Just the heat pulsing between my legs. There was only a primal desire that couldn’t be sated — at least not by me. No matter how hard I rubbed, it only sparked pitiful flares of pleasure.
Please… please… please!
I mindlessly repeated the Gaelic vow and began scratching at the wood again. If I worked at it long enough, eventually, I’d get through to the other side.
“Flower,” a rough voice said out of the blue.
I stopped rubbing at myself, certain what I saw couldn’t be the truth.
Wild stood before me now — had just blinked into view after I’d been scratching at the wooden barrier for… how long had it been?
Time had stopped meaning anything after Aidan shut me out on the other side of this door. A part of me wondered if I wasn’tstill in that mountain hidey-hole, freezing to death while my mind soothed me with increasingly hard-to-believe hallucinations.
“Wild?” I croaked.
He bent down into that crouch of his — the one that made him look like a wolf even when he was in human form. And then, I couldn’t just see him. I could smell his outdoorsy scent of wind and rain.
It really was Wild! My heart banged around inside my chest, unsure how to process his sudden presence.
“What’s going on here, then?” he asked in the same casual tone I would have used to inquire with the village St. Ailbe postmaster about whether my family had received any mail.
“It hurts,” I whined. “But Aidan won't mate me…”
“Aidan.” Wild's eyes abruptly stopped glowing. “He told ye his name?”
“Of course he did.” I gave my head a mournful shake. “He’s not like you. That’s why he… he… won’t open the door.”
My hand involuntarily scratched at the wood again.
“Come, Flower. Enough of that now.” Wild pulled my hand away from the ruined wood and put it in his mouth, sucking at my fingers and cleaning the blood off with a few long, deliberate swipes of his tongue.
The sight of him tending to my self-inflicted wounds this way tugged at my belly.
Not disgust…
More heat flowed from me in pulsing waves, making my core squeezewith want.
He removed my hand from his mouth with a wet pop and laid it over his bearded cheek. “I could smell ye from outside, ye know.”
He ran his mouth along the inside of my wrist but didn’t quite touch it.
So, I could only feel his breath as he whispered the Gaelic pledge I’d been mindlessly slurring out before he appeared. But his husky voice shivered through my soul.
“Will ye have me, then?” he asked when he was done making his vow. “Will ye pledge me yer —?”
Before he could even finish, I said the words I’d unconsciously memorized back to him in one long, exhaled breath.
My answer pulsed between us. Thicker than my heat.
Once.
Twice.
Then, suddenly, I was no longer on the floor. Wild scooped me into his arms, cradling me against his chest as we ascended a set of stairs, and he issued what sounded like clipped commands in Gaelic — not to me.
The heat smell blocked out anything that wasn’t right under my nose. But I still had some deductive reasoning left, and I could sense Sea in the periphery of what would happen next.
In what felt like only seconds, Wild was ferrying me through an open door. And soon, my back hit a bed that smelled like the wolf who’d refused to come out of the downstairs bathroom.
