Chapter 21 #2
My back is against the wall. I didn’t step back; he stepped forward. Or the corridor is narrower than I thought. Or my body put itself here because my body keeps making its own decisions about this man, and I’m losing the fight to overrule it.
He lifts his hand. Slowly, giving me time to stop him. His fingers touch my jaw. Turn my face up toward his.
My fingers itch to slap his hand away. I could put him on the floor the way I put him on the floor in the clearing.
I don’t.
His thumb traces my jaw. His eyes are on my mouth. Where his skin touches mine, the current amplifies. His want is under my skin, mine under his, until I can’t sort out whose need is whose.
“We don’t have the heat to blame this on,” I say. My voice has dropped. Rougher.
“I know.”
“If this happens, it’s because we chose it.”
“I know.”
“I still hate you.” The line comes out as if I’ve rehearsed it. Because I have. Every time I’ve seen him.
“I know that too.”
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him down to me.
The kiss isn’t soft because I don’t do soft. But it’s slower. Deliberate. My mouth opening under his, my hands fisting his shirt, and the choice of it — the conscious, uncoerced, fully human choice — is more frightening than anything the heat produced.
His hands find my waist and lift me. I wrap my legs around him because my body knows this position, has memorized this man’s dimensions. When he turns and carries me through the storage room door, I’m already working his belt.
The room is dark. Shelves, boxes, the smell of dust and cleaning supplies. He kicks the door shut and presses me against it. His mouth is on my neck, on the bite mark, and the contact there — his lips on the scar he made — sends a jolt through me that makes me gasp.
“Lock it,” I manage.
He reaches behind me. The bolt slides home.
His hands are under my shirt. Pulling it up, his palms on my ribs, my breasts, rough and urgent. I get his belt open. His pants. My hand finds him — hard, thick, ready — and the sound he makes against my neck when I grip him undoes something in my chest.
“Now,” I say. “Right now.”
He shoves my jeans down my hips. I kick one leg free — good enough.
He lifts me again, pins me against the door with his hips, and I guide him to me.
He pushes in, and my head falls back against the wood.
I bite my own lip to keep from crying out because the walls are thin and the corridor is ten feet away, and there are fifty wolves in this building.
He fills me. The stretch, the heat, the way his body fits mine that I’ve now felt enough times to recognize. The recognition is its own kind of intimacy — the knowing, the familiarity of him inside me, the way my body has stopped treating his as foreign.
Don’t think that. Don’t you dare think that.
He moves. Hard. Fast. The door rattling in its frame with each thrust. I’ve got my legs locked around his waist, one hand braced on a shelf, and the other gripping his shoulder, nails digging in.
The sounds I’m making are muffled against his neck because I will not scream and let everyone hear what we’re doing.
“Quiet,” he says against my ear. And then does something with his hips — an angle, a depth — that makes quiet impossible. I bite his shoulder to keep the sound in, and he groans, his fingers tightening on my thighs. We’re both trying to be silent and both failing.
It’s fast. Urgent. The kind of sex that happens when two people have been sitting across a room from each other for four hours pretending they don’t feel what they feel, and the pretending has been its own kind of foreplay.
He drives into me with a desperation that matches mine, and I come fast and hard, my body clenching around him, my teeth in his shoulder.
He follows — burying himself deep, his hips pinning mine to the door, the groan he bites off vibrating against my neck.
No knot. His body isn’t demanding it this time. No heat. No mating drive. Just two people who wanted each other and stopped pretending they didn’t.
We stay like that. Pinned against the door, breathing hard, his forehead against mine. My legs still around his waist. His hands on my thighs. The sweat cooling between us.
I wait for the horror. The self-disgust. The fury that followed every other time — at myself, at my wolf, at what forced us together.
It doesn’t come.
He pulls back enough to look at me. His face is flushed. His eyes are clear, no gold, no wolf. Just brown. Just him.
“Something’s different about you,” he says. Quiet.
My stomach drops. “What?”
“I don’t know. Something—” His hand moves from my thigh to my stomach. Rests there, flat, his palm spread below my navel — the same place his thumb rested that morning in the forest. His expression shifts. Concentrating. Reading something. “You feel different. Warmer. There’s something—”
I push him back. Gently — not the violent shove of the clearing. Just enough space to get my feet on the floor, my jeans pulled up, and my shirt straightened.
“I need to go,” I say. “Brenna will be looking for me.”
“Briar.”
“Don’t.” I’m at the door. Fingers on the bolt. “Don’t ask me what’s different. Not now.”
He’s quiet. Standing in the dark storage room, belt undone, his shirt pulled half off one shoulder where I dragged it. Looking at me with that expression — the one with no performance in it. The one that terrifies me.
I do something I don’t plan. I reach out and straighten his collar. Tuck the shirt back onto his shoulder. Smooth the fabric flat. The gesture is small and domestic and so at odds with everything we are that it hangs in the air between us like a question neither of us can answer.
His hand catches mine. Holds it for a second against his chest. His heartbeat is under my palm. Fast. Still coming down.
“Go,” I say. “Fix your belt. Go back to your people.”
“My people.” A breath that might be a laugh if it had more air in it. “Right.”
I slide the bolt and open the door. The corridor is empty. I step through, and I don’t look back, and I walk to the washroom and lock myself in. I press my hands against the washbasin and stare at my reflection.
My lips are swollen. My cheeks are flushed. There’s a mark on my neck where his mouth found the bite scar, red against the silver. I look like a woman who just had sex in a closet with a man she’s supposed to hate.
I look like a woman who chose it.
My hands go to my stomach. The place where his palm rested a minute ago, the same place my wolf keeps curling toward, the place where something is growing that he sensed without knowing what it is.
I straighten my collar, wash my hands, and walk back to the hearing like nothing happened.
Brenna gives me a look when I sit down. The kind of look that says she knows I’ve been gone too long, and the explanation had better be good.
“Security check,” I say.
She doesn’t believe me. Of course she doesn’t; the scent of sex is rolling off me in waves. But she lets it go.
The hearing resumes. Garrett is back in his seat. His collar is straight. His belt is fixed. He doesn’t look at me.
But under the table, his hand opens and closes once. Slowly. As if he’s still feeling my heartbeat against his palm.