“I’ve got you,” he says. “Let go.”
And I do.
Not because he told me to.
Because my body has been building toward this since he put his hands on me and has now arrived somewhere it has no interest in departing from. The sensation that moves through me is full, rolling, and total, a heat that starts where his hand is and breaks open. The kind of break that leaves me arching against him, the kind that empties my lungs of whatever sound I might have made and leaves only his name.
It spreads outward from the point of contact until it reaches my teeth, my fingertips, the back of my skull. My vampire-sharp nerves, which have spent weeks making survival miserable, make this extraordinary. I feel it at a depth no human body is wired to reach, every nerve reporting at full capacity, and I stop being a person with a complex interior life for approximately thirty seconds and become something very simple.
I breathe out his name. “Rogue!”
His hand goes still. His mouth presses to my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my jaw, small and warm and unhurried.
“You were saying?” he murmurs.
“I was building to a very important point,” I inform him, once I’ve located my lungs. “You’ve completely derailed the argument.”
“What was the argument?”
I tip my head back and look at him in the dark, the gold of his eyes, the curve that is almost but not quite a smile at the corner of his mouth. The mate bond hums between us, warm and alive, and something inside me has gone liquid in a way it didn’t know how to do before.
“I’ve forgotten… it’s completely your fault,” I say.
Something shifts in his expression as the smile becomes real. Something in his eyes I’ve been circling for days has finally landed.
His eyes, half-lidded and burning gold in the dark, find mine and hold. “You with me?” he asks, and his voice has gone rough and low, stripped of its usual layers, just the man underneath.
“Extremely with you,” I manage. “Aggressively with you. Don’t stop.”
Something in his expression shifts. “Good,” he says. “Then stop trying to rush me.”
I make a sound of frustration that transitions into something else entirely when he continues what he’s doing, patient and ruinous. I learn that there are worse fates than being thoroughly attended to by someone who has decided that this is worth doing properly.
He lowers me to the bed with hands that know exactly what they’re doing, not demanding, not performing consideration, simply certain, the way he is certain about everything. I pullhim down after me because the distance between us has become genuinely intolerable.
He moves over me, settling his weight between my thighs, and lowers his mouth to my collarbone, my sternum, tracing downward. My fingers curl into his hair and tighten. When he pauses, his mouth warm against my hip, his eyes lift to mine, asking nothing and offering everything, and I feel my body answer before my mouth does.
My hips lift.
His breath catches.
He comes back up to me slowly, and when his body settles against mine fully, the warmth of him, the weight, the pressure, every point of contact lighting up at vampire-sensitivity, and I stop directing and let the sensation be the entire world.
“Rogue.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know… I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You were about to tell me to stop being careful.”
“I was.” I look up at him. “Stop being careful.”
His eyes, half-lidded and darker than I’ve seen them, hold mine for a moment. The last thread of patience frays. “Careful…” he says, his voice dropping to something rough and specific, “… is the only reason you can still think straight right now. You want me to change that?”
When he finally moves back up to settle over me fully, his chest against mine and his weight a solid, immovable presence that my body registers as exactly right, he pauses with his mouth at my temple and his breath warm against my hair.
“Mine,” he growls, his wolf shining through.
