Chapter 16
Garrett
Her mouth is on mine, and I stop thinking.
Not slowly. A blackout. Everything I am — the alpha, the compound, the Syndicate, the corridor, the guilt — gone.
Replaced by the taste of her and the heat of her body climbing mine.
The wet slide of her against my cock and the sound she makes into my mouth, rough and desperate and nothing like the controlled woman who held a knife to my skin.
She bites my lip. Hard. Blood. I growl, and the growl vibrates through both of us. She grinds against my shaft, and the slick friction nearly drops me.
I take her down.
On her back in the moss, me on top of her. She pulls me with her — won’t let go of my hair, her legs locked around my waist, her tongue in my mouth. She tastes like the woman from the clearing who bared her neck for my mark. Like fury and want and a wolf who’s been starving.
I pull back. Look at her.
She’s spread beneath me in the moonlight. Dark hair tangled in moss. Gray eyes gone black with blown pupils. Her chest heaving. The flush on her skin runs from her jaw to her navel, and she’s breathing in rough, open-mouthed pants. She looks like she wants to kill me and fuck me in equal measure.
“Don’t just stare at me,” she snarls.
I take her breast in my hand. Not gentle — I’m past gentle. I squeeze, and she arches into my palm and makes a sound she tries to bite back.
No. I want that sound. I want every sound she’s got.
I drop my mouth to her nipple. Teeth first. I bite and pull, and she gasps. Her hands fly to the back of my head and press me closer. Her hips buck up, and the wet streak of her across my abs makes my cock throb hard enough to hurt.
“More,” she pants. “Harder.”
I bite harder. She cries out. Her fingers twist in my hair, and the sting goes straight to my balls. I’m leaking against her thigh before I’ve even gotten inside her.
I kiss down her stomach. Her muscles jump under my mouth. Trembling. Her claws are out. I can see them, extended past her fingertips, raking the moss as her hands fist and open and fist again. The wolf seeping through. Good. The wolf is honest in ways the woman won’t be.
I reach between her thighs.
She’s drenched. My fingers slide through swollen folds, and the heat of her is staggering, slick and molten. She jerks at the contact, her thighs clamping around my hand.
“Oh fuck!” The words punch out of her. She rolls her hips against my fingers, chasing pressure. The sounds she’s making have gone animal. Rough, guttural panting. My cock is pressed flat against my stomach, aching, throbbing in time with her breath.
I stroke her. Two fingers through wet heat. I find a spot inside her that makes her whole body shake. She tears up handfuls of moss, her spine arching off the ground.
“God, Garrett!”
My name in her mouth makes me pause. I stare down at her. She’s so damn perfect.
“Stop teasing and fuck me.”
“Ask me nicely.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “Fuck. You.”
“That’s the idea. Ask.”
She grabs my wrist and tries to force my hand harder against her. I resist. Hold my fingers still, barely touching, while her hips roll and seek. She snarls with frustration.
“I will kill you—”
“Ask.”
“Please.” It rips out of her. “Please, just—”
I flip her. She goes to her stomach, and I’m on her before she can react, my chest against her back, my mouth at her ear.
“Since you asked.”
I reach between us. Find myself, thick and aching, and notch against her entrance. She’s so wet the head slides through without resistance, nudging into heat that shorts my brain out.
“Tell me you want it,” I say against her ear.
“I want it.” No hesitation. No pride left. “Put it in me.”
I push in.
The heat of her. The grip. She’s tight — so tight my jaw locks against the groan that wants out. Her body opens for me inch by inch, her walls squeezing my shaft with a wet pressure that I feel all the way up my spine.
She moans into the moss. Long. Low. She lets me hear it. The sound goes through me like a current.
I bottom out. Hold there. Not to savor it. Because if I move right now, I’ll come. She feels that good.
“Move,” she pants, muffled by the moss.
I move.
I pull back slow and slam in hard. Her body rocks forward, and she braces her arms and shoves back to meet me.
The collision is obscene — wet, loud, the sound of our bodies in the quiet trees.
I do it again. Again. The rhythm is deep and punishing, and every thrust punches a grunt out of her that I feel in my cock.
My hand finds her hair. Wraps. Pulls her head back, arching her spine. The new angle lets me go deeper, and she cries out, sharp.
“Right there,” she gasps. “Right there, don’t stop—”
I don’t stop. I drive into that spot with everything I’ve got, and her cries get higher. Her walls are fluttering around me — squeeze, release, squeeze — and I can feel her climbing.
“You going to come for me?”
“Shut up and make me.”
I slam in harder. Faster. My grip in her hair, my other hand digging into her hip. I can feel the wolf in both of us — my nails sharp against her skin, her claws tearing the ground, the growl in my chest a continuous rumble, the noises from her throat more animal than human.
She comes.
Her body locks around me. The clench of her is so hard that my vision fails and I see nothing for a second. She screams — not my name, not a word, just a sound, raw, feral, a wolf in the grip of something her body can’t hold.
Hold. Hold it. Not yet.
I can’t.
The knot swells. I feel it building, the base of my cock thickening inside her, stretching her further while she’s still clenching from the orgasm. The squeeze of her body around the knot is so tight that my arms almost give out.
“Garrett—” Panic in her voice. She feels it. “You’re—”
“I know.” The voice that comes out is not mine. Deep. The wolf talking. “Take it.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. You are right now.”
She is. Her body is stretching around the engorged flesh, the resistance dragging a sound out of both of us that’s half pain and half something with no name.
“Oh, God.” Her face drops to the moss. “Oh God, it’s—”
The knot locks.
Full. Sealed. The pressure radiates through my pelvic floor, up my spine, into my chest. I can feel her heartbeat through it.
The pulse of her body around me, fast and hard.
Each pulse squeezes me, and the pleasure of it doesn’t peak because it can’t — the lock keeps the sensation held in, rolling, relentless, and I’m drowning in it.
My wolf takes over.
The growl that tears from my chest shakes the ground under us. Deep, possessive, alpha — and her wolf answers. Her muscles go slack. Her head turns. Her throat bares.
My fangs have extended. I feel the points against my lower lip. My mate mark is there below me — still ragged, the shape of my teeth.
Jesus. Did I do that?
My wolf doesn’t feel a shred of remorse. The more visible it is, the better.
My mouth finds the mark without my deciding. Lips on the scar, then my tongue, then a low growl from the back of my throat that I can’t hold in. She shudders, and the walls around me pulse tighter. Every hair on her body rises against my chest.
I don’t bite again. I don’t need to. The mark is mine. It was mine from the first time. The sheer sense of ownership flares inside me, tugging in my groin.
I come.
It explodes. My cock pulses inside her — thick, hot, endless.
Each spurt met by the lock’s grip and her body’s pressure, milking me, pulling it out of me in waves I don’t control.
My hips grind against her, driving deep, and I feel myself emptying into her with a thoroughness that isn’t just physical.
She feels what I feel. I feel what she feels. The fullness. The lock. The maddening pressure. Neither of us can tell where one body ends and the other begins. I hold her flat, my full weight on her, my mouth on the scar I made ten days ago, and I have never been closer to another person in my life.
Minutes pass.
The knot holds. Still hard. Still thick. Every small shift of my weight makes us both twitch. She’s breathing hard underneath me, her cheek pressed into the moss. There are tears on her face — not sobbing. Just a body’s overflow. Too much sensation pushed through a channel too small to carry it.
My hand moves from her hip to her hair. Not pulling. Brushing it back from her face. Tucking the wet strands behind her ear.
She opens one eye. Looks at me over her shoulder.
Whatever face I usually wear has been fucked off me, and I don’t have anything to rebuild it with. I keep stroking her hair back.
She closes her eye. But she doesn’t tell me to stop.
The knot softens. Slowly. Agonizingly. When I finally slip free, the loss of her hits me — a hollow in the center of my chest where she was a second ago.
I roll onto my back in the moss. Stars through the canopy. My cock wet and softening. My hands shaking. My wolf curled up inside me with the deep satisfaction of an animal that has done what it came to do.
She doesn’t run.
That’s the difference. In the clearing, she bolted, barefoot through the forest, blood down her shoulder, gone before I could stand up. Tonight, she’s face down in the moss, and she breathes, and she stays.
Minutes pass.
I sit up. She hasn’t moved. The long line of her back, rising and falling. The bite mark dark on her shoulder. In the moonlight, she looks like she belongs to this forest — silver skin, dark hair, the sharp lines of a fighter softened by the aftermath of what just happened between us.
My hand finds the small of her back. Rests there. Her skin is warm under my palm.
She tenses. Doesn’t pull away.
“Briar…”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. Hoarse.
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to talk about anything.”
“Okay.”
“And this doesn’t change—”
“I know.”
She turns her head, frowning.
“Stop agreeing with me.”
My mouth does something without my permission. Not quite a smile. Close enough. I feel her irritation arrive — sharp, familiar, the most normal thing she’s directed at me since I got here. The ordinariness of her being annoyed at me makes the almost-smile worse.
She puts her face back in the moss. “I still hate you.”
“I still know.”
My hand stays on her back. Her breathing slows. The forest settles around us. The heat is banked… not gone, still there, but the sharpest edge is off. Not urgent now.
Later.
Later, she’ll need me again. In a few hours, the heat will climb, and her body will want me. Her pride will fight, and her body will win.
I lie down beside her. Close. My hand on her back, her warmth in the space between us. The moss is damp, the air is cool, and I should be cold, but I’m not. She’s enough.
My wolf closes his eyes. Smug and sated.
I don’t close mine. I watch her breathe. Count the breaths. Learn the rhythm. My hand on her back. Her hand curled in the moss six inches from mine.
The heat is coming back. I can feel the slow rise, the tide turning. When it does, I’ll be here.