I rise to my feet and catch her before she can fall. She looks up at me with dazed eyes, lips parted, cheeks flushed.
“That was just the beginning.” I kiss her softly, letting her taste herself on my lips. “We’re not done yet.”
She reaches between us and fumbles with my belt. “Then stop talking and finish what you started.”
I help her with my pants, shoving them down along with my boxers. My cock springs free, hard and aching, and when she wraps her hand around it, I nearly lose control right there.
“Fern,” I warn, but she’s already stroking me.
“I want you,” she confesses, and the honesty in her voice breaks something open inside me. “Please, Connor. I need you inside me.”
I lift her again to pin her against the tree, and she guides me to her entrance. For a moment, I pause there, with the tip of my cock just barely inside. Our eyes meet, and then I thrust forward, burying myself to the hilt in one smooth stroke.
We both cry out at the sensation. She’s tight and wet and perfect around me, and I have to grit my teeth to keep from coming. Her nails dig into my shoulders as she adjusts to my size, and her breath comes in short pants against my neck.
I pull back and thrust forward again, establishing a rhythm that has her gasping with each stroke. The angle is perfect, letting me hit deep inside her, and the sounds she makes drive me wild. I pick up the pace and drive into her harder, faster, chasing release.
“Yes,” she moans as her head falls back against the tree. “Just like that. Don’t stop.”
I have no intention of stopping. Not when she feels this good, not when her pleasure is feeding into mine through that connection and amplifying everything tenfold.
I can feel her climbing toward another peak as her body tenses around me. I adjust my angle just a bit, and she keens.
“I’m close,” she gasps. “Connor, I’m so close.”
“Then fall,” I tell her as my rhythm becomes erratic as my own release approaches. “I’ve got you.”
She comes with a scream that probably carries all the way back to the pack house, and her body clamps down on me like a vice.
The sensation triggers my own release. I thrust deep one final time and empty myself inside her with a roar, marking her from within, completing the bond in the most primal way possible. Pleasure rockets through me, more intense than anything I’ve ever felt, and for a moment, I’m nothing but sensation and instinct.
When it finally subsides, I slump against her with a grunt. My legs are shaking, and I’m not entirely sure I can hold us both up much longer.
“That was…” Fern starts, then laughs breathlessly. “I don’t even have words.”
I press a kiss to her temple and chuckle. “Good. I’d hate to think I left you capable of speech.”
She smacks my shoulder weakly. “Asshole.”
“Your asshole now.” I reluctantly pull out and lower her to her feet, keeping an arm around her waist when she wobbles. “Like it or not.”
Chapter 13 - Fern
The bastard left me in the woods.
I wake to birdsong and dappled sunlight, and my body aches from sleeping on the forest floor. The white dress is bunched beneath me like a makeshift blanket. Leaves and broken flower petals are tangled through my hair from whatever Luna pinned there last night.
Last night.
Memories flood back in vivid detail. Connor’s mouth on mine. His hands everywhere. The way he made me fall apart against that tree, and then again with him inside me. That strange new connection between us magnified everything until his pleasure fed into mine and mine into his.
And then he just left.
I push myself upright and scan the clearing. No sign of him. No note, no message, and nothing to indicate he was ever here except the soreness between my thighs and the faint marks his fingers left on my hips.
Some protector. Some mate.
I grab my dress and yank it over my head. The zipper catches halfway up my back, and I have to contort my arm at an awkward angle to force it closed. My underwear is somewhere in the underbrush, and I refuse to go hunting for it. Let some woodland creature make a nest out of it for all I care.
