Chapter 3 #3
He pushes off the door and walks to the chair where I set my jacket. Takes off his own. Folds it. Places it on top of mine. Then he rolls his sleeves to his forearms. Slowly. The care he takes with each fold is obscene, given what I feel building behind the contained bond.
Something low in my stomach tightens.
“He wanted more,” I say. “I didn’t. I had Simone. I had fights to win. It was nothing.”
He says nothing.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
He lifts his head.
He starts moving.
Not toward me. Around me. He walks to the window.
Past it. Runs his fingers along the back of the second chair.
Comes around the far side of the room in a slow arc that puts me between him and the door.
He’s not looking at the furniture. He’s looking at me.
How he tracks my face while his body takes a different path makes my skin prickle.
I don’t turn to follow him. I hold my position and track him with my eyes, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.
He stops behind me. Close. His body cold behind mine. His breath on my neck.
“I don’t care about one night three years ago,” he says. His voice is low. Right against my ear.
My breathing changes.
"I don't care about a wolf shifter sitting at a bar." His arm comes up. He wraps his hand around my throat. His thumb rests against my pulse.
“What I care about,” he says, “is that you are mine. And I want every trace of anyone who came before me erased until you can’t remember what it felt like to be touched by anyone else.”
My breath leaves me.
His thumb presses against my pulse. One degree harder.
“Then erase it,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
The seconds stretch. His hand on my neck. His body behind me. The shadows stir against his skin where his wrist touches mine. The room is so quiet that both of our breathing carries.
“Maximus.”
Nothing.
“Erase it.” Again.
He spins me around, and my back hits the wall, and his mouth is on mine before I finish the breath.
The kiss is nothing like the man who adjusts my collar in the mirror.
This is raw and open and slightly wrecked, and I grab his shirt with both hands and pull, and he presses into me, and the wall is cold against my shoulders, and he is cold against my chest, and I am burning between the two.
He grips my hip and his fingers dig in, and I can’t move. His mouth drags from my lips to my jaw and down to the hollow of my throat, and his teeth graze the skin there, not breaking it, and I arch into it so hard my spine leaves the wall.
He pulls back. His eyes are black in the dark. The shadows have surfaced along his forearms, curling like smoke. He’s not pulling them back.
He has me pinned. Hand on my throat. Hand on my hip. The wall at my back and every inch of him pressed against my front. He expects me to stay.
I don’t stay.
I hook my foot behind his ankle and use his weight against him in the same move I’ve used on bigger opponents. He shifts. I spin him. His shoulders hit the wall where mine just were, and the sound of it is loud in the dark room.
His hands drop. His eyes widen. For one full second Maximus looks at me like he has no idea what just happened.
Good.
I hold his gaze. My palms flat on his chest, the crescent mark pulsing under my right hand. His heartbeat. Fast.
“My turn.”
I drop to my knees.
His breath stops. His hands go to the wall behind him and his fingers press into the plaster.
I’ve never done this with him. I’ve thought about it. But I’ve never been on my knees in front of this man and the look on his face right now says he wasn’t prepared for this either.
I undo his belt. Slowly. The way he rolled his sleeves. Giving him time to feel every second of what’s coming.
“Celeste.” His voice is wrecked already, and I haven’t even touched him.
I pull him free. He’s hard and heavy, cool in my hand, and I wrap my fingers around him and stroke once, base to tip, watching his face the entire time. His head drops back against the wall. The tendons in his neck pull tight.
I lean in and press my lips to the base of him. Softly. Then I drag my lips up along the length of him, slow, open, mirroring what he did to my throat moments ago. I feel him twitch against my lips.
His hands leave the wall and come to my hair. His fingers tangle in it but he doesn’t push. He’s holding on. The shadows flicker at his wrists where they meet my scalp.
I take him into my mouth.
The sound he makes goes through me. A low, ragged sound I have never pulled from him before, and I want to hear it again.
I take him deeper, finding the rhythm with my mouth, learning what makes his fingers tighten and what makes his hips jerk forward.
He’s trying not to move. The effort locked in his thighs, the muscles rigid, the control fighting the need.
I flatten my tongue against the underside and suck, and his whole body shudders.
“Celeste.” Different this time. Broken open. “You need to stop.”
But I don’t. I take him deeper and his hips buck and his fist tightens in my hair and his pleasure is coiling so tight it’s almost pain, and I use it. I’m relentless, and the shadows surge along his arms and every muscle in his body goes rigid.
“I can’t.” His voice is barely there. “If you don’t stop I’m going to…”
I pull back. Look up at him. His chest is heaving. His eyes are glazed.
“I know.”
Something cracks open in his face.
He pulls me up by my arms. My back hits the wall, he crashes into me again, and I can taste the desperation on him.
His hands drag down my body and find the waistband of my pants, and he doesn’t bother with the zipper.
He hooks his fingers into the fabric and pulls.
The sound of tearing fills the room. My pants and underwear gone in one motion, the cool air hits my skin, then his palm is between my thighs and his fingers push into me, my head drops back, and I’m already so wet it’s embarrassing.
“Not embarrassing,” he says against my mouth. I hadn’t realized I said it out loud.
His fingers curl inside me, and I gasp, and he finds the spot that makes my knees buckle and works it with an accuracy that should be illegal. I’m gripping his shoulders, my hips are rocking against his palm, and he’s watching my face with an intensity that makes my skin burn.
He pulls back. I make a sound of protest. He lifts me. My legs wrap around him, and the wall takes the weight.
He pushes into me in one long stroke, and the sound I make is not quiet.
The stretch of him. The fullness. My body opens and tightens around him at the same time. His forehead drops to mine. For one second, we are both still. The shadows curling against my skin and his breath ragged on my lips.
Then he moves.
Slow at first. Long, slow strokes that pull almost all the way out and push back in deep enough that I can’t hold my head up. Even now, even with everything cracking open, he’s making me feel every inch of it.
“Look at me,” he says.
I open my eyes. The shadows are moving along his jaw, his throat, licking up his arms where they hold me. His eyes are black, his lips are parted, he rolls his hips, and my breath breaks.
“There,” I manage.
He does it again. Slower. Grinding at the depth that makes my thighs shake. I clench, and a sound comes out of him that’s barely controlled.
“Again.”
He gives me what I ask for, and my vision blurs. His grip shifts on my thigh, hitching me higher, changing the angle, and the next thrust hits something that makes me cry out.
He doesn’t stop. He heard the sound, and he found the angle, and now he’s there, right there, and each thrust lands with an accuracy that should not be possible from a man who was shaking against a wall moments ago.
The tempo builds. Faster. His grip on my hip is going to leave marks and I want it to. The shadows wrap my wrists, press against my pulse points, pulse in time with something deeper.
Everything he contained in the car pouring through unchecked. What he’s feeling doubles back into my own body and feeds back, and the loop tightens until I can’t tell where his pleasure ends, and mine begins.
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
His rhythm stutters. He presses his face into my neck and drives into me harder, faster, losing control, and I want the loss. I hold on with everything I have.
The pressure builds low and tight and specific.
His breath goes ragged against my throat, and he shifts his angle one more time, and that’s it.
I break. The orgasm rips through me, my whole body locks around him, and the sound I make fills the dark room.
I feel it echo and hit him, and his grip goes bruising, and he thrusts once, twice, and comes apart.
The sound he makes is low and shattered. The shadows pull taut around both of us. Both hearts between us stop for one beat. Restart.
We stay against the wall. My legs still around him. His face in my neck. The shadows retreat slowly.
I run my fingers through his hair.
“A wolf,” he says finally. Still pressed to my throat.
I laugh. It comes out shaky. “You’re still on that?”
“You slept with a wolf shifter and didn’t know it.”
“I was twenty-four and human.”
“Your instincts should have flagged something.”
“My instincts were busy. I had a fight the next morning. He was just… in between.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me.
“In between,” he repeats.
“In between.”
His expression settles.
“He’ll be at the activation,” I say. “If he’s Iron Claw.”
“Probably.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
His hand finds the back of my neck again. Gentler now. His thumb traces my cheek.
“Not for me.”
“Are you sure?” I look at him skeptically.
He eases me down. My knees aren’t ready, but his arm stays around my waist until they are.
“I’m sure. Come to bed.”
He picks me up because the bed is apparently too far away to let go. I press my face into his neck. He smells like me.
I press my palm to the crescent mark over his heart. He pulls me closer.