Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Lucas
Her fingers dig into my shirt.
That small claim to the cotton over my chest is what undoes me. Not the kiss itself, not the heat of her mouth opening under mine, but the way she grips my shirt as if she can’t bear to let me go. She is not pushing me away. She is pulling me in.
The threat she just made breaks apart against my teeth.
“Wear his mark. Bear his child.” I taste those words on her tongue, and I taste them dying.
My whole body responds with a single, low sound that is barely human, scraped out of the place inside me that has been awake every minute of every night since she walked right into me and changed the architecture of my life.
I lift her. She is still unsteady on her feet, so I get my arms under her thighs and bring her up against me. Her hands reach up to my neck instantly, her mouth already chasing mine.
The bandages are gone. Her wounds have closed. I can feel the warmth of her skin through the thin shirt she is wearing, the shape of her breasts pressed against my chest, and the small, frantic stutter of her pulse where my thumb rests against her lowest ribs.
“I hate you,” she breathes into my mouth, her tears salty as they trail down her cheeks to our lips. Her fingers thread through my hair. “I hate you so much.”
“I know.” My voice has gone rough enough that even I do not recognize it.
I take three steps and lower her onto the bed, easing her down on the pillows. I should stop right now. This is the right moment to leave this room before I make a mistake I can’t undo. My body begins to pull away, but she yanks me back, kissing me fiercely.
“You’re a bastard.”
Tears cling to her eyelashes, and she looks so damn beautiful. I kiss her again. I kiss her until the tears stop, until her hand drops from my hair and slides down to the side of my throat instead, her thumb pressing against my pulse like she needs to feel it hammer.
I have wanted this ever since I can remember. I have wanted it through every restless night, every cold shower, every meeting where I sat across from her and pretended my skin was not on fire just from sharing the air with her.
I am done pretending.
“Tell me to stop.” I drag my mouth down her jaw. The skin under her ear is so sweet, my teeth ache. “Sienna, tell me to stop right now.”
Just one word from her, and I won’t doom both of us.
“Don’t.” Her hand grips the back of my neck. “Don’t you dare stop.”
The smell of her skin hits me again: the healer’s salve, the soap his assistant used on her, her own scent underneath all of it. My wolf comes roaring up out of wherever he has been hiding for days. He fills my chest. He fills my hands.
I pull her shirt up over her head carefully, mindful of the shoulder wound that has only just closed. There’s a new pink scar shining on her side. I press my mouth to it. She makes a small sound, and her hand fists in my hair.
I do not stop there.
I pull my mouth across the slope of her ribs. Down the soft plane of her stomach. She arches up off the bed, pulling my hair harder, almost cruelly. I take the burn at my scalp and let it feed that thing low inside me that has been starving for weeks.
I strip the shorts off her in one rough pull. Her hips lift to help me. My hands shake when they grip her thighs and spread them apart.
She is wet for me already. Drenched. The scent of her hits me hard enough to make my vision blur at the edges. My wolf snarls so loudly inside my chest, I half expect her to hear it.
“Lucas…” Her voice has gone thin. “Lucas, please—”
I drag my tongue up the center of her in a slow stroke, and the rest of her sentence collapses into a cry she muffles against the back of her own hand.
I do it again. I do it until her thighs are shaking against my ears, until her hand has dropped from her mouth and gone back into my hair.
Until her hips are chasing my mouth and her breath is coming in broken sobs that have nothing to do with crying.
I do not let her come.
I stop when she is right at the edge, and she makes a sound of pure outrage that goes straight through me. Her hand yanks my head back so she can look at me.
“Lucas!” Her voice cracks. Her eyes are wild. “If you don’t—”
I crawl up her body and, straddling her, I rip my own shirt off over my head. Before it hits the floor, her hands are on me, raking down my chest, my ribs, my stomach. Her nails leave trails of heat in their wake.
I pin both her hands above her head with one of mine. The other shoves my trousers down off my hips.
“Look at me.” I press her wrists harder into the pillow. “Sienna. Eyes.”
Her gaze snaps up to meet mine.
Her chest is heaving. Her mouth is swollen and parted. There is a flush on her throat that disappears around the curve of her breast. She is glaring at me with so much fury and so much desire, each layered on top of the other, that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
I push into her with a long, slow thrust.
Her head tips back. Her body bows up under me.
The sound that tears out of her is half a cry and half a curse, and I drop my mouth to her throat to feel it vibrate through her skin.
She is so tight around me, I cannot breathe.
So hot. The bond between us is straining at its leash in a way it never has before, pulling tight in my chest, every one of my nerves aware of every one of hers.
I hold there. I can’t move yet. If I move, I will not last, and I refuse to be done with her this fast.
She tries to buck up under me. I pin her hip down with my free hand.
“No.” My voice is ragged. “You don’t get to rush this. Not after what you just said to me.”
Her breath hitches. Her eyes flash.
She squeezes around me. Hard. On purpose.
A growl rips out of my chest, and my hips snap forward before my brain catches up. The cry she gives me is so wrecked, I almost spill right now, right here.
“Oh, you want to play that game.” I drop my mouth to her ear and bite down on the lobe sharply enough to make her gasp.
I let go of her wrists. I get one hand under her hip and lift it, changing the angle, and drive into her with everything I’ve got.
She arches high off the bed. Her hands fly to my back. I feel her nails dig in at my shoulder blades and scratch downward, eight burning lines. I welcome them. I want her marks on me. I want to feel the sting tomorrow under my shirt and remember exactly where her hands were.
I move inside her, and she meets me thrust for thrust. The headboard knocks against the wall.
Her legs come up and lock around my hips, her body driving up against mine like it is settling a debt with me.
She squeezes around me again, viciously, and I bite down on her shoulder in retaliation, mindful of the new scar. She keens into my hair.
“Who’s inside you?” I rasp out.
She turns her head to one side.
“No.” I slide my free hand into her hair and drag her face back to mine. Her gaze burns into mine. “Look at me, Sienna. Whose cock is fucking you right now?”
“Yours.” The word escapes her between gasps. Her nails sink into my back again. “You, you, fuck you, you.”
“Whose name are you going to say when you come?”
She bares her teeth at me. Her hips drive up against mine.
I slow down. I pull almost all the way out of her and stop. She makes a sound of such rage that I almost laugh.
“Whose name, Sienna?”
“Yours.” She is panting. “Yours! Lucas, you absolute—”
I drive into her brutally, and she breaks off on a cry.
I do it again. Again. I find the rhythm that makes her clench around me every time, and I stay with it.
Her hands are clawing at my back, and her mouth has fallen open.
My wolf is so close to the surface, I can feel him snarling behind my teeth.
She bites my shoulder. Hard. Hard enough that I feel the skin break. The sting rips a snarl out of me, and my hips slam into hers in response. She sobs with it, her thighs tightening around my waist.
I can feel her cresting. The bond is showing me everything. Her pleasure stacking under my own, the heat winding tight in her belly, the way her nerves are lit up everywhere I have touched her.
My wolf surges.
I feel him before I understand him. He is at the front of my chest, his attention fixed on the soft place at the side of her throat—and the word forming in him is not one I have permission to act on.
Mine.
I try to pull back. The beast is too close to the surface. The need to mark her is rising in me like a tide, and I cannot get my head above it, cannot find the part of me that has spent a lifetime saying no to exactly this. My wolf is in my teeth. I can feel his snarl shaping behind my own.
She squeezes around me one more time, fiercely and possessively, and that is what breaks me.
The mating instinct floods through before I have a chance to stop it. My whole body tightens. My canines lengthen against my will. A second of clarity rips through the haze, sharp and cold.
No. Not this. Not her.
I try to lift my head off her throat.
I cannot. My wolf has the reins.
“Sienna…” I get her name out, the sound ragged. “Sienna!”
“Lucas…” She is right at the edge. Her hand twists in my hair, her body trembling underneath mine. “Lucas, I’m—”
My teeth sink into her neck.
The scream that tears out of her is unlike anything I have ever heard.
Her body arcs up under mine and clenches around me so hard, I see white at the edges of my vision.
The bond does not crack open between us—it detonates.
Every wall I have ever held against her comes down at once.
I feel her in every nerve I have. The shock of the bite, the brightness of her orgasm, the way her pleasure is feeding back into mine in a loop that never seems to end.
I follow her over, with my teeth still in her throat and a sound coming out of me that is more wolf than human. The mark forms, hot under my mouth. The bond sings between us so loudly that I can feel it in my ribs.