Roar of the Wild (Fated Through Time #2)

1. Chapter 1

ELLIE

"Firewood," I said, holding up my armful of branches as evidence, "in case you were wondering why I followed you out here.

" Daska didn't look up from the limb he was stripping, and the smile moving through his beard said he didn’t believe me.

Wanting a man this much was still new enough to embarrass me, but I still watched him break a fallen limb into lengths, unhurried, thorough, the same patience he brought to everything.

Over the winter I'd learned exactly what else that patience could be brought to, and the memory brought heat to my face was already pink from the cold.

We'd left the others behind at the camp a good ten minutes ago, sent out for firewood while Dev coaxed the morning blaze back to life, Megan pretended not to be shivering, and Nathan stood over the scanner with the expression of a man willing a dead thing to speak.

Ordinary chores were all it was, in theory; a reason to be gone from the others for a while.

The corridor south of the Carpathians had opened up around us over the last few days into broad country, snowmelt running loud in every hollow and the river somewhere off to the east grinding its winter ice downstream.

The light this morning came thin and silver through the trees, the sort of early-spring cold that got into the seams of your clothes and stayed there.

Daska looked up and caught me looking, which he always somehow did.

That was all it took, most days; he didn't say anything.

He set the limb down, unhurried, and crossed the space between us, and the bond warmed in my chest, as it always did when he came close, a settled heat, sure of itself, nothing like the ragged thing Nathan had left behind.

Two years I'd carried that hollow ache and called it the shape of what I was.

Then a bear-shifter with reddish lights in his beard had decided I was worth choosing, and the ache had a rival now.

"You're cold," he said, in the wolf-tongue that had stopped feeling foreign somewhere over the winter. His voice did the low thing it did. "Let me."

"I'm gathering firewood," I said. "Very industrious of me, if you look closely. Whole armfuls of the stuff."

"I see it." He took the branches out of my arms and set them down with a care they didn't deserve, and then his hands came back to me, one at my jaw, one sliding into the fur at my collar to find the skin of my throat. His thumb traced the line of it. "Ellie."

Just my name, said low like that, and it undid me every time, though it had no business doing so.

Stop pretending you came out here for the wood.

I'd stopped pretending a while ago, if I was honest, and being honest with myself was a newer habit than the numbness it kept trying to replace.

I went up on my toes and he met me halfway, because he always met me halfway, and the kiss started slow and unspooled fast, his mouth learning mine like he hadn't already mapped it a hundred times.

He tasted of the mint leaf he chewed for his teeth and underneath that of something warmer, and I made a sound against him I'd have been embarrassed by six months ago.

He walked me back until my shoulders met the broad trunk of a pine, and I went, pulling him with me, my hands fisting in the front of his hides.

Bark at my back, the cold of the morning on one side of me and the furnace of him on the other.

His body caged mine without pinning it, always that care, always the door left open behind me in case I wanted it.

I didn't want the door left open behind me, and I told him so by pulling him hard into me.

"Here?" he murmured against my jaw, and beneath it sat the question that was as much a part of him as his hands. Are you sure enough, are you warm enough, is this truly what you want from me?

"Here," I breathed. "Before someone comes looking and Nathan gives me another lecture on discipline."

That got me the low huff of a laugh into my throat, and the vibration of it went straight down my spine.

His mouth moved to the soft place below my ear, and I tipped my head to give him the room, and after that there was nothing left of the morning but the drag of his beard against my skin and the heat pooling heavy in me.

He got the ties of my outer layer loose with the patience of a man who'd never been rushed in his life.

Cold air found the gap and I shivered, and he made a sound of apology and covered the bared skin with his palm, warming it, his hand splayed wide over my ribs, thumb just under the swell of my breast. I arched into it; two years I'd felt nothing, wanted nothing, told myself the wanting had died with everything else.

It hadn't died at all, as it turned out; it had only been waiting for hands that meant it.

"Cold," he said against my collarbone, half question.

"Don't stop."

He took me at my word and worked the layers open only as far as he had to, mindful of the morning even now, and got his mouth to my breast, and the first hot pull of it drew a cry out of me that I muffled against his hair.

His beard rasped the tender skin and I felt that everywhere, the sting, softened underneath, his tongue circling my nipple until it stood hard against the cold.

One of his big hands slid down over my belly, past the waist of my leggings, and stopped.

"Safe?" he asked, as he always asked. He drew back just enough to find my eyes, his own steady, and it was the asking that finished me every time.

No one had ever paused at the threshold of me to be certain I wanted them through it.

In the world I came from, wanting had been a transaction, and I'd stopped expecting anyone to check the terms.

"Yes, God, yes," I breathed. "I'm safe with you, Daska. Please, I want your hand on me."

His fingers slid lower and found me already wet, and his breath left him rough at the feel of it.

"You're soaked," he said against my mouth, wondering, and pressed the heel of his hand to my clit and rubbed slow circles that had my hips chasing him at once.

Two of his fingers pushed into me, unhurried.

I clung to his forearms and let myself make noise into the quiet of the pines, because he'd taught me my sounds pleased him, and because two years of holding still and small had cracked open under this man's patient hands and I wasn't holding still anymore.

He worked me open on his fingers, his thumb never leaving my clit, reading every hitch of my breath and following it, and the heat wound tighter in me with every slow curl of his hand.

"Look at you," he said, low, watching my face as if it held something he needed to memorise. "There you are. Let me feel you go."

I came on his hand with his name in my mouth and my nails marking his arms, clenching hard around his fingers, and he held me through it, his free hand steady at the small of my back, murmuring things half in his language and half in the broken bits of mine that he'd learned for me.

Before I'd finished shaking he was freeing himself from his own layers.

I reached for him and wrapped my fingers around his cock, thick and hot and already slick at the tip, and felt him shudder against me at the first stroke of my hand.

He let me work him for a moment, his forehead dropping to mine, his breath breaking.

Then he caught my wrist gently and moved my hand away, hooked one of my legs up over his hip, and notched himself against me.

"Still safe?" he breathed, holding there, the blunt head of him pressed to my entrance and not one inch further.

"Yes. Inside me, Daska. Now."

He pushed in slow, watching me the whole time, my face, my breath, the flutter of my lashes, and I felt every thick inch of him fill me, the stretch of it wringing a sound out of both of us when he seated himself to the root.

He held there, letting me feel all of him, his hand spread wide over my hip.

"Move," I told him, rocking down onto his cock, greedy for the friction. "Please move."

He began to move, deep slow strokes with no hurry anywhere in them, the trunk solid at my back and his hands taking my weight, his cock dragging thick and perfect through me on every pass.

I met him, my hips rolling to his rhythm, the heat building again already, faster this time.

He kept his forehead against mine so I had nowhere to look but into him, and the intimacy of that was almost more than the rest of it, being seen, being fucked sure by someone who wasn't going anywhere.

Through the bond I felt his pleasure feeding mine, a loop tightening between us until I couldn't tell whose want was whose, and when he groaned my name and his rhythm finally broke he reached between us and pressed his thumb to my clit again, and that was all it took.

I came around his cock a second time, clenching and shaking, and felt him spill hot inside me on a low broken sound with his face buried in my throat.

We stayed like that a while, breathing, his weight a warmth I'd have happily stood under until spring turned to summer. His heart slammed against my palm where I'd flattened my hand over his chest, and mine was going just as hard to answer it.

"Firewood," I said eventually, and felt him laugh, the whole of him.

* * *

We put ourselves back together in the companionable quiet that came after, him retying the laces I couldn't reach, me plucking a curl of bark out of his beard and refusing to acknowledge the smugness on his face while I did it.

The cold reasserted itself the moment his heat left my skin.

Spring in this world was a rumour the land hadn't fully agreed to yet.

I gathered the deadfall again, actual firewood this time, since we'd have to arrive back with something to show for ourselves, and he shouldered the bigger limb, and we started back toward the thread of smoke rising through the trees.