused on the thing that actually scared me.

Wanting her didn’t scare me. I had known that part was coming since Grimm found her in the alley.

What scared me was whether I had it in me to give her what she needed.

I was a man used to living alone. I’d built a whole life around it and it had been easy, because nobody had ever asked me to be anything else.

Her hand flexed against my chest. She murmured my name in her sleep.

My eyes drifted shut long before I was used to falling asleep. Maybe I didn’t have to figure it all out tonight. Maybe I only had to be here when she woke up.

I held her and listened to the rain taper off, and somewhere before dawn I stopped being afraid.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Autumn

I woke up tangled in Wilder Kincaid, his arm heavy across my waist and Grimm’s enormous head on the mattress beside mine, his tail thumbing against the floor.

“Your dog,” I murmured, “has terrible manners.”

“My dog has excellent manners. He waited until we were both conscious.”

I should have felt strange. Morning-after light had a way of making the night before look like a mistake. Instead, I felt warm, a little smug, and entirely unwilling to move.

Wilder apparently felt the same, because his hand slid down my hip under the blanket, and when I made a questioning sound against his throat, he rolled me half beneath him and found out, with unhurried attention, exactly how fast he could get my breath shaking first thing in the morning.

Callused fingers moved down my stomach, through the curls, into the slick heat that had apparently not gone anywhere overnight. Two fingers slid inside me while his thumb found a lazy rhythm on my clit. “You’re so ready, baby.”