Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
Kolt
We’d collapsed together onto the narrow bed, lying in a tangle of sweaty limbs and ragged breaths.
I ran my hand along her side, slowly, memorizing the shape of her by touch—the curve of her waist, the soft skin at her ribs, the delicious swell of her breasts. I thumbed the pebbled skin of one nipple, savoring the husky sound she made that resonated somewhere in my chest.
I know this, something in me thought. Not this specific moment.
I had no memory of Skye, of this room, of any of this.
But the instinct itself was familiar. Bone-deep.
The knowledge of how to move and where to touch and when to slow down to provoke breathy sighs.
I might not remember much, but my hands seemed to remember this with no help from me.
I pressed my mouth to the curve of her shoulder, the hollow at the base of her throat, the soft skin just below her collarbone, and I felt her hands tighten in my hair.
“Fully expected you to be cocky and bossy,” she said, her tone teasing, “but I never imagined that you’d be so…” There was a sharp inhale as I found a particularly sensitive place… “so tender.”
I laughed low and from somewhere deep in my chest. “I am not always tender.”
Before she could say anything else, I flipped her onto her back. "But for you—" My lips found her throat and nipped. "I am willing to be whatever you need."
She let out a small yelp, and I caught both her wrists and pinned them above her head in one hand, braced over her, watching her eyes go wide and then dark. Her chest rose and fell quickly. She stared up at me. She did not tell me to let go.
“You were saying?” I asked.
Her lips parted, but no sound emerged.
I dipped my head and kissed the line of her jaw, and she arched toward me, her wrists flexing against my grip with no real intention of pulling free. My tail swept slowly across her hip in a long, deliberate stroke, and I heard her sharp inhale.
“I have been thinking,” I murmured against her skin, “about what I intend to do next.”
“Have you?” Her voice was admirably steady, given that I could feel her pulse hammering where my lips rested on her throat.
“I intend to learn every place that makes you gasp.” I moved my mouth lower, following the line of her collarbone.
A sharp breath. “And?”
I pressed a slow kiss to her sternum. “And I intend to lick you until you’re begging for my cock.”
“What if I beg for your tail?”
My tail swept slowly across her hip in a long, deliberate stroke, and I watched the shiver chase across her skin. My voice was a dark rumble. "I will give you everything, greedy girl. Every last thing you ask for."
I released her wrists, and she didn’t move them.
Something about that undid me more than anything else had.
She left them above her head, not because I was holding them but because she chose to.
I traced my fingers down the inside of her arm, as slowly as I could make them go, and watched shivers chase the path I made.
“Kolt.” Barely a whisper.
“I know,” I said, and meant it in more ways than I could say.
There was a version of me out there who’d barely tolerated her, who’d been intimidating and gruff and dismissive, and I had no way of knowing what it would feel like to become him again.
There was a small, quiet part of me that almost hoped the memories stayed lost. Not all of them. I wanted to know my past, but anything that had made me keep her at arm’s length, anything that had made me blind to who she was… Well, I had no interest in remembering that.
I wanted to keep this. I wanted to keep her.
She arched her breasts into me and wrapped her legs around my waist. My cock throbbed with the desperate need to fill her again, to sink in her tight heat, to make her moan and scream and beg for more.
“Tell me you’re mine,” I husked as I thrust inside her, desperate for her to bind herself to me.
“I’m yours,” she whispered as I held myself deep and pressed my forehead to hers.
Mine, I thought as I captured her mouth in a kiss. No matter what happened or what I remembered, she would always be mine.