The venom passed between them and they came together.
Her body clenched around him in long hard pulses. The wolf in him roared, and the bear in her roared back. The bond exploded in her chest. He buried himself in her to the hilt and held there. His cock pulsed inside her, and his hot release filled her in waves. Her body gripped him through it, milking him, and the heat of him spreading inside her. She felt the mating venom move into her, hot and golden, and she felt her own venom move into him.
The world disappeared.
Stella was no longer in her bedroom. She was in a wide black expanse spangled with stars. Galaxies wheeled slowly overhead. Nebulae bloomed in pinks and golds and blues. The light was everywhere and nowhere. She was weightless. She was in her bear body, golden-brown and powerful.
Across the starlit plain, the wolf stood gray with blue eyes. He walked toward her, and they met in the starry expanse. The wolf pressed his shoulder against hers, and the bear lowered her head. In that moment, everything that was Blaze flowed into her.
His mother. The way she had smelled. The night she had died, when he was seven, and the way the room had gone quiet. The hands of his father. The first time he had hit him. The last time. The night he had left at fifteen with what he could carry. The fights he had taken to eat. The trainers who had been kind to him. Manny in Manila with the Kris dagger. Pi Noi in thekitchen. The day Dom had walked into the gym and looked at him without flinching.
His love. Steady. Iron. Without conditions.
She offered him back her own life.
Her mother in the doorway with flour on her hands, telling her she could do anything she wanted. Her father at the pass in his whites, the bear in him held in check by the work and by Lily across the room. Her own bear quiet inside her from her earliest memory, easy, no problem to manage. Holding Arlo the first time and the want in her chest so big she had to put him down. Nell at the back booth with her textbooks, the girl Stella had looked at and seen a version of herself.
Her love. Steady. Patient. Without limits.
They stood in the starlit space, their bond a luminous thread that tied them together. And then they were back in her bedroom, their teeth retracting from each other’s flesh. She gasped as he rolled away and gathered her in his arms. They lay together with the new awareness of each other bright and hot and new, cycling potent love and connection between them in an infinite loop.
Chapter
Thirty
Blaze stoodat the edge of the cliff with his arm around Stella’s waist. The wind came off the Atlantic in long cold gusts and pulled at her hair where it had come loose under the wool cap he’d bought her in Doolin yesterday. The grass at his feet was salt-cropped and short. The cliff face beneath the grass was black and wet where the spray reached it. Three hundred feet below, the sea was the color of slate and the white foam at the rocks was the only bright thing in the picture. The Cliffs of Moher ran south of him in a long sweep, the headlands going hazy in the May mist.
His wolf was sitting on his haunches inside him with his chin lifted to the wind, ears moving lazily, content. He’d spent most of his life with that wolf raging. He’d spent the last few months learning what the wolf was like at rest. He still wasn’t used to it.
They’d been in Ireland for nine days. Five in Dublin, walking the city in long loops with no agenda. Two in the Wicklow Mountains in a stone cottage, where they’d shifted on the second night and run through bracken and old stone walls at dusk. Blaze had stopped halfway up a ridge and watched her move throughthe dark, the gray wolf settling onto his haunches in the heather. Her grizzly was massive and watching her run always sent a thrill through him.
They then drove west across the country in a small rental car. Spent a night in Galway. They’d been on the Wild Atlantic Way at a B&B in Doolin for four days. Tomorrow they’d drive south to Killarney. The day after, the Ring of Kerry. The day after that, the long flight home.
He turned his head and looked at her again. She was looking out at the water with her face open to the wind. Her cheeks were red from the cold, and she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He thought about Hunter in the breakroom that morning when Brie had brought the Sweet Summit boxes over. That had been the day Blaze had downloaded mate.com. The morning his life changed.
“Dad called yesterday,” Stella said. “Nell’s been doing the evening manager shifts after class. She’s getting back into the swing.”
He pictured Nell taking an order at a booth in the diner when he’d walked in to tell Stella she was his mate. She’d been gone within the week.
“She’s already gotten three job offers in Portland for after she graduates.”
He kissed the top of Stella’s head through the wool cap. “She’s going to do great things.”
They came in from the cliffs at three. The B&B was a stone farmhouse with a low ceiling in the front room and a wood stove.Their room was on the second floor at the back of the house. It had a double bed under a quilt the owner’s grandmother had stitched. A window looking east over the field where two Highland cows grazed knee-deep in spring grass. A kettle on the dresser and a tea tray with shortbread.
Stella unwound her scarf at the door, and she pulled off her cap. She turned to him, and he kissed her, his mouth cold.
“Tea?” he said, pulling back.
He filled the kettle from the bathroom tap and set it on the little electric base on the dresser. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off her boots. She got up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. While he was filling the mugs, she came back out with something in her hand. She crossed the room to him and showed it to him.
His brain registered the lines. Then it registered she was holding a pregnancy test. Then everything in him cracked open at once. He pulled her into an embrace, unable to speak. His throat had closed. His eyes were burning. He held her against his chest with his hand in her hair. The bond was a hot bright thing roaring between them.
He pulled back enough to look down at her. His eyes were wet, and he wasn’t going to pretend they weren’t. “How far along?” he finally managed.
“Maybe six or seven weeks.”
