The effect is instant. His hand on my fur, and the panic breaks. Not slowly. All at once, like a fever snapping. His hand moves to my neck, my back, long steadystrokes that press the fear down and let something calmer surface. Gradually, the shaking stops.
“There you are,” he murmurs. His hand is warm and steady in my fur. “There you are. You’re all right.”
I am all right. I’m lying on my side in a nest of blankets with a man’s hand on my back. Four legs. A tail. Against all evidence and reason, I am all right.
“Now,” he says. “The shift back is instinct, same as the shift forward. Don’t force it. Think about your hands. Your actual hands, the way they feel when you’re holding a mug or writing notes. The weight of them. The shape.”
I think about my hands. I think about the pen between my fingers when I write clinical notes. I think about the texture of a mug handle, the press of gauze against a wound, the familiar architecture of digits and knuckles and tendons.
The shift is gentler going back. A slow unravelling, bones reshaping with a grinding pressure that’s uncomfortable but not agonising. My vision floods with colour. My limbs lengthen and reconfigure. The fur retreats, replaced by skin that’s oversensitive and flushed with heat.
I’m lying on the floor of my nest in a tangle of blankets, naked and sweating, with Roan’s hand still on my back.
“Good,” he says. “That was good.”
“That,” I say, and my voice comes out shaky and human and mine, “was the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“I know.”
“I had a tail.”
“I know.”
“I had a tail, Roan.”
Something twitches at the corner of his mouth. “You did. It was very elegant.”
“Elegant. I had a fucking tail and you’re calling it elegant.” I want to hit him. I want to laugh. I want to cry. Instead, the heat, which had retreated during the shift, comes roaring back with a vengeance that steals my breath and turns my skin to fire. My body arches off the blankets, and a sound comes out of me that isn’t a scream and isn’t a moan and is somewhere between the two.
Roan’s hand on my back goes still. I can feel his restraint like a physical thing, the careful, measured control he maintains when my body is making demands his wolf wants to answer. I can feel what it’s costing him. The tension in his hand, the controlled breathing, the careful stillness of a man holding himself in check. Want so fierce it tastes like metal, and the iron will not to act on it.
“Roan.” My voice is wrecked. The heat is afurnace, and his hand is the only cool point on my body, and I need more of him, all of him. “I need…”
“Tell me.”
“You know what I need.”
“I need you to say it. After what just happened, I need to hear you choose.”
He’s right. Of course he’s right. My body just did something I didn’t choose, can’t control. He’s making sure the next thing that happens is something I decide with my whole self. Wolf, human, everything in between.
“I choose you,” I say. “I choose this. Now, please, before I lose my mind.”
His hand moves from my back to my face, tilting my chin up, and his eyes are pure gold and looking at me with a tenderness that the heat can’t burn away.
“Then you have me,” he says.
Chapter 29
She's Everything
Roan
She’s lyingin the nest she built, flushed and shaking and looking at me with eyes that hold no uncertainty, and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Not because of how she looks, though she takes my breath away. Because of what she just did. She shifted for the first time, alone and terrified, and when I calmed her, and she came back to herself, the first thing she did was choose. Not the heat choosing. Not the bond choosing. Phoebe, choosing me, with her voice steady and her eyes clear and every part of her present for the decision.
I’ve never been more in love with anyone in my life, and the word is so fucking inadequate I want to burn it and startagain.
