“I know,” I say, and I pull his mouth back to mine because the words are going to break me, and I’d rather come apart in his arms than in his sentences.
Idocome apart.
The orgasm hits like a wall of pure fire. It starts in my spine and tears through me with a force that locks every muscle inmy body. I tighten around him and hear him curse—a broken profanity against my throat—and then he follows, driving into me one last time with a force that pushes us both against the wall.
We stay there. Pressed together. Breathing. His forehead in the curve of my neck, my legs still locked around his waist, both of us shaking with the aftershock.
“Bedroom,” I manage. “We’re not done.”
He laughs. It vibrates through his chest and into mine. It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve heard in years. He gathers me up—I don’t unwrap from him, don’t want to—and carries me up the stairs. We bump the railing. He swears. I laugh against his shoulder, and the laugh tastes like freedom.
My bedroom door opens. Closes. The lock turns—his hand, reaching behind him, because even now some part of his brain is thinking about perimeters. Although maybe we should have been thinking about that before when we were making a commotion in the hallway.
Not that I regret it.
He lays me on the bed. Follows me down. And this time it’s different. The frantic edge has been blunted by the first round, and what replaces it is slower, more deliberate, more devastating.
He strips off the jeans still tangled around my ankle. Peels away what’s left. Then he looks at me, spread across the bed in the moonlight from the window, and it does something that makes my heart stop and restart.
“What?” I say.
“Just looking.” His voice is rough. “I need a second to look.”
He looks. At the new scars, the hard-earned muscle, the body that’s different from the one he knew at twenty. I let him. Because I’m looking too. The boy I knew was lean, all sharpedges and restless energy; a wolf growing into his frame. This man is something else entirely.
Leading a pack has carved him into something broader, denser, more substantial. His shoulders have filled out, thick with muscle. His chest is a solid wall of warm skin over hard contours, golden hair scattered across the planes of it, trailing down the center of his stomach in a line I want to trace with my tongue.
His arms are roped with the kind of strength that comes from years of swinging axes, wrestling wolves, and carrying burdens no one else could shoulder. His hands— God, his hands. Broader than I remember. Rougher. The knuckles scarred and callused, the fingers thick and capable and currently resting on my thigh like they belong there.
Which they do. They always did.
He’s not the pretty boy I fell in love with when the world was simpler. He’s weathered. Worn. Beautiful in the way men become when life molds them.
The man he became in the years we lost.
Then I see it. A leather cord around his neck, and on the cord, a thin gold band. My ring. The one I threw at him that day in the field. He’s been wearing it against his skin for all this time, and the sight of it—small and warm and faithful against the broad expanse of his chest—undoes something in me.
I touch it. One finger against the band.
“You kept it,” I say, swallowing hard.
“I kept everything.” His voice is barely there. “The ring was just the part I could carry.”
“I…” I swallow again. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything.” His eyes are still roving over me. “Fuck, you don’t know how often I’ve thought about this,” he husks out. Then he lowers himself over me, and his mouth begins a slow descent from my throat to my breast. His tongue traces circlesaround my nipples, which pucker instantly. When he sucks one into his mouth and grazes his teeth over the tip, I arch into him and stop thinking about anything at all.
His mouth moves lower. Along my stomach. The ridge of my hip. The inside of my thigh.
“Merric—”
“Shh.”
His mouth finds my clit, and I come off the bed. His hands pin my hips, and he holds me there—open, exposed, shaking—and works me with the focused patience of a man who has nowhere else to be for the rest of his life. My hands fist in the sheets. In his hair. I say his name like it’s the only word I know, and when the second orgasm builds, it’s slow, deep, inevitable.
He brings me to the edge. Holds me there. Pulls back.
“Don’t you dare,” I gasp.
