Chapter 14 - Caitlynn
She kissed him.
Not gently. There was nothing gentle about it—it was months of fury and want.
The exhausting business of being constantly aware of someone and refusing to do anything about it, and it tasted like all of that, like anger that had nowhere left to go.
His hands came up immediately, one at her jaw and one at her waist, and he kissed her back with a thoroughness that made it very clear he’d been waiting for her to do something irreversible.
She got both hands into his shirt, and the wall of his study pressed against her back, and she didn’t know who’d moved whom, and it didn’t matter.
His mouth was at her throat, and her hands were in his hair, and the anger was still there, but it had changed shape, running hot through the same place in her chest it had always lived, and she thought—the thought dissolving almost before it formed—this is what it’s been. This is what all of it has been.
His hands. The breadth of them. The way they moved like he’d been mapping the geography of her for months in his head and was now confirming the terrain.
She arched into him, and his breath caught against her collarbone, and the sound of it undid something she’d been holding together with her fingernails.
The desk was behind him. She pushed. He went.
Papers scattered across the floor—the border reports, Viktor’s neat handwriting fanning out over hardwood—and neither of them stopped to care.
His mouth found hers again, harder this time, and she bit his lower lip, and his fingers dug into her hip, and the noise he made against her mouth went through her like voltage.
They didn’t make it to a bed.
His mouth was on hers, and her hands were fisting the front of his shirt.
She was pulling him backward without deciding to, and the desk hit the backs of her thighs, and she sat on it hard enough to scatter the border reports across the floor.
She didn’t care. She pulled him between her knees, and his hands slid up her thighs.
His thumbs pressed into the soft skin of her inner leg, and every coherent thought she’d been building for three months dissolved into the sound she made against his mouth.
“Off,” she said, yanking at his shirt, and he pulled back just far enough to drag it over his head.
She put her hands on his chest and felt the heat of him, the hard planes of muscle, the way his stomach contracted when her fingers traced the line of hair below his navel.
He watched her touch him with those ice-blue eyes gone dark and his jaw tight and his breathing ragged, and the control she could see him holding onto—barely, by his fingernails—made something low in her belly clench hard.
She wanted to break it. She wanted to watch it go.
She pulled her own shirt over her head, and his gaze dropped, and his hands followed.
His mouth followed his hands, and when his lips closed over her nipple through the thin fabric of her bra, she arched off the desk and grabbed the back of his head and held him there.
His teeth grazed. She gasped. He did it again, harder, and she wrapped both legs around his hips and pulled him flush against her and felt him—hard, straining against the fabric between them—and ground into him with a deliberateness that made his breath stutter against her skin.
“Caitlynn.” Her name in his mouth, rough and wrecked. A warning or a prayer, she couldn’t tell which and didn’t care.
“Don’t stop.”
He lifted her off the desk like she weighed nothing—hands under her thighs, her legs locked around him—and they were on the floor, the thin rug doing nothing against the cold stone, and she pulled him down over her and got her hands on his belt.
Her fingers were shaking. His were steadier but only just, and between the two of them, the remaining fabric was gone, and there was nothing between them but heat and skin and the weeks of anger that had been running on the wrong fuel this entire time.
He braced himself above her. Arms on either side of her head, the muscles in his shoulders rigid, his forehead pressed to hers. She could feel the effort it cost him to hold still—the tremor running through him, his wolf and his body and every part of him straining toward her.
“Look at me,” she said.
He did. Those eyes, close enough that she could see the rim of darker blue around the iris, and the way he looked at her—like she was something he’d been terrified of wanting—cracked the last of it open.
She tilted her hips and took him in.
The groan that tore out of him broke against her mouth—low, involuntary, stripped of every layer of control he’d been maintaining for months—and the sound of it undid something at the base of her spine.
She felt him everywhere. The stretch of him, the heat, the way her body adjusted around him, and then pulled him closer before she’d made the decision to.
She exhaled against his jaw, and the sound she made was nothing she recognized.
He moved. Not gently. This was months of restraint cracking at its foundation—every careful distance he’d kept, every conversation he’d had in his own head, every night lying awake three feet of plaster away from her—and it came out in the rhythm he set, deep and urgent and relentless, and she rose up to meet every stroke with her heels driving into the backs of his thighs.
Her nails raked down his spine, and he swore against her throat—a single word, animal and bitten off—and did it again harder, and she gasped and arched and pulled him closer still.
His mouth found her breast, and his tongue circled, and she twisted under him with a sharp, punched-out cry that echoed off the stone walls.
He lifted his head. His eyes—those ice-blue eyes, gone so dark they were nearly black—met hers, and what was in them was not gentle and not asking, and her entire body clenched around him in answer.
“More.” The word came out rough, and she barely recognized her own voice. “Kahn…”
He gave her more. His hips rolled deep, and his hand slid between them, and his thumb found the place that emptied her mind entirely—circling, steady, the same maddening precision he brought to absolutely everything—and she locked her ankles at the small of his back and took all of it, the pressure and the pace and the weight of him driving her into the floor.
The pleasure built in her like a wave that had been forming for three months and had finally run out of ocean.
She heard herself making sounds. She stopped trying to muffle them.
His name, torn loose from the back of her throat.
His name like a demand and a surrender at once, while her fingers dug into his shoulders and her spine arched off the thin rug.
She came apart loudly. Her whole body seized, her vision whited out at the edges, and the sound she made was gutted and raw.
She didn’t care, couldn’t care, because the wave had crested and she was under it.
It took everything with it—every wall she’d been holding up, every careful distance, every piece of armor she’d worn since she was old enough to know that people left.
He followed two thrusts later, his hips stuttering and stilling, the groan he buried in the curve of her neck something she would hear for the rest of her life, his whole body going taut and then undone.
She didn’t know how much time had passed, how long they lay there, next to each other, breathing hard.
The lamp was steady. Had been steady since—
She didn’t finish the thought.
He shifted. Not pulling away—a small adjustment, settling.
His chin came to rest against the top of her head.
His thumb moved once across the skin of her hip, absent and slow, like he’d forgotten he was doing it.
Goosebumps followed the path of it. She kept her breathing even and didn’t move because moving meant acknowledging that his thumb was doing things to her nervous system that his thumb had no business doing, given that the rest of him had just done considerably more.
The border reports were everywhere. One of them was under her left shoulder blade. She could feel the edge of the paper against her skin, and it was annoying but not annoying enough to shift away from the warmth of him, which was a piece of information she was going to have to sit with.
She searched for a line. A deflection. Something sharp and Caitlynn-shaped that would put distance back where it belonged and let her breathe without his heartbeat under her ear, making the breathing complicated.
Nothing came.
She tried again. Sifted through seventeen years of practiced deflections, the arsenal she’d built one foster home at a time, and found it locked.
Emptied. Like she’d spent every round of it in the fight that led here and there was nothing left but this—his shoulder under her cheek and his arm across her ribs and the quiet.
The anger she usually kept loaded and ready had gone somewhere she couldn’t reach.
Not vanished. She could still feel the shape of it, distant, the way you felt weather that had passed through and left the air different.
But it wasn’t running things anymore, and what sat in its place was something without a name—something that had been growing under the anger for weeks, maybe longer, wearing its shape the way water wore the shape of whatever held it.
Outside, the mountains were dark. A single howl rose and fell somewhere beyond the boundary. The lamp held steady.
“Your floor is terrible,” she said.
His chest moved under her cheek. Not a laugh. Close. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“You should. My back has opinions.”
“Your back is welcome to file a formal complaint.”
“It will. In writing. With diagrams.”
“I look forward to reviewing the diagrams.”
“You won’t enjoy them. They’ll be very critical of your hospitality.”
“My hospitality,” he said, and his voice had gone low and warm in a way that made the goosebumps come back, “has never been criticized before.”
“Then it’s overdue.”
His arm tightened around her. She let it.
Let herself settle closer instead of pulling away, which was new, which was the kind of thing she’d have armored herself against an hour ago and couldn’t seem to now.
His hand came up, and his fingers moved through her hair—slow, absent, the gesture of someone who’d been wanting to do it for a long time and had only just been given permission.