Chapter 20
Decker
Her mouth opens under mine, and the last of my care goes with it.
She presses closer. Her hands curl against my chest, and I roll her under me and hold my weight off her bandaged hip. The fur slides away somewhere behind her. Neither of us reaches for it.
Her skin is warm everywhere I touch. I put my mouth to her throat. She tips her head back and lets me have it. Her pulse is right there under my lips, quick and getting quicker. Her scent is strongest here. I stay until she squirms.
Her hands move on me. No hesitation in them. One palm flattens over the gashes on my ribs—closed now, still tender—and her touch goes through me harder than the claws did. Her other hand finds my hip and pulls me down against her.
I give her some of my weight. She takes it with a sound I haven’t heard from her before, low and open, and my whole body answers it.
I run my hand up her side. The old burn scars pass under my palm, and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t go stiff. She presses into my hand instead. She knows exactly what I’m touching, and she offers it anyway, and my hand goes still over the scars for a beat that has nothing to do with heat.
There’s plenty of heat everywhere else.
She hooks her knee over my hip and rolls up against me.
Her breath goes ragged. Her fingers dig into my back.
I’m hard against her through my pants; she can feel it, and she doesn’t shy from that either.
She moves against me, slow and deliberate, and my control starts coming apart a piece at a time.
I want to take my time, and I want to take her now, both at once. I want my hands on every part of her. I want the sounds she makes when nothing’s held back. The bear is wide awake and wanting the same things, shoving me on, and for once the two of us are pulling in the same direction—
Then it hits.
No warning. No build. One second I’m losing myself in her, and the next, a drive comes up through me with one target: the side of her neck, low, where it meets her shoulder. Teeth in. Deep. Held until it’s done and can’t be undone.
Mark her.
The force of it locks my jaw. It’s not a want. Wants can be refused. This is my whole body already moving toward one spot on her skin, and I’m a half-second from putting my mouth there.
I wrench back.
Off her. Up. I sit on the edge of the cot with my hands braced on my knees and breathe like I’ve run the mountain.
Nothing like it has ever come up in me. Not with any female. Not once. Not close. I’ve heard males talk about the drive to mark—how it takes you, how there’s no arguing with it—and I decided it was something that happens to other people. I’m solitary. Built that way. Chose it.
I’ve known this woman days.
Days. And the bear is ready to put a claim in her skin that outlasts both of us.
Her hands have gone still. She’s reading me. I can feel it without looking.
“Decker.”
“Yeah.”
“What—?”
“Give me a second.”
She nods silently. The quiet sits heavy.
I get off the cot and put stone floor under my feet. Cold air on bare skin. It doesn’t touch the heat, and it doesn’t touch the other thing either. The urge hasn’t gone. It’s pacing.
She sits up behind me. When I turn, the fur has fallen off her shoulders, and she’s left it there, pooled around her hips, breasts in sweet silhouette. She watches me, working me out.
“It isn’t that I don’t want you,” I say.
She waits.
“The bear.” I look past her at the wall, because looking at her isn’t helping.
“There’s a thing it—” I stop, not sure how much of this I can tell her.
That the bear wants to claim her, mark her, and keep her as his own.
It’s too much. My thumb presses hard into the stone shelf.
“Things are complicated right now, and…” I make myself stop there.
“You’re dealing with a lot, and I don’t want to be the thing that adds to it.
When this happens, I want it to be for the right reasons, and I want you to be sure. ”
Silence.
“You’re not saying no,” she says.
“I’m saying not yet.”
She takes that in. Then she reaches for the fur and draws it up over her shoulders.
“That’s the most words you’ve used all week,” she says. “Are you going to start talking like a normal person now?”
“Don’t count on it.”
She gives me a little smile, and I melt just a little.
There’s more I didn’t say. That the thing the bear wants scares me more than the dragon did, because the dragon I understood.
This thing that’s happening... This, I don’t understand.
No, that’s not it. I understand it perfectly.
I just don’t understand how it could happen to me.
She settles back onto the cot. After a while, her breathing evens out, and I stand in the dark and run the problems through my head.
Hiding her works until it doesn’t. Viktor’s people are patient. The Syndicate’s aren’t, and they’ve got the roads and the sky. Every day behind that boulder, the walls get a little closer. A cave is still a cage, no matter who built it or why.
The danger hasn’t gone anywhere. It won’t. But I can’t want her free and keep her hidden at the same time. If she’s ever going to choose anything—me included—someone has to clear her name and get her sister out of the Syndicate’s hands.
That starts with Viktor. Face to face. My read against his file, my word on the table with everything it’s worth. He might take me standing up for what I’ve done. He might take more than that.
I’ve known this was coming. I’ve just been putting it off.
She sleeps. I stand with my back against cold stone, wanting her so hard it aches, and I let the want keep me company while I work out what I’ll say to a man who thinks I’ve turned against him.
Tomorrow, I start down the mountain.