Daron's breath goes out of him in one long shudder.
His other hand comes up — slow — and the back of his fingers brush along the side of my jaw. His ice-blue eyes are wet at the rims and he does not look away. He has been a man with his hands on a rifle for two years and his hands are doing something else now, and I can see in his face how badly he wants to be allowed it.
He tilts his head.
Slow. Deliberate. The wolf in him offering his throat to me.
I understand what he is asking.
"Yes," I say.
I rise up on my toes. His hand moves to the back of my neck — supporting me, not directing me — and his breath catches when I put my mouth against the side of his throat where the pulse beats hardest under the skin.
He smells like forest and something underneath that is just him. The pulse hammers against my lips. I open my mouth.
I bite.
Clean, sharp, my teeth breaking the skin, marking him. His pulse jumps once against my tongue. Iron and salt and the heat of him.
He groans.
Low. From his chest. The sound of a man whose body has been holding something for months and is finally being allowed to let it go. His hand at the back of my neck tightens. The hand that was at my jaw drops to my hip and pulls me into him, and I feel every inch of his body against mine for the first time — the lean weight, the heat, the wolf running close to the surface under his skin.
My body is burning for his.
I have wanted him since the corridor, when his eyes met mine and my body said mine. The cabin porch when I watched him shift — the lean man becoming a wolf, ice-blue eyes still ice-blue. I have been telling myself it could wait until we were safe and there were no Syndicate hunting us.
I want him now.
A deep low pull in my core. The hard line of him against me, my body rocking into him before I have decided. His arms tighten around me. My pulse spikes. The patch on my chest goes hot.
I want him here. I want him in this barn on the concrete with the smell of motor oil and old cedar around us. I want him before we get in the trucks and before we drive south and before we walk into a Syndicate building with rifles up.
I cannot have him here. Not tonight.
I lift my mouth from his throat.
"Daron. Promise me. Soon."
His ice-blue eyes are still wet. He does not look away.
"Soon," he says. "I promise you. As soon as I can have you."
The bond seals.
I feel it the same beat the answer lands — the thread closing all the way, the wolf in him rising and meeting me, the pack-recognition coming up in him as he accepts the mark.
My bite, in the curve of his throat.
Daron's breath catches.
Not from the bite. From what he is reading now through the bond.
"I feel you," he says. Low. "I feel where you are. I feel your pulse."
"Yes."
"If you get hurt in there tonight."
