“It’s the opposite of bad.” His mouth grazes the curve of my neck, and my hands fist in his hair. “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever—” He stops himself. Pulls back. Looks up at me with eyes that have gone darker, the gold swallowed by the amber, and his pupils are blown wide. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop.”
“If you stop, I’ll kill you.”
The laugh that escapes him is raw, breathless. The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. Then his mouth is on mine. I stop thinking entirely.
The kiss is nothing like what I imagined. It’s not gentle. It’s not careful. It’s three days of separation, of wanting condensed into a single point of contact that detonates on impact. His hand cups the back of my head. He kisses me like he’s drowning and I’m air. I kiss him back with the same desperation because I am drowning, I’ve been drowning for days. His mouth is the first breath I’ve taken sincehe walked out my door.
The bond flares. I feel it like a physical force, a wave of heat that rolls through me from the point where our lips meet and expands outward until every nerve ending in my body is lit up and singing. His other hand tightens on my waist, pulling me closer, and I climb into his lap without grace or hesitation because the distance between us is intolerable, every centimetre of it, and I need to be closer, I need to feel his skin against mine, I need?—
“Bedroom,” I say against his mouth. “Now.”
He stands with me, still wrapped around him, my legs locked at his waist, and carries me through the cottage like I weigh nothing. His mouth doesn’t leave mine. He navigates by instinct or memory or some wolf sense I don’t understand, and when we reach the bedroom, he lays me down on the unmade bed with a gentleness that contradicts every desperate, frantic thing about the last sixty seconds.
Then he pulls back and looks at me.
I’m spread across my own sheets, breathing hard, lips swollen, hair tangled, wearing a jumper and leggings, and nothing about this moment is elegant or composed or any of the things I imagined my first time with someone new would be. But the way he looks at me?—
He looks at me like I’m sacred.
“Don’t,” I say, because if he’s gentle right now, I’ll shatter. “Don’t be careful with me. Not tonight.”
Something shifts behind his eyes. The restraint he’s been holding, the careful, measured control he’s maintained since the moment he walked through my door, lets go. I watch it happen. I watch the man step back. Something older, wilder, steps forward. His eyes are pure gold now. No brown. No amber. Just molten light pinning me to the mattress.
He pulls his shirt over his head, and I take in his hard body. Broad chest, stomach, the kind of muscle that comes from use rather than vanity. Three faint lines across his left ribs, barely visible. Scars from the rogue’s claws. The wounds I treated in the forest, fully healed, marked only by thin white traces on his skin.
I reach up and touch them. He shivers.
“That’s where I found you,” I say.
“That’s where you found me.”
He lowers himself over me, and the weight of him, his heat, is so overwhelmingly good that I arch up into it with a moan I don’t try to muffle. His mouth finds my neck again, my jaw, the spot beneath my ear that makes my hips roll against his. His hands slide under my jumper, palms flat against my stomach, and the skin-on-skin contact sends the bond into overdrive.
I feel everything. Not just his hands but the emotion behind them: want, tenderness, a possessivenessso fierce it should frighten me. It doesn’t. The bond transmits it directly, bypassing thought, and in return, I know he feels what I feel. The hunger. The relief. The staggering, terrifying joy of being touched by the person your body has been screaming for.
He pulls my jumper over my head and unclasps my bra, tossing them both on the floor. When the air hits my bare skin, I gasp, and when his mouth follows the air, I stop breathing altogether.
“Roan—”
“I know.” His voice is wrecked. He kisses down my sternum, between my breasts, across my ribs. Every point of contact blazes. “I can feel it. I can feel everything you’re feeling.”
“Then you know I need you to stop going slowly.”
He makes that sound again, the one that’s not human. His hands find the waistband of my leggings and strip them down my legs along with everything underneath. His fingers trail fire down my thighs as he drags the fabric free, and he pauses just long enough to look at me, and the expression on his face isn’t hunger anymore, it’s something closer to devastation, like seeing me like this has broken something inside him that was barely holding together in the first place.
Cool air for half a second. Then his body covers mine. Nothing between us except his jeans. I reachbetween us. Deal with them. Patience is a luxury neither of us has left.
My knuckles brush against him as I work the button and the zipper, and his hips jerk involuntarily. The sound he makes against my collarbone is something I want to bottle and keep and replay on every bad day for the rest of my life. He kicks the jeans off the rest of the way, and then it’s skin against skin, and the bond hums at a frequency I can feel in my teeth.
He settles between my thighs, and I feel him there, the hot, hard length of him pressed against me but not yet inside, and he stops. His forehead drops to mine. His breath is ragged, and his arms are shaking where they bracket my head. I feel him fighting himself—not reluctance, not hesitation, but the last threadbare attempt to make sure this is something I’m choosing rather than something being done to me. Even now. Even with his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still.
I answer by tilting my hips up and pulling him closer, and I sayyes. The restraint in his expression collapses like a condemned building.
When he pushes inside me, the bond detonates.
There’s no other word for it. Every sensation I’ve been carrying for weeks—the warmth, the desire, the pull, the ache of separation, the slow-building heat that I mistook for fever—all of it converges on the pointwhere our bodies join and explodes outward in a wave that tears a sound from my throat I’ve never made before. My back arches off the mattress, and my fingers clench in the sheets, and for a disorienting, shattered second, I can’t tell if the fullness I feel is physical or something deeper, something the bond is doing to the architecture of my chest. Both. It’s both.
I feel him rasp against my neck, his whole body trembling. I feel what he feels. Completion. Relief. A rightness so absolute my mind goes blank trying to hold it. Beneath that, a staggering vulnerability. The sensation of a door being opened that can never be closed again, and the terrifying, exhilarating knowledge that he doesn’t want it closed. He buries his face in the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. Just breathes. His ribs expand against mine. I hold him there, one hand in his hair, the other spread flat between his shoulder blades, his heart slamming against my palm.
