Chapter 11
Kieran
She shows up at my door at nine o'clock. It’s a good thing, too, because my wolf is going insane. Keeping myself from shifting and running to her has been like wrestling a bear.
"I'm not here because I forgive you," she says, walking past me into the house. "I'm here because your sister spent the afternoon giving me a tour of the greenhouse and feeding me tea, and now I'm too relaxed to maintain a proper grudge, and I blame you for having hospitable relatives."
"Noted." I close the door behind her. "Can I get you something to drink, or would accepting a beverage compromise your position?"
"Coffee. Cream and sugar. And don't be smug about it."
I'm already smug about it. My mate is in my house, barefoot, smelling of whatever soap the guest cabin stocks, and her wolf has dragged her back here despite every instruction her human brain has issued to the contrary. I make the coffee and say nothing.
She takes the mug and settles onto the couch with her legs tucked under her, and I sit in the chair across from her.
"I want to talk to you about something," she says, "and I need you to actually listen instead of doing the wall thing."
I frown at her. "I don't do a wall thing."
"Kieran, you do a wall thing. You are the wall thing.”
"Speak,” I say. She narrows her eyes at me.
“Well, now I won’t speak, since you ordered me to.”
“Don’t speak. Or do speak if you want to. Do whatever you want.” It’s surprisingly hard for me to say those words. So maybe I’m a little bit of a control freak.
"It's about Rose."
My jaw tightens. She sees it and holds up a hand.
"I'm not yelling. This is me, calm, on your couch, drinking your coffee, having a civilized conversation, which I believe is a first for us, so let's see how long it lasts." She takes a sip. "There's a tri-pack dance next month. Rose wants to go. You said no."
I give a short, sharp nod. "I did."
"Why?"
"Because she's seventeen, and a tri-pack dance is hundreds of wolves, at least fifty percent of whom will be male, with bad intentions.”
“Do you consider anyone ever wanting to date her to be someone with bad intentions?”
I answer with a growl and an involuntary extension of my claws, which I quickly retract. Date my baby sister? Hell no. No-one gets to do that. Ever.
Instead of glaring at me or mocking me, she gives me a small smile so full of sympathy that it makes my heart skip in my chest.
"Right. And when she's eighteen? And nineteen? And twenty-two, and twenty-five, and thirty? When does she get to go to a dance, Kieran?"
I don't answer, because the honest answer is never, and I'm aware that's not a position that survives contact with reality.
“Did you tell me to stop babying and protecting my brother?”
“That’s different,” I growl. I can’t explain how, but it is.
"Amaryllis told me about your mother," she says quietly. "And your father."
I nod grimly. I mean, it’s not a secret.
"I'm not going to make a speech about it.
But I want to say one thing, and it's this: Rose is a healer.
She's always going to be a healer. And healers don't sit still when someone nearby is hurting — your mother couldn't, and Amaryllis can't, and Rose won't be able to either. That's who they are. Sometimes strength is accepting that we can’t control everything, or everyone, Kieran. I know you’d die to keep your family safe, but that’s not what they need from you.”
She stops there, and sips her coffee.
The worst part is she's right. The second worst part is that she knows she's right, and she's being gracious enough not to press it, which means I can't even enjoy a good argument about it.
We sit in silence for a minute. It should be uncomfortable, and it isn't, which is its own problem. She's looking at me over the rim of her mug with an expression I can't quite read, and then she sets the mug on the side table and pulls her shirt off over her head.
I blink. Her bra is plain white cotton and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, and she appears to have no idea what she just did, because her eyes go wide and she looks down at herself and then back up at me.
"Oh my fates, what am I doing? Why did I do that? Do you pinky-swear you’re not hexing me?"
My anger fades and melts into a huge, self-satisfied grin. "Your wolf knows where you live," I say.
"No she doesn't."
I will not press the point, because I’ve already won the argument, whether she knows it or not. "Well, your wolf knows where she wants to spend the night."
"Just because I'm maybe spending the night doesn't mean we're mates." She says this while sitting on my couch in her bra, which undermines her point considerably.
"Just keep telling yourself that." Ok, I’m getting a little smug.
She stands up. I stand up too. She closes the distance between us and puts both hands flat on my chest and pushes, and my boots don't move.
"Has anyone ever told you what an unbearably smug bastard you are?"
I throw back my head and laugh. "Has anyone ever not told me that?"
"I'm serious. You are the most arrogant, infuriating, overbearing—"
"Also, pushing a man who’s twice your size is never going to be an effective strategy." I catch her wrists gently and hold them against my chest. "I thought Bram taught you better than that."
Her eyes flash. I see it coming a full second before it happens and I let it happen anyway, because my wolf wants to know what she'll do next and frankly so do I.
She hooks her ankle behind mine and sweeps my leg out from under me.
Bram did teach her better than that. I go down hard, and she comes with me because I don't let go of her wrists, and we hit the rug in a tangle, her on top of me, both of us breathing hard, her hair falling around my face.
"Better," I say. "Your heel didn't turn out at the end."
"Shut up," she says, and kisses me.
The bra goes first, because it's closest and I've been thinking about what's under it since she pulled her shirt off on my couch and pretended it was an accident.
I flip the clasp with one hand and she shrugs out of it without breaking the kiss, and then her breasts are bare against my chest and the contact drags a sound out of her that goes straight through me.
I roll us over so she's under me, and she makes a noise of protest that dies the moment my mouth finds her throat.
I work my way down, taking my time, tasting the hollow of her collarbone, the soft skin below it, and when I close my mouth over her nipple she arches off the rug and her fingers twist into my hair hard enough to hurt.
I stay there, sucking, circling with my tongue, until she's squirming and yanking at my shirt with both hands.
"Off. Take it off or I'll rip it off."
I pull it over my head and her hands are on me before it hits the floor, dragging down my chest, my stomach, hooking into my waistband.
My jeans come off with her help — her help being largely impatient tugging and one well-placed heel — and then her jeans require a negotiation that she wins by biting my shoulder hard enough that I stop thinking about logistics and start thinking about survival.
Then she's bare underneath me on my living room rug and I take a moment to look at her, because I can, because she's here, because every inch of her is flushed and furious and mine whether she admits it or not.
"You're staring again."
"I am." I press my mouth to the inside of her knee and feel her whole leg tense.
I kiss my way up her inner thigh, slow, deliberate, and her breathing goes ragged and her hand comes down to push my head where she wants it, which I ignore, because I am in charge of this part and she's going to have to accept that.
"Kieran, I swear to every fate that ever—"
I put my mouth on her and the sentence ends in a gasp.
She's wet and hot and she tastes the way she smells — burnt sugar and clove, sweet and sharp — and when I drag my tongue through her folds she grabs the edge of the rug in one fist and my hair in the other.
I work her clit with slow, flat strokes, learning what makes her hips buck and what makes her go rigid, and when I slide two fingers inside her and curl them she swears at me in a register I didn't know she had.
I bring her to the edge twice and pull back both times, because she swept my legs out from under me and I haven't forgotten, and because the sounds she makes when she's close and denied are going to sustain me through every difficult meeting for the rest of my natural life.
"If you don't — I will actually kill you — Kieran, please—"
The please does it. My mate said please, and my wolf and I agree on very little, but we agree on this: when she asks, she gets.
I seal my mouth over her clit and press my fingers deep and she comes apart with a cry that shakes the lamp on the end table.
Her thighs clamp around my head and her back arches clear off the rug and I feel her clench around my fingers in hard, rhythmic waves, and the fire in the hearth spits a shower of sparks that neither of us notices.
I kiss my way back up her body while she's still shaking, and she grabs my face in both hands and pulls me up to her mouth and kisses me, tasting herself on my lips, and her hand wraps around my cock and squeezes and the last of my patience burns to ash.
She pushes at my chest. I let her roll me over, and then she's straddling me on the rug, her hands pinning my wrists above my head, her hair curtaining us both.
"My turn," she says.
She reaches between us and takes me in her hand and guides me to her entrance and sinks down onto me in one slow, devastating slide.
I grit my teeth and let her set the pace, and she rolls her hips in a rhythm that's designed to destroy me — slow and grinding, taking me deep, watching my face while she does it.
She braces her hands on my chest and rides me harder, and I grip her hips and drive up to meet her, and the rug is bunching under us and a book falls off the shelf and the fire crackles again and I couldn't care less if the whole house comes down around us.
She's tight and hot and every time she grinds down onto me the sound she makes is closer to the edge, and I can feel her getting there in the way her rhythm stutters, the way her nails dig into my chest, the way her head falls back and her lip disappears between her teeth.
I sit up without warning, wrapping one arm around her waist, pulling her flush against me.
The angle changes and she gasps and her arms come around my neck and we're chest to chest, forehead to forehead, breathing each other's air.
I thrust up into her deep and steady and she moans into my mouth, and I swallow it, and give her another, and another, and her whole body starts to shake.
"Kieran — oh, fates — I'm—"
She breaks. She comes with my name in her mouth and her nails in my back and her entire body clenching around me, and I last exactly three seconds longer before I follow her over, spilling into her with a growl that rattles the windows in a way that has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the woman in my lap.
The fire gives one final pop and settles. A log rolls gently forward in the grate, nudged by nothing visible.
For a while, the only sound is our breathing and the fire ticking down to embers.
She's slumped against my chest, boneless, her face tucked into my neck. I've got one hand in her hair and the other on the small of her back, and neither one is moving anytime soon.
"The rug is uncomfortable," she mumbles into my chest. “I…I should go home.”
My wolf growls. I snort in derision. As if I’d let her go. “My bed is very comfortable. You’re staying here.”
"Fine. Bed. But this still doesn't mean anything."
I smile at her. “Of course it doesn’t.”
I carry her to the bedroom because I want to carry her to the bedroom, and she lets me because her wolf lets her, and I let her pretend yet again that this is only for tonight, while my wolf rolls over in complete and transparent satisfaction.