Chapter 20 #2
His hands found my breasts with that single-minded devotion, his mouth finding my nipple, tongue circling, the groan vibrating through my ribs. I let him because the pleasure was sharp and real. But tonight I wanted more.
I pressed my palm flat against his chest and pushed him down. He went, his back hitting the furs, his eyes wide.
I kissed his mouth. Then his throat. Then lower — down the center of his chest, following the dark line of hair from his navel downward.
His breathing changed. Got ragged.
“Talia ...” He propped himself up on his elbows. “What are you ...”
“Lie back,” I told him.
He didn’t. He watched me move lower and I could see the moment he understood because his whole body went rigid and his elbows gave out and he dropped flat against the furs.
“You don’t ...” he started, choking on it, his hands fisting the furs. “I’ve never — no one has ever ...”
“I know,” I murmured against his hip bone. “That’s why.”
I took him in my mouth.
The sound he made wasn’t human. A raw, guttural cry that tore from his chest and bounced off the stone walls.
His hips bucked, involuntary, uncontrollable, and I pressed my hands against his thighs and held him down and worked him slowly.
Learning the shape of him. The weight, the heat, the way his body responded to pressure and the flat of my tongue.
He lasted less than a minute.
His hand found my hair, not gripping, just holding on, and his body fractured, hands fisting my hair.
“Talia, I’m going to, you need to ...”
I didn’t pull away.
He came with a shout that split him in half. His body arched off the bed and his hand tightened in my hair and I kept my mouth on him through every wave until his body went limp and his hand fell away and his chest heaved.
I lifted my head. He was staring at the ceiling with his mouth open and his eyes glassy, a man who’d just had his mind wiped clean.
“What ...” He swallowed. “What did you ...”
“Took what I wanted,” I replied, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
He covered his face with both hands and made a sound that was half laugh and half sob.
Then he went still and dropped his hands, his eyes found mine and they weren’t glassy anymore. They were burning. The amber had swallowed everything and the pupils had gone narrow and dark and the look on his face was nothing I’d seen before.
This was the wolf.
He moved before I could react.
His hands closed around my waist and I was on my back before I understood what had happened, lifted, turned, put down on the furs with a strength that made my weight feel like nothing.
My head hit the pillow and he was already pushing my thighs apart with his shoulders, already settling between my legs, already lowering his mouth with a single-mindedness that left no room for asking.
His mouth found me and the sound that came out of him was a growl, low and sustained and vibrating against the most sensitive part of my body. This wasn’t the careful, searching tongue from the first time. This was instinct. The wolf knew what it wanted and it wanted to devour me.
His tongue was broad and flat and relentless, stroking with a pressure that made my back arch off the furs. He gripped my thighs and spread them wider and buried his face between them and ate me like a man who’d been starving for decades and had finally found sustenance.
I couldn’t think. Couldn’t see. The pleasure was savage — nothing gentle, nothing tentative, just his mouth and his tongue and the growl that never stopped vibrating through me. He found the rhythm that made me cry out and locked onto it with predatory focus, driving it home again and again.
My hands found his hair. Twisted. Pulled.
He groaned against me and the vibration sent a spike of pleasure so sharp I screamed and my hips lifted off the bed and he followed, his hands sliding under me, lifting me to his mouth, holding me suspended between his palms and his tongue while my legs shook.
I came so hard I lost time. One moment I was arching off the bed with his name tearing out of me and the next I was flat on my back with the aftershocks rolling through me and his mouth still on me, gentler now, lapping, tasting, that low growl still rumbling.
He wasn’t finished.
He rose up from between my thighs and his body covered mine and his face was above me, flushed and wrecked and his beard glistening wet with me, the coarse hair dark and slick from chin to throat.
He didn’t wipe it away. Didn’t seem to know or care.
His mouth found mine and I could taste myself on him, sharp and salt, and feel the wet scratch of his beard against my face.
The rawness of it, the animal intimacy of kissing a man still wearing the evidence of what he’d just done, made something deep in my belly clench hard.
His hips pressed against mine and he was hard again, impossibly hard, and his eyes were still burning with that amber-swallowed look that was all wolf.
“I need ...” he started.
“Take it,” I told him.
The last restraint snapped loose.
He thrust into me in one stroke, no guidance, no hesitation, instinct finding the angle that nature had designed, and the sound we both made filled the cottage.
He didn’t wait for me to set the pace. The wolf had taken the reins and it drove his hips with a rhythm that was primal and deep and exactly what my body was screaming for.
His wet beard dragged against my throat as his mouth worked along my neck, not kissing, just tasting, his teeth scraping and his tongue following. I could feel the slickness of his beard leaving traces of me on my own skin and the filthy intimacy of it made my hips lift to meet every thrust.
“Harder,” I gasped, and the word came out before I could catch it.
He obeyed. His hips slammed into mine and I felt every inch of him, deep, deeper, finding places that hadn’t been touched in sixteen years, hadn’t been touched ever, because William had been gentle and careful and this was neither of those things and my body was singing with it.
This wasn’t the trembling virgin who’d cried the first time. This was the animal underneath, and it was magnificent.
He pulled out and I made a sound of protest. Desperate, needy, furious at the loss. But his hands were already turning me and I was on my stomach before I understood what had happened. Flipped like I weighed nothing. Like my body was a thing he could arrange however he wanted.
“Yes,” I breathed into the furs. “Yes.”
He entered me from behind and the depth of it made us both cry out.
His hand found my hair, twisted into it, pulled, arching my back until the stretch ran from my scalp down my spine, and his other arm wrapped under my hips and lifted them and the angle was devastating.
Every thrust hitting a spot that sent sparks cascading through my vision.
His beard scraped against the back of my neck, rough and still damp, and his breath came hot and ragged, punctuated by sounds that weren’t words, growls and snarls and the occasional broken syllable of my name.
I could feel his body changing against mine, not fully shifting, but the edges of it, the heat intensifying, the muscles hardening, the teeth against my skin growing sharper.
His hand twisted harder in my hair and I moaned and pressed back against him.
The pleasure was building again, waves stacking faster than I could process.
The pull on my scalp and the depth of him and the wet scrape of his beard against my nape and the growl rumbling from his chest into my spine, all of it feeding into the same tightening coil.
I liked it. Liked it so much it frightened me, the fist in my hair, the weight of his body driving mine into the furs, the rawness of being taken by something that was more than a man. I wanted more of it. Wanted him to pull harder and thrust deeper and lose himself completely.
“Don’t hold back,” I told him, muffled by the furs. “I can take it.”
He snarled against the back of my neck and his hips found another gear, harder, faster, his grip on my hair tightening until the pain bloomed bright at my scalp and fed straight into the pleasure building at the base of my spine.
“Talia ...” My name mangled by teeth that weren’t quite human. “The bite. I can’t hold ...”
“Do it,” I gasped. “Now.”
His hand released my hair and found my right shoulder instead, not because I’d told him to, but because the wolf knew where it wanted to mark.
His fingers dug into the flesh, holding me still.
His mouth opened against the muscle where neck met shoulder, I felt the heat of his breath, the wet scratch of his beard, the points of teeth that were too sharp, too long, pressing dents into my skin.
He thrust deep, once, twice, and on the third his teeth sank in.
The pain was sharp and bright and real. It cut through the pleasure and then fused with it, the two braiding together into something that had no name.
His teeth were in my flesh, deeper than human teeth could go, and I felt the bond snap into place, not gradually, not gently, but like a door kicked open from both sides at once.
And I could feel him.
Everything. All at once.
His pleasure, a wave so vast it nearly drowned us both.
His love, older than I’d understood, deeper than I’d believed, a river flowing since boyhood without once changing course.
His terror that the teeth were too deep.
His triumph that they were exactly deep enough.
The wolf howling inside him with a joy so fierce it brought tears to my eyes.
And a sensation I hadn’t expected. Being inside me, felt from his side. The tight, wet heat of my body around his. The pull of it. The way it felt to him. Overwhelming, sacred, like being allowed inside a temple he’d spent his whole life circling from the outside.
The orgasm detonated through us both.