Chapter 7 #3
He drags me off the step as though he’s done pretending distance was ever an option.
My back meets the wall with a dull thud, his body caging me there without force, only certainty.
Then he kisses me, and there’s nothing careful left in him.
It’s fierce, desperate, almost punishing in its intensity, as though he’s been fighting himself for hours and has finally decided to lose.
I should be horrified. Instead, I open for him.
His hands slide up to frame my face, holding me exactly where he wants me as the kiss deepens.
Every ounce of restraint that’s haunted him all night seems to unravel against my mouth, and I meet it without hesitation, my fingers knotting tighter in the front of his shirt as though I can somehow pull him closer than being pressed against me.
Then his hand wraps around my throat.
Not tight. Just enough to make it clear that, for this moment, I belong to him, and I’m powerless to change it.
I wait for the panic. Five years of flinching at less than this, and I wait, but it never comes. What steamrolls forward instead is a purr, rolling up out of my chest and vibrating against his palm, an unmistakable order to my Alpha to keep going.
He rewards me with a deep growl in his throat.
His lips leave mine and travel down my jaw to my throat, where he removes his grasp. His other hand finds the hem of my hoodie and the bare skin under it and pushes up until his fingers rest just below my breast, and he stops there, waiting.
“Oh, God!” I gasp, arching off the wall, incapable of anything except following the blind, burning hunger that has taken my brain hostage.
His hand closes over my breast, and I moan out loud when he tugs at my nipple. My hips are moving without permission, and my need is so violent that I forget the house and Ethan and my own name.
And with his mouth on my throat, licking, sucking, his teeth just barely there, I come apart completely.
I forget how to breathe. Everything in me bursts at once, and I shudder through it in waves with my hands clawed into his shirt. It’s only his body pinning me to the wall that keeps me on my feet.
“Roman. Fuck.”
I’m shaking. He pulls back enough to watch me, and he’s grinning, the absolute menace. His hand leaves my breast, drops to the button of my jeans, and flicks it open.
“You have no idea what you’ve brought out of me,” he whispers.
His hand slides down into the wreckage, and I’m so wet that I collapse back against the wall at the first touch of his fingers pushing between my folds.
I’m quivering under his touch, and his eyes never leave me, watching for my reaction.
Seconds. That’s all he takes. Then he draws his hand out and puts two glistening fingers in his mouth, and the look that crosses his face, that raw, greedy elation, nearly sends me over a second time.
He grunts, slams his palm into the wall beside my head, and grinds his erection against me, hard and fast. I feel the instant throb of his cock through the denim, then the sudden damp heat of it.
He’s got his head against my neck, growling, tense, clearly coming, and I’m dizzy with his scent, drowning in the sound of him coming undone for me.
Fuck, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
We stay there gasping in the dark like two people who just walked away from a car accident.
Then he pulls back, and we both start laughing quietly.
“Ten minutes,” he murmurs, forehead dropping to mine. “And I didn’t even get your shirt off.”
“You got further than I did.” I giggle, loving being pressed up against him, sharing this moment.
“I had a plan, you know. I’ve thought about this enough times that I’d need a lot more than ten minutes.”
That’s when the kitchen light on the far side of the room clicks on.
I flinch.
Footsteps sound somewhere past the kitchen.
He draws back, and every part of me objects. I watch him gather himself, then he catches my chin between his thumb and finger and tips my face up.
“I should go. It’s for the best, and I mean that.” His thumb drags once across my bottom lip. “But I’ll be awake in that cabin all night with the flavor of you in my mouth. And in the morning, you’ll wake up and know exactly what I’m still tasting.”
Then he’s gone, across the room, out the door, and swallowed by the darkness outside.
I’m not confident I can walk when I’m buzzing from my scalp to my heels, jeans unbuttoned, hoodie shoved up around my ribs.
“Lucy?” Ethan calls out from the kitchen, voice thick with sleep.
My heart tries to leave through my mouth. “Only me,” I answer, dragging my clothes into some approximation of order. “All good.”
“Okay, just checking,” he says, and the light goes off, then his door closes.
I cross to the front door and stare outside.
The path, the pines, and the darkness past them holding its breath, and nothing else.
I stand there for a long time in the cold with the little wooden wren digging into my pocket, working out exactly what I’ve done.
The bond is going to come for both of us more intensely now.
I spent twelve hours proving to myself that I can’t get through one night without him, and then I proved it to him too.
Maybe I’ve earned everything coming my way, seeing as I’ve completely lost control of myself.