“What if I—”
“You won’t.” He is certain in his words.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” The gold of his eyes doesn’t waver. “I know you, Charlie Harris. I have been watching you choose, every day, every hour, when it would have been easier not to. This is the same.” His thumb traces the line of my jaw, unhurried. “It’s just you. Choosing.”
The hesitation doesn’t disappear. It becomes something I can hold, something with edges I can feel, name, and stand next to without being consumed by it. The training has given me that, not the absence of the want but the space between the want andthe act, the moment where I still exist as a separate thing, still have a vote, still am Charlie Harris with a choice to make.
And I make it.
I press my mouth to the curve of his shoulder, the muscle there, and I feel him anticipate it, his exhale going slow, his hand sliding into my hair, not directing, holding.
And I bite.
His skin gives under my fangs with a resistance so slight it’s almost tender. His breath catches. Every muscle in his body goes taut for half a second, not in defense, in surrender, and then releases, and the warmth of his blood fills my mouth. The taste of him detonates through me.
Not chaos or the frantic, spiraling rush of the clearing. Something deeper. Steadier. His blood runs through me with the quality I’ve only felt from him, warm, wild, and ancient, threaded with the wolf, and where it touches the framework Crave built inside me, it doesn’t destabilize it. It illuminates it. Every technique, every session, every forty-minute hold, all of it lit from within by the warmth of him flooding through me.
I take a mouthful, the same time he thrusts deeper inside me.
We both moan with the pleasure flowing through us, the pleasure of his cock inside me, and the pleasure of my hunger being satiated at the same time.
Pure. Fucking. Heaven.
But the restraint of stopping there is not white-knuckled. It’s mine. Clean, present, and certain, Charlie Harris, here, choosing. Somehow, I draw my fangs back with a hiss, a line of blood trailing down his shoulder, and I close the marks with care, my tongue tracing the small wounds, and the shudder that moves through him travels through everywhere we’re touching.
“Mine,” I say. Low, rough, and completely without self-consciousness, the vampire in every syllable.
The word lands in my chest and takes root.
He growls in response, and then I feel it.
The first pulse of it arrives low and deep, a slow heat at the place where we’re joined, and his body changes in the specific way it does when the wolf takes over the last remaining functions the man is still trying to manage. I know this feeling…
This time I feeleverything.
The beginning of it is specific, a thickening, insistent, and unhurried pressure building outward from the core of him until he’s stretching me. Not too much. Just fuller, deeper. The exact, impossible pressure of him settling into me by slow degrees, expanding until no part of me doesn’t register him, and every vampire-sharp nerve I have reports it back at full clarity—the heat of him, the weight, the way my body accommodates without complaint because accommodating him is apparently what my body has always known how to do.
He goes still.
Not out of caution. Out of a precise stillness, giving me space to feel it, all of it, without rushing.
I feel the knot settle into place, thick, insistent, a claim the wolf makes that the man doesn’t entirely have a vote on, and the sound I make is not a word. It is every nerve in my body filing its report simultaneously.
“Breathe, Charlie.” His voice is roughened against my temple, lower than I’ve ever heard it. “Breathe through it.”
So I do.
The vampire-sharpened sensitivity that has been my enemy for weeks does what it was always going to do, once I stopped fighting it. It takes what’s happening and gives me all of it, at once, and the result is not overwhelming. “Already?” I say, against the side of his jaw. “I have questions about the biology.”
“Later,” he manages.
“I’m going to need a full debrief.”
“Apparently.” His voice is rougher than I’ve heard it all night, strained with effort, the man still present but losing ground to the wolf by the second. “Tell me if—”
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t ask me if it’s okay. You know it’s okay… in fact…” I say, breathless, “… if you ask me one more considerate question I’m going to bite you again.”
