Page 101 of A Lady’s Guide to Werewolves

She found her release so hard that she saw stars.

When he eased back, she was still riding the waves of pleasure, the tiny aftershocks that trembled down to her toes, up her spine. Floating.

But he was still holding back. She felt it in the briefest hesitation, the twitch of his muscles. The soft growl he wrestled back.

And that would not do. Not here. Not now.

“Are you still trying to prove something to yourself?” She recalled how carefully he had made her ask for his touch in the library, how he had made her beg in the woods and then disappeared. He didn’t make her plead and writhe with desperation to prove he was stronger than she was. He did it to prove that she was stronger. That she was in control. “Is that why my hands are up? Why you still won’t let me touch you?”

He released his grip on her hair carefully, easing the strands loose. Gently. Almost politely. She was losing him again, the real him. The complicated him.

“Aidan.”

He rested his brow on the back of her head, breaths sawing roughly in and out of him.

“So you don’t want to keep me, then?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant and failing. Failing utterly. “You only want to catch me?”

“I want to keep you.” His voice was rough, pulled past Highland crags and cold mountains. “I always want to keep you.”

“Prove it,” she said.

And then she ran again. A dare. A gamble.

A plea.

When Aidan caught her again, it was different.

Catching her was easy. She might be quick and agile and fearless, but he had a wolf. He could hear her heartbeat, the tiny, delicious gasps she tried to stifle, the way the leaves shifted under her feet. Her hair tangling on a branch. He could smell her soap, the sweet berry scent that always seemed to cling to her. The sun, the long grass, the smoke from an oven. All of it combined to make her smell irresistible. Like only Sorcha could.

She was fierce and clever and utterly delicious.

His.

His wolf knew it. The earl knew it, and the curator.

He knew it.

He didn’t let her run far this time. He enjoyed the pull to follow her, to push his body after hers, to find that thread in the darkness that was Sorcha. An auburn gold sheen, similar to tracking magic, but different. Unique. It wasn’t separate from him. He knew her magic, felt it, tasted it, scented it on the wind. He didn’t need his eyes or his nose or his ears.

He chased her because there was joy in it, for both of them.

And hunger. The kind he had been pretending not to feel, had been burying under protocol and politeness and long, lonely nights pacing the museum halls where there was so much binding magic that he did not fear his wolf running.

The kind of hunger that recognized her, just as his wolf did.

He ran faster, simultaneously cataloguing the silver burble of a creek nearby, the startle of a stag crashing through the bushes. An owl. A wasp’s nest somewhere up high among the branches.

And Sorcha.

Always Sorcha.

His blood burned and there was a howl trapped in his throat when he snatched her mid-leap over a fallen branch. He twisted to bear the brunt of the fall as he pulled them down to the ground. He barely noticed the impact, too busy flipping her onto her back and caging her with his body. She gasped as his palms slammed into the dirt on either side of her head. His thighs pressed against her hips. She was caught.

She smiled.

It very nearly undid him.

This woman.