Page 20 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

Her expression rearranges itself. Not softening. Calculation. She's running numbers she hasn't shared with the class and arriving at a conclusion that requires verification.

She kisses me. The contact is brief, precise, a test conducted with the same methodical rigor she brings to wound assessment. Her mouth is warm and tastes like the bitter compound she takes every morning, and underneath the bitterness there's something that doesn't belong to the suppressant, something sweet and low that my wolf locks onto before she pulls back.

"I needed data," she says.

"That was a kiss."

"It was a controlled assessment of pheromone response at intimate proximity." Her tone is steady. Her pulse, visible at her throat, is not.

"Signe."

"Be quiet."

She leans forward again, and this time the kiss isn't diagnostic.

Her mouth opens against mine and her hands find the sides of my face. The clinical frame she built around the contact shatters on impact.

She tastes like herbs and winter and the compound that's been hiding her from every wolf alive. Underneath all of it there's a sweetness my wolf chases with the single-minded focus of an animal that has found water after weeks of drought. My hand finds her hair before I've decided to move it.

The braid she wears at the fortress is tight and controlled, every strand disciplined. My fingers close around the base of it and pull her head back with enough force to break the angle she chose and replace it with mine.

The sound she makes against my mouth isn't clinical. It isn't measured. It travels through her lips into my jaw and settles at the base of my spine, and my wolf files it under essential the way he files water and shelter and the sound of prey breaking cover.

I hold her there. Her throat is exposed, the pulse hammering under the skin, and my wolf wants to put his teeth on the hollow where the nerve cluster lives and end the pretense of clinical boundaries forever. I don't. But the wanting restructures every priority in my body around the fist I've wrapped in her hair.

"Terms," I say against her mouth. "Tell me your terms."

She doesn't answer with words. She drops to her knees between my legs with the precision she brings to every procedure. For one breath I see the healer reasserting herself, determined to manage this encounter with expertise and detachment and the conviction that the professional is separate from the biology.

My hand is still in her hair. I don't let go.

Her fingers work the laces of my trousers with steady competence. When she frees me, the cold air of the infirmary hits skin that's running hotter than fever.

I'm thick and hard in her hand. The look she gives what she's holding carries the measuring quality she wore while assessing my wounds for the first time, cataloging size and heat and the pulse she can feel against her palm.

The distance lasts until she lowers her mouth and my grip tightens in her braid.

I set the pace. Not with cruelty, but with the unambiguous authority of a wolf who has been lying on a cot watching the most controlled woman in the fortress pretend she doesn't want this. She follows what I'm asking for.

The measured steadiness she started with fractures against the pressure of my grip and the depth I'm guiding her toward, and what replaces it is rawness, presence, and nothing that resembles the safety of a professional framework.

The heat of her mouth surrounds me. The slick pressure of her tongue works the underside in long, deliberate strokes. Her jaw opens wider when my hips lift, and a sound vibrates in her throat when I push deeper than she intended, barely audible, impossible to miss. Her hand wraps around the base where she can't follow, fingers tight, taking in the girth and the heat.

The dual sensation strips the coherent thoughts from my skull one at a time until the only thing left is the feel of her and the animal certainty that she's been mine since the cottage whether she's ready to hear it or not.

My wolf catches the scent change before I do. The suppressant, which has been holding with diminishing authority since the cottage, loses another fraction of its ground, and what bleeds through is omega. Not the faint thread I caught during the bandage change. A full harmonic, sweet and dense and biologically unmistakable, her body responding to the alpha pheromones flooding the space between us.

The compound can mask her at rest. It can mask her during casual contact. It can't mask her while she's on her knees with her mouth on a compatible alpha and every receptor in her body is firing in a direction the suppressant wasn't designed to contain.

The slick follows. I can't see it but I can smell it, rich and warm, her body producing the one biological signal that no amount of professional framing can redefine as assessment.

She knows. I watch the knowledge arrive in her face, the fraction of a second where the healer processes what her body is doing and the woman behind the healer understands what it means.

A sound escapes her, low and involuntary, bitten off before it can become anything she'd have to acknowledge. She falters under my grip. Recovers. Resumes with desperation replacing the precision, racing to finish before the finish takes what she can't afford to lose.

My grip doesn't ease. The base of me swells against her palm, the alpha precursor she'd describe in medical terminology if she weren't experiencing it against her skin, the biology that says the body she's touching wants to lock and hold and keep. She adapts instead of pulling away, her fingers accepting the thickening, and the knowledge that her hands are meeting my biology rather than retreating from it unravels the last thread of control I have.

I finish with her name in my mouth, bitten off before the second syllable, my back arched off the cot and my fist still locked in her braid. Every muscle in my body strains against the drive to pull her up and put my mouth on the hollow of her throat and give both of us the irreversible thing she described in such careful language.