When I reach the toes of his heavy black boots, I place a hand on each of his knees and gently ease them apart. I can feel the muscles flexing under my palms as I drag them up to his waist, taking the bottom of his flannel shirt with me. I’m in the perfect position to see the hard wedge of his erection through the worn material of his jeans, and my thighs clench at the thought of taking it deep inside me. I want his knot – in fact, my heat demands it, - but not before I’ve taken him apart with my mouth. “I want to suck you, Alpha.”
“Water first,” he tells me, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes at my pout. But I rise up to accept the glass, watching him overthe rim as I gulp it down. When I’m done, I rest a hand on his groin, gently squeezing the iron-hard shaft. “What about now?”
He leans back in the chair, his chest swelling as he blows out a harsh breath. “Sweet girl, I want your mouth on me more than anything in this world, but Ineedmy arms around you. Can you come up here?”
I nod, because how could I say no to a request like that?
I hold his gaze as I straddle his lap, the worn denim of his jeans brushing my swollen pussy. “Fuck,” he breathes, locking his arms around me and pressing his mouth to my throat. “If this is a dream, don’t wake me, okay?”
“It’s not a dream,” I tell him, running my hands over his shoulders and arms. He’s still dressed in his flannel shirt, and I carefully peel it off, exposing the white tee that clings to his chest. His scent wafts up to me, heightened by his arousal, and I can’t bite back a whimper. “Did you like watching us together?”
“You took that knot so well,” he murmurs, kissing the valley between my breasts. “And Wings makes you shine so beautifully, I’m kind of intimidated by his skills.”
“He’s perfection,” I agree, brushing my tender breasts against the soft cotton of his tee. “We’re mates, and that’ll never change, no matter how many bites I take.”
He looks at me thoughtfully, his thumb brushing over his claiming mark. “You planning on getting another?”
I blush, wondering if he can see the face that flashes through my mind. The bond gives me glimpses into his moods, but thankfully no telepathic vision. “I feel pretty good right now.”
“You really do,” he agrees, his hands dropping to circle my waist. “Talking about intimidation, you sure you don’t regret takingmybite? I look at you, see how much those guys adore you, and I’m well aware that you’re way out of my league.”
I brush my fingers over the swollen side of his face, feeling the deep well of his insecurity through the bond.He really thinkshe’s not good enough for me?This stunning, damaged man thinks he’s somehow not worthy of our bonding, when the truth is, he’s only seen a glimpse of who I really am.
“There’s something I want to show you.” His hands clutch me instinctively, but he lets me go with a rueful look as I slide off his lap. Turning slowly, I pull my hair out of the way, grasping it tightly in one hand. I’m not ready yet to read his face, but I can sense the moment he takes in my scars by the way his shock jolts through our bond.
“Burns.” His breath is a pain-wrapped hiss of recognition. “Electrical?”
“A radiator.”
“Fuck me.” I shiver at the broken curse, but startle twice as hard as he leans forward and presses a kiss to my spine. His hand steadies my hip, soothing the ripples of reaction that dance over my skin. Touching methereis still so hard, even when it’s my mate, and in the throes of my heat. He must sense my unease through the bond, because he slowly,carefully, draws me back onto his lap. There’s both a new gentleness and a coiled violence in the way he wraps his arms around me. “Tell me that whoever did that to you is burning in hell.”
I tuck my chin to my chest,feelinghis rage as it licks over me. “I took care of it.”
“Of course you did,” he purrs in my ear, nuzzling his bite mark. “But I want to go kick over their gravestone, just to make sure.”
“I’ll tell you all about it another time,” I promise, pushing the ghosts back into the shadows where they belong. “Because right now, Alpha, I really need to feel your knot deep inside me.”
Chapter Nineteen: BLUFF
Someone hurt my mate.
The scar is old, but the hurt throbs like a new, vicious wound. I can feel it in the bond, and in the way Abbie’s back quivered when I kissed her spine. Now I’m cradling her pain between my hands, my fingers brushing the puckered skin while I contemplate revenge. She says they’re dead, but I need to see it with my own eyes. I want to find the man or men who did it so badly, I can taste the burn of coppery violence in the back of my throat.
I have to remind myself:you’re the man now, not the wolf.
As a kid growing up in tornado country, I believed I had a beast living inside me. A wild, feral monster that would one day tear out of me like a storm made of fangs and claws. It was only watching my old man beat his packmate to death in a drunken rage that I gave it a name:temper. Such a simple word for the thing that tore me to strips from the inside, and sent me to war when I was too young to know that life didn’t always end in blood and violence.
They liked me in the army - angry putty in their carelesshands. They liked me even better when I was looking through a sniper’s scope. I got good at turning targets into distant puffs of pink mist; a smudge on the landscape that I never had to look in the eye, even if they screamed in my face when I fell asleep. It was better with Ark by my side – or his hand on my leash, depending on the shape of my temper and the position of the moon – but when he left, my superiors got even more careless. Without my handler, I was a liability, and so when we were hit by an ambush, they didn’t try too hard to scrape my remains off the Humvee.
From the army to the Iron Flyers shouldn’t be a big stretch for a guy like me. Ark always wanted me in his club, but all his talk about brotherhood and safe havens felt like a hazy oasis in the desert. Part-dream, part-delusion, and I’d had my fill of both by the time I limped out of the VA hospital.
But now I’ve got real skin in the game. In fact, it’s soft, pink, and smells like peach cobbler drizzled in honey and dark chocolate. It’s also damaged, defensive, and so fucking precious to me I can’t think straight.
“Stop obsessing over our scars,” she murmurs, rocking insistently in my lap. “It’s what’sinsidethe broken, twisted shell that counts, remember?”
I get dark humor. It’s the only way I stopped myself from eating my gun when the migraines were at their worst. But nothing about this situation is even remotely funny to me.
“I want to wrap my hand around their spine and detach it from their skull.”
