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“Christ, you are a vision,” he murmured against my skin. “Watching him touch you like that…” He moved our joined hands to the hem of my dress and bunched the fabric in my grip. “I thought I’d die with it, Avery. I’d never felt so out of my mind.”
“I wanted you,” I breathed. “Just you.”
“I know it.” He touched the skin of my thigh and my knees buckled. “Look at you. Already shaking for me.”
He drew my hand up and in, skirting over the inside of my thigh. Heat blazed through me, pounding at the base of my stomach.
“Wolfe.”
His teeth grazed against my throat. “Last chance, grá. If you let me do this, there’s no going back.”
There was no other option.
It could only be this—him.
“I’m sure,” I replied, voice even.
I felt his smile against my skin and I closed my eyes, prepared to let him swallow me whole.
Chapter 26
Wolfe
His mother used to say he was more like the animal he was named after than a man.
He’d come home from the fields with Patty covered in mud and howling, a raw sort of wildness about him.
He felt like that animal now, eyes glazed, mouth parted in a bone-shattering hunger he’d never felt before.
Avery melted in his grip, head back against his chest. Her breaths were thin and raspy, tipped in anticipation. Now that he had her like this, he didn’t know where to start. Her mouth, her neck, her hips. The soft slope of her bare thigh. He wanted all of it.
He made a few leisurely passes, his hands locked over hers. Over her ribs, across her breasts where she strained against him. To the fabric barely clinging to her shoulders. He nudged a strap down with her finger, studying the way the light in the room painted her in gold.
He wanted to bite.
To mark.
To claim.
He wanted there to be no confusion about who she belonged to—who he belonged to—after this.
“Avery.” He nipped her earlobe and she jolted in his arms, a little whine building in the back of her throat. He commanded himself to breathe, to leash in the control that was rapidly fraying. “Do something for me?”
“Anything,” she breathed.
Dangerous words.
“Turn that ring around.” He touched the gold band with his thumb.
“What?” She sounded dizzy, almost entranced.
“Turn the fucking ring around,” he said again, dropping their hands to squeeze her hip. “We both know you’re mine, love.”
She groaned his name but did as he asked, turning the heart inward.
Claimed by him.
He snarled against her shoulder, curling his fingers around hers and bringing them back under her dress. She quaked against him, breath coming faster and faster.
