Page 148 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

I pull him back down to me, and my thighs part as he settles between them. I reach a hand around to grip his ass and gasp when his teeth take the edge of my ear in response.

“I thought I’d never see you again.” The warm brush of his breath on my neck makes me melt. “Thought the gardai would get you, that I’d never get to…”

Whatever he meant to say goes unsaid as his lips find mine again.

There are no promises here. Nothing we can say that changes what this is. We’re thorns wrapping around the same stem, always one wrong move away from drawing blood. From fucking up whatever this starving, undeniable thing between us really is—if we live long enough to find out.

Wolf’s hands work at the hem of my shirt, his fingers trailing heat along the plane of my stomach. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t ask, or reach for anything I’m not already willing to give, anything I’m not aching for him to claim. But I hear the question in his touch all the same and take the tunic off myself, guiding his fingers, his touch, back to my skin.

His hand climbs up my ribs, careful of the scar left by the assassin’s blade, and cups the curve of my breast. His thumb traces the hard peak he finds there, and I let my head fall back, gasping.

“Yeah?” Wolf growls against my mouth, and kisses me; I answer by nipping at his bottom lip. I reach my hand down between us, teasing at the waistband of his leathers. I stroke the length of him beneath, already hard for me.

The groan I draw from him pours fuel on the flames licking up my core.

I pull at the shirt covering the muscled expanse of his chest,and Wolf’s breath catches. He tears his mouth away, forehead resting against mine, and a rare flicker of…

Is thatfearthat darkens his eyes?

I pull back, searching him the way he looked at me, but let my thumb trail along the inches of bare skin above his waistband. But I don’t draw the shirt any higher.

He tenses, almost imperceptibly, and draws one hand up to cup my face as his darkened green eyes flicker back to mine.

Old Ones… it’s like he’s waiting for me to pull away. Towalkaway.

Fromhim.

“You might not like what’s underneath,” Wolf warns softly.

My heart splinters.

Without a word, never taking my eyes off his, I draw the hem of the shirt up another inch, then another. I move slowly, waiting for him to tell me to stop, to give me some sign he doesn’t want this.

He never does, even as he braces with every inch of skin he lets me bare until there’s nothing left but for him to drag the shirt over his shoulders and throw it somewhere neither of us cares about. A brief flare of anguish burns in his gaze, there and gone in a blink—and I take him in.

Old Ones—there are so many more scars than I had seen in that secret room where he bandaged my side. Some jagged, others more like the raised welts of long-healed brands. Still others mirror the branching purple scar marking his jawline.

My chest, my heart, crack open, a rock wedging in my throat. “How?”

I trail a hand along the deep welts and indentations over themuscled width of his chest, his collarbone, his ribs. He shudders, just as the storm crashes outside. “Does it matter?” Wolf watches me trace the scars with a feather-soft touch. I don’t want to hurt him—can’t imagineanyonehurting him like this.

There’s a weight behind his simple question—a shield just waiting to be drawn back up between us.

I don’t answer him with words. Instead, I close the inch between us and press my lips gently to the deep, raised scar carved across the dip where his shoulder meets his collarbone and feel the muscles there tremble beneath my kiss.

“Maeve,” he whispers, low and ragged. And when I turn my face up to his, the raw longing in his eyes bruises my heart.

His mouth finds mine, and this time the kiss is a dangerous combination of raw hunger and need and the aching loneliness that’s burned in us both for too long.

Wolf lowers his mouth to the peak of my breast.

Fuck.

The heat of his mouth only adds to the fire inside me. His tongue teases my nipple, drawing tight coils of pleasure, and I stifle a moan with my hand.

His fingers reach up, knotting in mine. He pulls the hand from my mouth, kissing along each of my bruised knuckles.

“I want to hear you. Ineedto hear you, Maeve.”