Grace
I wake up warm. Warm all the way through, for the first time since the draws. The cold is gone. The blanket over me is heavy, and it smells like him, and I know where I am before I open my eyes.
His quarters. His bed.
The pull under my ribs is quiet. Not gone. Close.
I open my eyes, and he’s there—chair dragged to the side of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, watching me. He looks terrible. And beautiful. There are shadows under his cheekbones, and his jaw is dark with more beard than I’ve ever seen on him.
“Hey, bear,” I say. My voice comes out as a croak.
He’s up before I finish the word. There’s a glass of water already poured on the nightstand, and by the ring of others beside it, it isn’t the first. His hand comes behind my shoulders and helps me sit up against the pillows.
I drink the whole glass. He fills it again without my asking, and I drink half of that.
“How long?” I ask.
“A while.” He sits on the edge of the bed this time, not the chair. “Long enough that the healer stopped scowling at me yesterday.”
“That’s not a number.”
“You slept. That was the job.” He pauses. “Eleven breaths a minute, mostly. Twelve since this morning.”
“You counted my breathing.”
“Every one I was awake for.”
I look at his face, at his hands, which won’t quite settle on his knees, and I know he was awake for almost all of them.
“The healer wanted you in the wing,” he says.
“I’m not in the wing.”
“No.” He doesn’t explain it, and he doesn’t need to. I look past him at the room instead—his blanket, his walls, the window with the ridgeline going gray-blue outside. The last time I stood in here, we were shouting at each other. It feels smaller now. I don’t hate it anymore.
More of it comes back while I finish the water. The green slats in the fence. The band on my wrist. Blood spreading under a door. A bear too big for the doorway.
My bear.
“The site’s finished,” he says, watching me put it together. “Cleared out. Nobody who was standing in it is standing now.”
“Serenity—” I start, and stop, because I already know, and saying it hurts.
“I know.” His jaw tightens. “They told us after. I’m sorry. We went in for both of you—”
“She was gone before I ever sent a message.” My voice is steady. The grief is there, but it’s been there for days. “I found out at their front desk. You were right, and I paid everything to prove you wrong, and I did it for nothing.”
“Don’t.” His voice roughens. “Don’t do that to yourself. You made a mistake for someone you love. I could never hold that against you.”
“Okay.” I set the glass down. “Not tonight. She’s alive somewhere, and tomorrow I start again, and this time I don’t do it alone. But tonight I can’t hold on to her and be here with you at the same time. I don’t have it in me.”
He nods. He’s close now, and his eyes haven’t left my face.
“I hated you,” I say. “In this room. For about a day.”
His jaw flexes, but he takes it.
“Then I stood at the fence in the dark and watched you guard my window while I walked out behind your back, and I couldn’t keep hating you after that. None of what I did was about you being wrong.”
“I know why you went.” His voice drops. “I’d have gone too.
I did go. Just later, and louder.” His thumb finds the inside of my elbow, over the bruise where their tape was.
“I should have told you everything the day I knew it. All of it.” His thumb stays there.
“I kept telling myself I was taking the weight off you.”
“You weren’t the one carrying it,” I say. “I was. Always.”
“I know. I knew it while I was doing it anyway.”
The space between us has closed without either of us moving much. His hand is warm over the bruise, and my heart is going faster. From the way his nostrils flare, he hears it before I do.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” he says. He doesn’t move back.
I reach up and take a fistful of his shirt.
“Then get down here and rest with me.”
I pull, and he comes, braced on one arm so his weight lands anywhere but on me. He kisses me slowly, like he’s taking something back that was his. It doesn’t stay slow. My mouth opens under his, and the sound he makes is raw. His hand slides up my arm to my jaw, and I can feel it shaking.
I get my hands under his shirt, and he breaks off long enough to pull it over his head.
Then I’m touching all of him—the muscle, the old scars, two new red lines across his ribs that weren’t there before that building.
He strips the sleep shirt off me, one of his own that someone must have put me in, and drops it off the side of the bed.
His mouth goes to my throat, the hollow between my breasts, working lower, and I lose track of everything but where he is.
“Easy,” he says against my skin when my hips lift. “We’ve got all day.”
“We had a whole week, once,” I say. “I want the day to keep up.”
He laughs, more in his chest than his mouth, and then his lips close over my breast, and neither of us is laughing.
He goes slow, thorough, like he’s checking that every part of me made it back—hands over my ribs, my hips, the inside of my thigh.
When his fingers slide between my legs and find how wet I am, I moan low.
“Grace.” Just my name, and it carries everything.
“I know,” I say. “Come here. I want you.”
“Not yet.” He moves lower, lips dragging over my belly, then the sharp line of one hipbone. He kisses down the front of my thigh, open-mouthed, tongue leaving a wet trail that cools in the air. My muscles jump under him.
He reaches my knee and keeps going, pressing his mouth to the inside of my calf, then my ankle, then the arch of my foot.
I squirm, toes curling, but he holds my ankle steady and moves to the other leg.
He kisses up from my toes this time, slow and deliberate, teeth scraping lightly at the tendon behind my knee.
By the time he reaches my inner thigh, I am twisting under his hands, hips lifting on their own, breath coming short.
“God…Decker… I’m ready…please…” My chest is heaving.
“I’m not done yet.” His head drops, his shoulders push my thighs wide, and his mouth is on me—no ceremony, like a man who missed a meal.
I cry out and grab his hair. He works my clit with his tongue and one thick finger, then two, watching me the whole way up my body, and I don’t have to fake a sound.
He pulls the first orgasm out of me faster than I’m ready for and holds me through it while I shake and curse at him.
“That’s one,” he says against my thigh.
I laugh. “Get up here, bear.”
He slides up my body then, chest brushing mine, the weight of him settling over me without crushing.
His hands hook under my thighs and lift, drawing my calves over the crooks of his elbows until my legs are hiked high along his sides.
The shift opens me wider, hips tilted up so my knees nearly touch my ribs. He leans in, forearms braced beside me.
“I’m not glass,” I tell him. “You won’t break me.”
“No,” he says, low. “You don’t break.”
But he’s still just hovering there, staring at me as if I might disappear. I reach between us and angle the tip of his cock against where my pussy is open for him.
“Fuck me,” I whisper, eyes locked with his.
He lines himself up and sinks in, the thick head parting my pussy in one steady push. My body gives around the blunt pressure, walls yielding to the heavy girth until he’s seated deep, hips flush to mine and the full length buried.
“Oh, my God.” The sound is low in my throat. I feel the way he fills me completely, the dense weight of him forcing a deep ache that borders on too much and settles into raw fullness instead.
He stays locked there, arms braced, a tremor running through his shoulders. My calves rest against his elbows, my thighs spread wide around his torso. Every small shift of his weight grinds the head of his cock against that sensitive spot inside.
“Sweetheart…” He holds still, his jaw tight, his whole body shaking with the effort of not moving.
“Move,” I plead.
He does. Slow and deep first, pulling sounds out of me I don’t try to stop. Then harder when I ask for it, my nails raking his shoulders and down his back. He gives me exactly what I want and a little more, and the wave builds low and unstoppable, just as it always does.
“Decker!” His name comes first, but the sounds after it make no sense at all as I buck against him. “Yes,” comes next. “Yes, God, yes!”
“Fuck, you’re beautiful.” His eyes are fixed on me. Dark. Intense. The bear close.
“I love you, bear.” I don’t know where it comes from, but with the waves still surging, now seems like the right time.
His lips drop to mine, his hips still rolling small, maddening circles. “I love you too, Grace.”
The breath that eases out of me seems to take years of tension with it. And then, without thinking, I turn my head and tilt my chin.
His mouth goes to my throat.
To the join of my neck and shoulder, where it’s gone a hundred times, where it’s touched down and stopped and pulled back every single time. His teeth press against my skin. And stop.
He goes rigid above me and inside me, holding at the edge of the thing he’s refused himself, and I feel the question in the locked set of his jaw better than any words.
I take a fistful of his hair and hold his mouth right where it is.
“You’ve been stopping since the den,” I get out. “Stop stopping.”
“Grace.” Gravel and want together. “Once it’s done, it’s done—”
“I know what it is.” I press his face closer. “Yours. Do it.”
He drives deep and bites down.
The sting is sharp and clean, and it doesn’t feel like pain, but I scream anyway.
It feels like being claimed, like something closing tight around us both.
Heat spreads out from his teeth, down my shoulder, through my chest, all the way to where we’re joined, and the wave breaks so hard the room goes white.
My back arches up into him. I hear myself making a sound, long and climbing, more wolf than me. She’s up and pushing into his teeth, answering him.
He comes with his teeth still set in my flesh and my name breaking apart in his chest, buried deep and staying there. His arms shake. I hold his head to my throat with both hands and go down through it with him.
Then it’s quiet.
Quiet like I’ve never been. My wolf lies down inside me, all the way down, loose and finished, and everywhere our skin touches I feel the same thing happening in him.
The huge restless thing that’s run under his surface since the day I met him going still at last. His tongue moves over the bite, slow, and the sting eases to a throb, and the throb to a warmth that feels like it’s mine to keep.
“Okay, sweetheart?” he asks against my neck. He’s still shaking.
“Better than.” My hand is loose in his hair now. “You?”
It takes him a moment. “Quiet,” he says. “It’s quiet.”
He pulls the blanket over us, my body tucked against his side, my head settled on his chest where he wants it. His heartbeat is slow and heavy under my ear. The bite throbs in time with it, already part of me, and I don’t care that his stickiness still seeps from me. It’s how the bear likes it.
“Sleep,” I tell him. “You look like a warning poster for caffeine addiction.”
“In a minute.” His hand moves through my hair. “I’m not done looking at you.”
He’s asleep in four.
I feel it happen, his breath going deep, his arm going from holding me to just resting, all that watchfulness finally standing down, because the thing it was watching is right here under his arm.
I lie and listen to his heart slow, warm all the way through, and I’m almost gone myself when his hand moves.
It slides down from my ribs, slow and heavy with sleep, and comes to rest low on my belly. Palm flat. Fingers spread.
And it stays.
I look at it in the gray light. It’s nothing.
A sleeping hand finds somewhere to lie, that’s all it is.
But when I shift to turn further into him, the hand doesn’t slide off the way a sleeping hand should.
It comes back. Same place. Same spread. Settled and certain, the way he plants himself in front of a door he means to hold.
The wolf lifts her head, a contentment settling that doesn’t seem to have its source in the bite. Something else. Something…
I put the thought away.
His hand is warm through the blanket, heavy, sure of its spot.
I close my eyes.