Chapter 7
Kieran
I enjoyed letting her beat me.
Her tail is up, her ears are pricked, and she's prancing in a circle at the treeline, rubbing her victory in with her whole body. My wolf is beside himself. As far as he's concerned, we've just watched our mate conquer France.
I turn for home, and she falls in beside me without being asked. We run the ridge trail in the last of the daylight, and I keep the pace easy for her benefit.
My house comes into view through the pines, and I shift on the front walk. Behind me I hear the crackle and pop of her shifting too, and then, with no pause for breath —
"Don't think this changes anything." Her voice rises in anger.
"You ordered my brother into combat training.
Nobody asked me. Nobody asked him, as far as I can tell, and he's eighteen, and if you think one scenic jog means I'm going to stand here and let some seven-foot sentinel use my baby brother as a tackling dummy—"
I turn around.
She's standing in my yard with her hands on her hips, hair wrecked, chin up, eyes blazing, magnificent, and wearing nothing but the sunset.
Her small, perfect breasts are round and tipped with rosy nipples.
The neatly trimmed thatch of her pubic hair nestles invitingly, and her feminine aroma drifts through the air, tantalizing me.
And she’s completely forgotten she’s naked, as she stands there lecturing me.
I grin. I can't help it.
"What," she says dangerously, "is so funny?"
"Nothing."
"No, go ahead. Something's hilarious. Share with the rest of the class, Mr. Holt."
"It's nothing." I keep my eyes pinned to her face with the discipline of a man defusing a bomb. "You were saying. Tackling dummy."
She opens her mouth to keep going. Then I watch it arrive — the slow, dawning realization. Her eyes drop.
"You could have said something!”
“I could have,” I agree with a nod. “I was enjoying the view.” My wolf is howling, circling inside me, desperate for release. Claim her, claim her, claim her!
Her cheeks redden. “Stop looking at me!”
“We’re shifters. We get naked in front of each other all the time.”
“It’s different with you!” she splutters, her blush deepening. And my grin widens. I like that it’s different with me.
"Come inside," I say with a wry smile. "I'll get you a t-shirt."
I’m dressed now, and so is she, wearing the t-shirt I just handed her.
She disappears into the plain gray shirt. It hits her mid-thigh, the collar slides off one shoulder, and she has to roll the sleeves twice just to find her hands.
She looks ridiculous. She looks perfect. She smells caught — my scent wrapped all the way around her — and my wolf goes silent in the way that's more dangerous than the howling. As far as he's concerned, the paperwork is complete. We are now merely waiting for her signature.
I retreat to the kitchen and start making coffee just to give myself something to do.
"So," she says, following me, because retreat has never once worked on this woman. "My brother. Why are you setting him up to be a punching bag when you’re supposed to be helping him?"
"Your brother." I measure grounds with tremendous focus. "Bram isn't teaching him to take a punch. He's teaching him to throw one."
"He can't shift, Kieran. You put a boy who can't shift in a gym with a wall of muscle who—"
"Who will teach him to stand up for himself and fight like a man. If you keep babying him and protecting him, he’s never going to know what he’s capable of.
He’s never going to develop self-confidence.
And he’s never going to be able to get in touch with his wolf, if that’s even a possibility.
Back off and let him grow up, Olivia, he’s an adult now. ”
I’m risking a lot saying that. I’m insulting my mate. I see the anger flaring in her eyes. She takes a step back, and draws in a furious breath.
But a young man’s future, his sense of self-worth, and possibly his ability to shift, is at stake here.
"That's—" she starts. “Why didn’t you at least ask me first?”
“Because you would have said no.”
“Not necessarily! You may be right, possibly, but he’s my family, and you can’t just keep-”
She keeps going. I stop listening, because I've just noticed the twigs.
Three of them, snarled in that wild dark hair. Souvenirs of the ridge trail. My wolf finds this unbearably endearing, and for once, he and I are in complete agreement.
I cross the kitchen.
"—and furthermore—what are you doing?" She tips her head back to stare up at me.
"You have twigs in your hair." I pull the first one loose.
"I— that's not— we were discussing—" She goes very still, the particular stillness of prey that realizes it’s been spotted. Oh, she has no idea. "You are way too close."
"I like where I am right now." Second twig. Her hair slides through my fingers, and she smells of pine and clean sweat and my own shirt. "You picked these up chasing me through the forest, princess."
"I did not chase you. You ran off. I happened to run in the same—"
“Please,” I scoff. “You’re my fated mate. Your wolf wants mine, just like you want me, just like I want you. No, it’s more than a want. It’s a need. How have you been sleeping since you met me, mate? Not as well as you would if you were where you belong. In my bed.”
Her pulse is visible in her throat. I free the last twig and let it fall, and take her chin between my thumb and finger, tipping her face up to mine.
"Tell me to stop."
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out of it.
"Cat got your tongue, princess?"
"You—" she manages, her voice husky, her eyes glazed with fury and desire. "You are the most—"
I kiss her.
She goes rigid for one heartbeat. Then she melts into me with a small furious sound, her fists closing in the front of my shirt, soft lips brushing against mine, and I make myself break it off, her breath still on my mouth.
"Tell me to stop," I growl, challenging her.
"Shut up," she breathes, and yanks me back down.
The last of my restraint goes up in smoke. I get my hands on her waist and somewhere behind me coffee mugs lift off the counter and thud back down.
There goes my self-control again.
"This doesn't mean I like you," she says against my jaw.
"Understood." I get an arm under her and lift her onto the counter, and she wraps her legs around me with zero hesitation for a woman who doesn't like me.
The gray shirt comes off over her head. And then she's bare in my kitchen, flushed and glaring, daring me to say one word about it, and I take my time looking because I've earned it and because it makes her breath go ragged.
"You're staring."
"I am." I bend and take one tight nipple in my mouth, and her whole body arches, her fingers driving into my hair.
She gasps something that starts as an insult and doesn't survive to the end.
I work my way across to the other one, unhurried, savoring every helpless sound she's trying to strangle, until she's squirming on the counter's edge and yanking at my shirt with genuine hostility.
"Off. Now."
"Bossy." But I strip it over my head, and her hands land on my chest and slide down my stomach with a hum of open appreciation, and when her fingers hook into my waistband every drawer in the kitchen rattles.
She freezes. "What was that?"
"Old house." I kiss her before the follow-up question, and slide my hand up the inside of her thigh, and she stops caring about carpentry.
She's soaked. I drag my fingers through her folds, slow, learning her, and she moans into my mouth and rocks against my hand with a shamelessness that nearly ends me on the spot.
I work one finger into her, then a second, curling them, my thumb circling her clit, and she breaks the kiss to swear at me — a broad-ranging piece of profanity that questions my parentage and my ego while her hips ride my hand, chasing more.
"Look at you," I murmur against her throat. "All that yelling, and this is what you wanted."
That earns me a ferocious glare.
"I will kill you," she pants, "later," and comes apart on my fingers with a raw cry, her thighs clamping around my wrist, her nails scoring my shoulder. The overhead light flickers. Every cabinet door opens and slams shut.
I carry her to the couch. We don't make it to the bedroom; the bedroom is a full nine feet away. She shoves my jeans off with impatient hands, and then there's nothing between us and her eyes find mine, dark and burning. I sit down and she straddles me.
She takes my cock in her hand and guides me to her entrance, and sinks down onto me slow — a deliberate, torturous inch at a time, watching my jaw clench, enjoying it, taking her revenge.
She's tight and molten around me and by the time she's fully seated I'm gripping the couch cushion in one fist because the alternative is gripping her hard enough to bruise.
"There," she breathes, shaky and smug at once. "Now who's—"
I thrust up into her and the sentence dies.
She sets the pace. I hold her hips and let her ride me, watching her come undone above me — the fierce concentration, the flush spreading down her chest, her lip caught between her teeth, my name arriving in pieces.
Every lamp in the room is trembling in its socket.
The bookshelf is one deep breath from raining paperbacks on us both.
Twenty-nine years of perfect control, and this woman has ended it in days.
"Kieran." My name breaks in half in her mouth.
And then it happens.
Between one heartbeat and the next, a door opens in my chest, and she pours through it.
Not her body. Her. Want, first — a mirror of mine, burning.
But underneath the want: relief. Bone-deep, aching relief, the feeling of setting down a weight she's carried so long she forgot it wasn't part of her spine.
She is happy. Under all the yelling and the pride and the armor, right now, in my lap, wrapped in my scent, she is happy — and she has no idea I can feel it.
The mate bond, open and roaring.
My wolf lunges. Mark her. Scent her. Keep her.
Tell her. I lock every muscle against it and grip her hips instead, driving up to meet her, and she takes that as encouragement, and after that neither of us is capable of strategy.
Her rhythm shatters. She grinds down on me, crying out, and I feel her climax twice — once around my cock and once through the bond, a double detonation no male in history has survived with dignity — and I follow her over with a growl that rattles the windows in a way that has nothing to do with weather.
For a long moment the only sound is breathing.
She's collapsed against my chest, boneless, her heart hammering into mine. Through the bond her contentment washes over me in slow, warm waves, completely unguarded, and I lie there receiving the biggest secret of my life through a channel she can't see, and say nothing.
"Okay," she mumbles into my neck, already half asleep. "Fine. I like you a little."
"I won't tell anyone."
“But you’re still an arrogant, bossy bastard.”
“Well, that is something I won’t need to tell anyone. Everybody already knows.”
I stare at the ceiling and stroke her hair and take inventory. My fated mate — the one who's spent all week calling that a ridiculous idea — is asleep on my chest, and the bond between us is wide open, and she has no clue.
"A little," she said. The bond says otherwise. The bond says quite a lot otherwise.
Tomorrow she'll wake up, rebuild the armor, and inform me that this changed nothing. And for the first time since I met her, I'll be able to feel exactly how much she doesn't mean it.
My wolf stretches out inside me, insufferably pleased with us both.
Best chase of my life.