My nipples were hard. Obscenely, pointedly hard, standing at full attention. The cool cabin air wasn’t helping, but neither was the six-foot-something, naked, huge-cocked man-beast standing close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his chest.
“I still want an explanation,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound nearly as convincing as the first time I’d said it.
He stepped closer. Not touching yet, but close enough that I could count the scars on his collarbone and see the way his abdomen flexed when he breathed. His cock was thickening between us, filling and rising with a lazy inevitability that short-circuited my higher brain function.
Don’t look at it.
I looked at it.
Do not look at it again.
It was worse up close. Or better. It depended on which part of me was doing the assessment.
“There’s a creature hunting you.” His hand came up. With one finger, he traced the line of my collarbone from the hollow of my throat to the point of my shoulder. “It wants to mate with you. If it succeeds, you’ll die.”
The words were genuinely terrifying. But his finger was still on my shoulder, and the processing was going to have to wait. Every nerve ending in my body seemed to have rerouted itself to the single point where his fingertip rested against my skin.
“The thing from the mountain.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re—what? Some kind of…” The sentence died. What was I supposed to call him? Werewolf felt campy. Shape-shifter felt like a sci-fi novel.
“I’ll explain that later.” His finger reversed course, tracing back along my collarbone, then descending. It followed the centerline of my chest, traveling the valley between my breasts without touching either one. The restraint was on purpose, almost surgical, and it was driving me out of my mind. “Right now I need you to understand that you’re not safe. Not in your apartment, not in a hospital. Nowhere except where I can reach you.”
“And where’s that?”
“With me.”
His finger kept its slow descent. Over the flat of my sternum, down my belly, tracing the midline maddeningly slowly. He stopped just above my pubic mound and rested there, the heat of that one fingertip radiating outward until I could feel it between my thighs.
“You don’t know me.” My voice had gone breathy and thin. I hated it. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’re brave.” His other hand came up and cupped my jaw, tilting my face so I had no escape from those amber eyes. This close, they weren’t just one color. They were layered, gold over brown over something older and wilder. “I know you ran from a hospital in a torn gown with no shoes and no plan because something inside you saidrunand you trusted it.” His thumb traced along my jawline. “And I knew the moment I caught your scent that you are my mate.”
His mate.
“I—”
“You’re scared.” His thumb stilled against my jaw. “But that’s not all, is it?”
I should have lied. I should have told him I needed space and time and at minimum a solid forty-five minutes of explanation before any mating whatsoever could take place.
But there was another part of me that did not care about any of that. Not one fucking bit.
That part wanted him inside me so badly my thighs were shaking.
“No,” I said. “That’s not all.”
Something shifted in his eyes. The careful, almost clinical control he’d been maintaining cracked down the middle, and what surfaced underneath was not careful at all. His hand left my jaw and he lifted me off the floor like I weighed nothing, turning to press my back against the rough wood of the cabin wall. My legs wrapped around his hips on instinct, and his cock pressed against my belly, thick and hot and iron-hard.
One hand pinned my hip. The other slid between my thighs.
His fingers found me not just wet butdrenched. When he dragged two fingers through my folds the sound was obscene in the quiet cabin.
“Naughty girl.” The words vibrated against my throat. His lips were there, not kissing, just resting against my pulse point, feeling the wild stammer of my heart. “You’re soaked.”
I nodded because language had abandoned me entirely.
