Chapter 18 — Ethan
“Being with you is the only thing I’ve felt certain about in my life.” The second the words leave my mouth, I want to claw them back.
Too much. That was too much.
I’m not known for pouring my heart out beside moonlit ponds to women who have the legal authority to execute me. I keep my expression neutral as I speak, watching for Rhiannon to politely withdraw.
Instead, she looks at me. Really looks. The way she does when she’s deciding what to do with every piece of information at once. Then, she says my name.
“Ethan.”
Just that. Quiet and certain, like a door clicking shut on everything outside this moment.
I read everything in the way she says it. The softness she’d never show in the light of day, the acknowledgment of everything unspoken between us. Every reasonable thought about consequences and self-preservation exits my brain in orderly fashion.
I cup the side of her neck, my thumb settling against her pulse. It races against my skin, betraying her composed expression. I lean in slowly, giving her every opportunity to pull back.
She doesn’t.
The kiss is unhurried. Her lips meld with mine. The pond is quiet around us as moonlight filters through the canopy. I kiss her like the forest and the sky have agreed to protect us from the rest of the world for this one night.
The kiss deepens. Her lips part and my tongue slides against hers. Rhiannon catches my lower lip between her teeth, not gently. The contrast between my patience and her edginess builds a slow burn that tightens my chest and settles low in my stomach.
When we separate for air, I rest my forehead against hers.
“Are you sure you want this?” My tone is quiet but direct. I need to know if she’ll call this a mistake like last time.
Rhiannon’s answer isn’t words.
She rises, closes the distance between us, and pulls me up by the front of my shirt. Her mouth finds mine before I’m fully standing. Her lips are certain, deliberate, seemingly saying, Silly question. Stop asking questions.
I get the message.
She peels my shirt upward after unhooking it from my trousers and pushes it up my torso inch by inch before letting it drop onto the ground. Her palms press flat against my chest, fingers spread wide.
She’s not exploring. She’s memorizing, applying the same focus she uses to study a patrol route. She runs her hands outward from my sternum, over my ribs, and up to my shoulders.
Her fingers glide over the scars on my arms and slow down.
She follows the longest one with her fingertip, a thin, pale ridge along my forearm I’d stopped noticing years ago. Then, she lowers her head and presses her lips to it.
She moves to the next one. And the next. Her mouth is patient and warm against each scar as she works her way across my arms without looking up, giving me an unprecedented kind of attention. Nobody has ever touched those marks and made me feel like anything other than damaged.
One of my hands cradles the back of her head, holding on but not directing.
Don’t you dare. My throat tightens. My vision blurs, and I stare up through the canopy at unfamiliar stars and try to think about literally anything else. Training tactics. Sandwich construction. The structural integrity of dungeon cells.
It works. Barely.
When she lifts her face, I can’t help but reach for the laces of her tunic. My hands are steadier than they should be. I work the laces loose, fold the fabric back, and peel it down her arms.
Then, I stop.
Moonlight carves her figure in silver — the athletic lines of her stomach, the swell of her breasts, the scatter of freckles across her collarbone that I already know extend all the way down.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” I say it the way I’d report that the sun rises in the east. Observation. Fact.
Her expression shifts, throat working, lips pressing tight for one unguarded second. She heard the truth in my voice.
The rest of our clothing comes off with less ceremony. Boots hit the grass. Pants are unlaced, pushed down, and stepped out of until there’s nothing between us but the night air.
Rank is stripped away. Species is irrelevant. Summit politics and pack laws and the twelve reasons this is too complicated, all of that is gone. It’s just her and me and the sound of water gently lapping against the shore.
I guide her down onto the moss.
It cushions her, soft and cool and alive. The canopy shelters us. Moonlight glows on the curve of her shoulder, the notch at the base of her throat.
She’s watching me, her golden-brown eyes appraising. She wants this, but she’s deciding whether she can risk it.
“Let me.” I hold her gaze. “Just this once, let me lead.”
Her chin tips up half an inch. Not agreement, exactly. More like permission.
I’ll take it.
I lower my head to her throat and press my mouth to the flutter at her throat. Her skin is hot, her heartbeat insistent against my lips, and the intimacy of it sings somewhere behind my ribs. Her life, beating that close to the surface, trusting me to be that close.
I kiss along her neck, down to the hollow between her collarbones. She exhales, and her breath is controlled but not steady. Her fingers curl at her sides.
I go lower and pause at her chest, just to look.
Her breasts rise and fall with each breath, her nipples peaking in the cool air. Freckles I didn’t get to count last time are scattered across the upper curve of her left breast. There’s four on the right one.
I’m already hard and pressing against her thigh, but I ignore it. It’s not time yet.
I lower my mouth to her left breast and work my way downward.
Slowly. I circle one nipple with my tongue until it hardens, then pull it between my lips and suck, gently at first, then harder, while my thumb rolls along the other.
Rhiannon arches. Her fingers dig into the moss and pull up a fistful by the roots.
She makes a sound, low and caught somewhere between an exhale and a moan, that drives every drop of my blood south. I graze her nipple with my teeth. Her fingers twist into my hair and grip.
I lift my head just enough to see her face. Her eyes are half-closed, her lips parted.
“Do you like that?”
She nods, her fingers knotted in my hair.
I suck harder, my teeth grazing the sensitive peak, then give it a nibble with careful pressure.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes,” she says again, louder this time.
Every sound. I want to hear every sound from her.
I move to the other side, giving her the same sustained attention. Her hips start moving against the air, seeking contact I haven’t provided yet. The slow roll of them is unconscious. Her body is asking for something her mouth hasn’t decided to say.
Then, I go down to her ribs, her stomach, the ridge of her hip, where I press my lips onto her skin in a long, open-mouthed kiss and drag my teeth over the bone. She sucks in a breath so sharp it sounds almost pained.
This is torture for me, too. I’m hard enough that concentration requires effort, every sound she makes ratcheting me up by another degree.
But I stay controlled. Last time was fast and desperate, fueled by grief and the wreckage of her control.
This time, I want to take my time with her.
I want to absorb every response, every tell, every movement that shows the Commander dissolving into the woman she doesn’t let anyone see.
If this is the last time, I’m making sure I remember everything.
I press my lips to the inside of her knee.
Her legs fall open, without hesitation or negotiation. She’s opening for me, and a fierce, awed recognition burns in my chest at the trust in it. The Commander of the Guard, letting me in.
I kiss higher up on the soft skin of her inner thigh. She’s warm there, warmer than anywhere else, and she smells like pine and what lies underneath that — a scent rich and biological and so specific to her that my brain is already flagging it as important.
“Do you want me to taste you?”
Her answer is a soft whimper.
I lower my head and drag my tongue — flat, broad, slow — from her entrance to her clit.
The sound Rhiannon makes is raw. A moan that punches out of her and echoes through the trees, making the silence that follows it feel electric. A hand flies to my hair and grips hard enough that my scalp burns.
The sharp pull sends a pulse of heat through my whole body and I groan against her. Her hips buck at the vibration.
She definitely likes that, even if she tries to pretend she doesn’t.
I find my rhythm by varying the pressure, speed, and angle, reading her in real time, tracking every catch in her breath, every roll of her hips, every involuntary flex of her fingers.
She’s responsive in subtle ways she’d probably hate knowing I’ve already internalized.
I’m logging the way her breathing stops entirely for a moment before she exhales a moan, the way her thighs press in when I’m close to her and fall open when she wants more.
When I find the specific combination that makes her lose herself, I lock in.
I slide two fingers inside her.
Her back arches off the moss and she says something that might be my name and might be a curse.
It’s probably a combination of both. I curl my fingers forward while my tongue works her clit in tight, relentless circles.
I don’t care about the effort it takes, I would do this until every wolf in the fortress hears her.
Rhiannon is coming apart beneath me.
The armor she welds onto herself every morning before anyone else is awake is gone. She’s gasping, her body rolling in waves, her nails scraping my scalp, saying my name in fragments between breaths instead of with controlled, authoritative precision.
She’s letting herself be just herself.