Chapter 12 #2
The silvery mist swirls around me as I call the human form back.
The transformation is instant, wolf dissolving into man between one breath and the next, and I'm standing in the trees naked and bleeding from the shoulder bite with the cold air on my skin and the taste of her people's blood still coating my tongue.
The adrenaline hasn't ebbed. It's redirected, the combat drive pouring into a channel that the wolf doesn't distinguish from the killing, because the wolf doesn't make that distinction.
The wolf fought and won and wants, and the wanting was there during the fight, woven through the violence the way her scent is woven through my skin.
The blood hasn't dried on my hands. My body is already reaching for her.
The darkness of that, the seamless transition from ending wolves to wanting the woman who watched me do it, should slow me down. It doesn't.
She looks at me. The blade is still in her hand.
Her chest rises and falls with each ragged breath, and the expression on her face has nothing professional left in it.
Her eyes track the blood at my shoulder, the rise and fall of my chest, the full length of me standing bare and whatever she sees strips the last pretense from her features the way the fight stripped it from mine.
She watched me kill wolves from her own pack's wreckage, and she's looking at my mouth.
'This doesn't happen again.'
She said that. I agreed. We were both wrong.
I cross the distance between us the way I crossed the distance to the lead wolf.
The same economy of movement, the same predatory focus, the stride of an animal closing ground on what it intends to take.
Her free hand comes up to my chest, fingers splaying against the muscle above my heart, her palm flat against my sternum, feeling the slam of my heartbeat under her hand.
Her eyes don't leave mine as I take the blade from her other hand and drive it into the earth beside us.
"Your shoulder," she says, and her voice is wrecked.
"Later." I cup the back of her head with one hand and take her mouth.
The kiss is nothing like what happened between us in my quarters.
That was fury, the detonation of an argument that had been building for weeks.
This is rawer, simpler: two people who just survived together and whose bodies have stopped pretending that the wanting can be managed with agreements made in safer rooms. Her mouth opens under mine, and the sound she makes, low and involuntary and stripped of every defense she wields inside fortress walls, drops through my chest and lands behind my navel with a heat that nearly buckles my knees.
She tastes like cold air and exertion and the metallic edge of adrenaline, and underneath all of it, the sweetness I've been catching in fragments through the wall for weeks.
Here, with her tongue against mine and her breath mixing with my breath, the sweetness is concentrated enough to make the wolf in my chest lunge forward.
I press her back against the nearest pine.
The bark is rough, and I'll think about that later, about marks on her skin that weren't put there gently, but right now the need to have her pinned, contained, pressed between the solid wood and my body, is an imperative that rational thought can't override.
She hooks one leg around my hip and pulls me closer, and the contact of her clothed body against my bare skin blurs my vision at the edges.
I'm already hard, have been since the shift back, the adrenaline and the combat and the sight of her standing over the fight she won converting to arousal with an efficiency that makes the wolf and the man indistinguishable.
"You have blood on your mouth," she says, and her voice holds no objection.
"I know."
"I don't care." She pulls my head down and kisses me again, open-mouthed and fierce, and the taste of blood transfers between us with a frankness that should disgust both of us and doesn't.
"Off," I tell her when I pull back, and my hands are already working her shirt over her head, tugging her trousers down her hips with a focus that leaves no room for finesse.
"Planning to leave me anything to wear on the walk back, or is this the plan?" She kicks free of the fabric anyway, helping more than resisting, and then it's skin against skin in the cold mountain air and neither of us is cold.
Her scent hits me the moment her clothes come off.
Not the version I've been breathing through stone and catching in corridors, the muted composition that the herbs flatten into an approximation of beta.
This is the full depth of her, sweet and dark and thick enough to coat the back of my throat, and my body's response is immediate and total.
Every muscle locks. My cock throbs against her belly, already leaking at the tip, and the wolf surges with a territorial hunger that wants to bury itself in the source of that scent and stay there until every wolf in the territory can smell me on her from a mile away.
Her arousal layers underneath the sweetness, a richer, muskier note, and each breath I take of it amplifies my own response, which changes my scent, which she breathes in, which deepens hers.
The feedback loop Signe described in clinical terms is nothing like clinical in practice.
It's a spiral, each revolution winding tighter, pushing both of us further from reason and closer to the animal underneath.
I can smell the slick before I touch her.
The warm, heady scent of it rising between her thighs, distinct from the rest of her arousal the way a single instrument rises above an orchestra.
When I slide my hand between us and press my fingers against her, the slickness coats my hand in a rush that makes my breath stall.
She's drenched, her body producing it in a flood that runs down the inside of her thighs and onto my wrist, slippery and warm and infused with the concentrated essence of her scent.
I bring my fingers to my mouth and taste her, and the sound that comes out of me is not human and not civilized and I do not care.
Her pupils blow wide watching me lick her off my fingers.
"You look like a man who just found religion," she says, and the words come out breathless but the wit is still there, still sharp even with her back against bark and her thighs slick and her body giving her away in every way her mouth refuses to.
Her scent spikes, the musk deepening, and the wetness between her thighs gets worse.
I can see it now, glistening on her inner thighs in the fading light.
I put my hand back between her legs. She gasps when my thumb finds the swollen ridge of her clit, a sharp, honest sound without a trace of strategy.
I work her in slow, firm circles while two fingers push inside, and the tight, clenching heat around my hand is slippery and rhythmic and tells me exactly how close she already is.
Her hips rock against my hand, chasing the pressure, and her head falls back against the bark as her body follows what my fingers are offering.
I curl them forward, press against the spot that makes her thighs shake, and her moan breaks open into a ragged, desperate sound that goes straight to my cock.
"Now," she says. "Torben."
My name in her mouth, not the title, not the rank, spoken with the raw desperation of a woman who has stopped calculating and started wanting. The word rearranges something fundamental in me that I don't have vocabulary for.
I withdraw my fingers, slick and shining, and grip her hips, lifting her against the pine.
She wraps both legs around my waist, and the angle opens her to me, the wet heat of her pressed against the underside of my cock.
I can feel her slick coating me before I push inside, the warm slide of it easing the head of my cock against her entrance.
I hold there for a beat, feeling her body pulse against mine, her muscles fluttering in anticipation.
Then I press forward, and the first inch of her parts around me in a tight, slick grip that drags a groan from deep in my chest. I take it slow, every inch earned, her body yielding around my cock in increments, the slick easing the stretch but not erasing it.
She's tight enough that I feel every ridge, every contraction, every involuntary clench of her inner walls adjusting to the width of me.
Her back arches against the bark. Her nails dig into my shoulders, the injured one included, and the sting of her fingers in the bite wound fuses pain and pleasure into a single jolt that I can't separate and don't want to.
I bottom out inside her and hold there, fully seated, the heat of her wrapped around every inch.
Her forehead drops against my shoulder, and for a suspended moment neither of us moves.
The stillness is its own intimacy: locked together in the trees with the dead wolves behind us and the cold air on our skin and the absolute, devastating simplicity of being inside her with nothing between us.
No wall. No professional framework. No terms. Just the tight, wet grip of her body around mine and the sound of her breathing against my neck.
Then she rolls her hips, adjusting the angle, and the movement sends a streak of sensation up my spine that breaks whatever restraint I was holding.