“Do that again,” I demand.
The knot shifts with it, pressing against a place inside me that makes my spine arch completely off the tree, my mouth fall open, and a broken, filthy sound tear out of me that the forest is absolutely going to keep between us.
“There—” I drag him closer by the back of his neck, my legs locked around him, my hips rolling in answer. “Right there, don’t you dare stop—”
“I’m not stopping,” he says, his voice stripped to nothing, and he proceeds to move.
Not away. Deeper. A slow, grinding roll forward that presses the knot exactly where the last shift found, and this time the sound I make is his name on a breath with nothing else attached to it, just Rogue, just that, while my whole body answers in a wave that starts at my core and rolls all the way to my fingertips.
“Don’t hold back,” he says into my hair, the same words as before, but rougher now and frayed around the edges. Like he’s barely holding himself together while he says them. “Not with me, Charlie. Christ.”
I let go completely.
The sounds coming out of me turn rough and uncontrolled. I dig my fingers into his shoulders and drag him closer until there’s no distance left between us. My fangs descend completely on their own. He sees it. The growl that comes out of him is deep and wolf-dark, the sound reverberating through the knot and straight into my core is hard enough to set off a violent wave that knocks my head back against the tree.
“Jesus.”
“I know.” He presses his mouth to my jaw, my throat, his breathing rough and close against my skin. His hands grip my hips with a force that would shatter anything human and does spectacular things to me, tilting me forward, changing the angle, the knot pressing deeper still, and every small involuntary shift of either of us sets off another rolling cascade that I am utterly unequipped to manage.
“Rogue.” His name is the only word I have left, and I’m using it constantly.
“Right here.” His voice is hoarse, two hundred years of careful control completely eroded, leaving something underneath that sounds undone in the most fundamental way. “I’ve got you.”
He moves again, unhurried and deliberate, a slow grind that drags the knot against that spot with devastating accuracy, and the sound I make dislodges something from the canopy above us.
“Harder!”
He does.
Again…
… and again.
Each roll of his hips is slow and intentional, the knot pressing in exactly the right place with exactly the right force, and the pleasure builds in layers I have no vocabulary for. Not the sharp, climbing peak of human sensation… this is vaster. Spreading and continuous, and stacking on itself, wave rolls over wave with nowhere to resolve, just building and building until my entire body is caught in it, and I stop attempting to monitor any of it.
“Don’t hold back,” he says into my hair. The same words he said before, but they mean something different now, strained, almost desperate, the request of a man hanging onto his last thread of composure. “Not with me, Charlie. Please.”
I stop holding back. My hips roll forward to meet Rogue’s, and I stop moderating the sounds I’m making. I dig my fingers into his shoulders and drag him closer until there is no distance left between us, and my fangs descend entirely on their own. The growl that comes out of him at that is so deep and wolf-dark it reverberates through the knot and into my core and sets off a wave so violent that my head drops back against the tree, and I say something extremely undignified into the night sky.
“Mine,” he growls, his jaw pressing hard against my neck and shoulder, teeth dragging a slow, claiming line. “Mine.”
“Yours,” I gasp, and mean it in every single dimension.
His mouth finds my throat and stays there, open and hot, while his hips hold their devastating rhythm and the knot keeps its devastating pulse, and I am completely, entirelyunraveling. The pleasure has become one continuous thing, no peaks and valleys, just an endless building pressure that radiates from every point of contact outward, my whole body lit up and humming, vampire senses turned entirely against me, translating everything at a resolution no human body was ever designed to process.
My fangs find his shoulder.
This time I don’t hesitate.
I sink in at the exact moment he grinds forward, and the taste of him detonates through me simultaneously with the deepest pulse of the knot yet. The resulting collision obliterates every coherent thought I’ve had in twenty-three years of living, plus four days of undead existence.
Lycan heat floods my mouth, rich, ancient, and his, a flavor that is specific and unmistakable, running through me like a lit match meeting accelerant. The bond, the blood, the pleasure, and the heat collapse together into something singular and devastating, and I make a sound against his skin that is muffled only because my fangs are buried in him.
His answering groan is the most destroyed sound I’ve ever heard from a living creature.
His arms lock fully around me, both of them, gathering my entire weight against his chest with a grip that communicates something far beyond words, and his hips press forward in slow, grinding pulses that match the rhythm of the knot, relentless and unhurried and absolutely destroying me. I take only a mouthful… less. Just enough to feel him flood through me like wildfire, and stopping there is simultaneously the hardest thing I’ve ever done and the easiest, because the part of me that pulled back is mine, is Charlie Harris, and she held.
My tongue closes the marks with instinctive care, and the shudder that moves through him at that small gesture travels all the way down through the knot.
