Chapter 7
Briar
We shift at the same time. I don’t decide to do it. My wolf takes my body and remakes it, bones snapping into new shapes, and then I’m standing barefoot in the grass with nothing on and the night air biting every inch of me.
He’s done the same. The wolf is gone. The man is here. As naked as I am.
Don’t look at him.
I look at him.
He’s— Fuck. I saw him in the cabin, stripped him myself while he was under, and I thought I’d already accounted for what he looked like.
I hadn’t. Unconscious, he was a body. Awake, standing, the moonlight catching the sweat on his skin and the blood still running from the cuts I gave him, he’s something else.
The breadth of his shoulders. The way the muscle sits on his frame, heavy, earned, nothing decorative about it.
He’s built the way a working animal is built, for function, for endurance, and my wolf’s response to the sight of him is a sound in my chest that I barely manage to swallow.
What. The fuck?
His eyes drop down my body. Not slow, not deliberate. Fast. Involuntary. The way your eyes go to fire in a dark room. He drags them back up, and I can see the effort that costs him. My skin is tingling everywhere his gaze touched, and I’m furious at both of us.
“You think you can just leave?”
“I already did.” He rolls his shoulders, muscles bunching smoothly beneath taut skin. There’s a deep gash in his flesh that he probably got when he smashed out of that chair. “You want to drag me back?” He raises an eyebrow. “Try.”
“I will.”
“Then do it.”
“I’m dead serious,” I growl, the wolf still close. But right now, that’s not as much help as it should be.
“Look, I got your message,” he says. “Things were done. Bad things. And that’s on me. It wasn’t a victimless crime. But if you think I’m going to sit around while you make holes in me, you’re wrong.” He gathers himself, about to keep moving.
“I told you to stop!”
“And I told you to stop me.” He takes a step.
Then another. Closing the space between us with the easy authority of a male who’s never been denied ground.
His scent reaches me — God, his scent — blood and male and the dense undertone of alpha that my wolf has been focused on since the ridgeline.
At four feet away, it’s so strong I can feel my pupils dilating.
“But you’re not going to,” he says, close now, heat radiating off his skin. “Because you’ve had all day to figure out what you want from me, and cutting me isn’t it.”
The scorn in his tone makes my already heated blood boil.
I hit him.
I want to punch him in the face, but my fist catches the wound on his shoulder instead, my aim thrown off because my hands are shaking, and I will not think about why my hands are shaking.
Rage, that’s why.
He grunts, the first honest sound of pain I’ve gotten from him, and I follow with my elbow into his scarred ribs. He reaches for me. Not swinging — grabbing. Trying to catch my arms, lock them down. I duck under his reach and drive my knee into his side.
He’s fast. Faster than he should be, wounded and drugged and running on whatever fumes got him out of that cabin. He catches my wrist, and the grip is absolute; my bones grind under his fingers. He yanks me off balance, and I slam into his chest.
Fuck.
Skin on skin. The full hot length of his torso against me, my breasts flattened against his chest. The contact sends a bolt of heat straight between my thighs that makes my knees want to fold.
No! Fight! Hit him again.
I rake my nails down his forearm, across the cuts, and he hisses.
His grip loosens, and I tear free. We circle.
I’m panting. He’s panting. The air between us is thick with the smell of blood and sweat.
And something else that my wolf is drunk on, a musk that’s pure alpha male, and I want to claw it out of my nose.
He comes again. Catches me, both arms this time, locking mine against my sides, his hands flat on my back, my body pinned against his from chest to thigh.
I writhe, trying to wrench free, and the writhing is a mistake because it rubs me against him in ways that turn the heat between my legs into a wet, insistent ache.
He feels it. I know he does, because his arms tighten and his breathing drops and his cock twitches against my stomach.
He’s hard, insistent, throbbing, and hot.
And this is going in a direction I have no intention of allowing.
I twist sideways, teeth snapping, clawing at him.
I’m fighting against a much stronger opponent, and I need every weapon at my disposal. It doesn’t help. He takes me down.
Ground. His weight. My face in the grass and his hand between my shoulder blades, pressing me flat. I push up, and he pushes down again. I’m pinned under two hundred and twenty pounds of pure male, and my body — my traitorous, desperate body — is arching into the pressure instead of fighting it.
“Get off me!” I scream, bucking my hips.
“Stop fighting me,” he growls into my ear, his teeth grazing the sensitive shell of it.
Fight him!
But I can’t. And worse, I don’t want to. My struggles become less about escaping and more about the friction of my nipples dragging against the rough forest floor, the way his hips press down on mine.
He growls.
Low. From the very bottom of his chest. A sound that isn’t a word and isn’t a threat and isn’t anything human. It vibrates through his ribcage and into my spine, and I feel it in my belly, my thighs, between my legs, where I’m so wet I can feel it on my skin.
My wolf responds. A sound rips out of my throat — rough, needy, pitched to match his growl — and I didn’t make it.
I didn’t choose it. But it comes, and his response is immediate.
His hand slides from between my shoulder blades to the back of my neck.
His fingers twist into my hair and pull, yanking my head back, and his other hand grips my hip hard enough to leave marks I’ll wear for a week.
Without conscious thought, I arch my back, raising my hips high in the air. I feel the cool air kiss my wet pussy, exposed and vulnerable to his gaze. I hear his breath hitch, a sharp intake of air that tells me he sees exactly how ready I am.
I’m gasping, teeth bared, still struggling. But beneath the fight, something else is brewing. My core clenches, instinct awakening to the alpha call.
This is a terrible idea. This is the worst thing I could possibly—
I push my ass back against him. Grind against the hard length of his cock.
The contact is electric. I feel it everywhere, a full-body jolt that wipes the thought clean out of my head.
My claws are out. I can feel them, extended past my fingertips, scoring the dirt as my hands curl into fists.
I’m panting like an animal because I am one.
My wolf has taken the wheel, and the woman screaming in the back seat can scream all she wants.
“Fuck!” he mutters. He tilts my hips. Angles me. The head of his cock drags through wet folds, finding my entrance, and I should stop this. I should shift and run and put miles between us and never—
He thrusts in.
I make a sound I’ve never heard from my own mouth.
Deep, guttural, dragged up from the bottom of my lungs.
The stretch is — God — he’s thick, and I’m tight, and the sting of being spread open this fast is sharp enough to make my vision swim.
But underneath the sting, my wolf is howling.
Satisfaction so savage it floods my body and melts my resistance.
And all I can do is dig my claws into the dirt and push back to take more of him.
God! Oh, God! What are you doing, Briar?
I’m not thinking, that’s what. My primal brain is focused entirely on the heat building between my thighs.
“Is this what you wanted?” he grits out, driving deeper, hitting a spot inside me that has no business being so sensitive. “You chased me down for this?”
“Screw you!” I gasp, my fingers clawing at the earth before me.
His chuckle is low, hoarse, infuriating.
He fucks me. He doesn’t go slow. His fist tightens in my hair, his fingers bruise my hip, and he drives into me hard enough to shove me forward in the grass.
I brace my arms and shove back. Every impact is a collision — the anger and the wanting tangled so tight I can’t find where one ends, and the other begins.
I am fucking the man I came here to destroy, and my body doesn’t care.
My body thinks this is the best idea it’s ever had.
“God!” he grunts, the sound fluttering over my skin.
His nails are wrong against my hip. Thicker.
Sharper. Claws, or close to it — the wolf pushing through his hands the way it’s pushing through mine.
The growl from his chest hasn’t stopped.
It rolls through me with every thrust, a vibration I feel in my teeth.
When his mouth finds the back of my neck, the graze of his teeth sends a bolt of something through me that isn’t pain and isn’t pleasure and is more intense than both.
His teeth are wrong, too. Too sharp. Too long. I can feel the points dragging against my skin, and the threat of those jaws — what they could do — is an awareness under everything else.
I don’t want to stop. That’s the horror of it. My wolf doesn’t want to stop, and the part of me that knows this is a catastrophe is getting quieter with every thrust while the part that wants him gets louder.
“Yes!” I hear myself say. “Yes… Fuck, yes!
: The pressure is building. My thighs are trembling.
My arms can barely hold me up. Everything is tightening — belly, thighs, the grip of my body around his cock — and when I come, it hits so hard that my arms give out and I scream into the grass.
My whole body seizes, clamping down on him.
The pleasure is blinding, obliterating, the kind that wipes out thought and leaves nothing but nerve endings and the animal howling behind them.