“Then don’t be angry. Not right now. Just let me—”
“Let you what?”
“Be here. Just… stand here. With you. And be sorry in a way that actually means something.”
She glares at me. The light is almost gone. The bunkhouse is dim, amber, intimate in a way that neither of us planned. Her arms are warm under my hands, and she hasn’t pulled away.
“I hate you,” she says, and neither of us believes it.
“I know.”
“I’ve hated you for eighteen years.”
“I know that too.”
“So why does it feel like—?” She stops. Swallows. Her eyes search my face, and whatever she finds there makes the last of her resistance waver. “Why does everything get quieter when you’re close?”
I don’t answer with words. I pull her toward me. Slowly. Giving her every chance to stop it, to plant her feet, to push me away. She doesn’t. She lets herself be drawn in, and her forehead comes to rest against my collarbone, and for one long, shaking breath, she just settles.
I wrap my arms around her. Carefully. She’s smaller than I remember—or I’m bigger—and she fits against me in a way that makes my wolf finally go silent.
Her hands come up. Fist into the front of my shirt. She pulls.
I tip her face up with one hand. She lets me. Her eyes are wet and fierce. She’s looking at me like I’m the answer to some unspoken question.
I kiss her.
This isn’t like at the river. The river was careful. Tentative. Two people testing whether the bridge would hold.
This is the bridge collapsing.
Her lips part under mine, and the taste of her goes through me like a lit fuse. The salt of her tears, the sweetness of her mouth. Her warmth. It’s like being lost in a memory. Only it’s real, and it’s now.
Her hands drag up my chest and twist in my hair, pulling me down, pulling me closer, and I stop being careful because carefulisn’t possible anymore. My hands find her waist, her ribs, the curve of her back. She arches into me and makes a sound against my mouth that shoots down to my groin.
I can feel the resistance she’s been white-knuckling for days finally giving way. The mate bond slides into place with a resonance so deep it vibrates in my teeth, my bones, the floor beneath us.
She walks me backward. My calves hit the cot, and I sit, tugging her with me. She climbs into my lap with her knees on either side of my hips, her hands still in my hair, and her mouth still on mine. The cot protests under our combined weight with a creak that both of us ignore.
I find the hem of her shirt. My fingers brush the skin underneath—warm, smooth, alive. I graze the underside of her breast, and she inhales sharply against my mouth. Not pulling away. Pressing closer.
“Merric.” She breathes my name, ragged, barely a word.
“Tell me to stop.” I’m giving her the out because she deserves it, even though every part of me is praying she doesn’t take it.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
Her shirt comes up. My shirt follows. Skin to skin for the first time in eighteen years, and the sound she makes when my mouth finds her throat is—
“Oh, Jesus!Shit!” It’s Sienna’s voice. From the doorway. High-pitched with alarm.
Brenna is off my lap so fast the cot flips. I don’t even see her move; one second she’s in my arms, the next she’s standing four feet away with her shirt clutched against her chest and her hair wild and her eyes wide.
Sienna is frozen in the doorway with a dinner plate in one hand and a look of pure, horrified surprise. Her mouth is open. Her face is scarlet. She looks from Brenna to me—shirtless,panting, sitting on the overturned cot—and back to Brenna with a speed that would be funny under any other circumstances.
“I was bringing… Greta sent… I didn’t—” Sienna spins on her heel and walks out so fast she nearly drops the plate. “Sorry! God. Sorry!”
She’s gone. Her boots hammer the porch steps, and the sound fades across the yard.
