Chapter 14 #2
She looks at my face and the reading starts before I've barely crossed the threshold. Her eyes move across my face the way they move across terrain, cataloging the stress points, the fault lines, the places where the structure is under load.
"Torben."
"Later."
"That bad," she says.
"Later." I cross the room and take the blade from her bed and set it on the table.
"Disarming a woman before delivering news is a negotiation tactic," she says, "Not a reassuring one."
"I'm not negotiating."
"No. You're stalling. The difference is that negotiation produces information and stalling produces anxiety, and I already have enough of the second one to supply the entire barracks.
" She uncrosses her legs and faces me fully, and the sharpness in her eyes is the sharpness of a woman who has survived by reading wolves and knows when one is lying to her.
"Your jaw hasn't unlocked since you walked in.
You smell like Stellan's study. And you took my blade before you said a word, which means whatever you're about to say, you think I'm going to want to stab something. "
"You're not wrong."
"Then say it."
"I can't." The admission comes out rough. "Not yet."
She studies me for a long beat, and what passes across her face is the rapid, visible calculation of a strategist weighing the cost of pressing against the cost of waiting.
I watch her choose waiting, and the choice isn't submission.
It's the tactical patience of a woman who knows that the information will come and that forcing it before it's ready produces worse intelligence than letting the source deliver on his own terms.
"Fine," she says. "But you owe me the blade back when this conversation eventually happens. I want to be armed for it."
The ghost of humor in the words is thin enough to cut, offered to a man she can see is breaking and delivered with the deliberate steadiness of someone handing a rope to a person on a ledge.
She knows something is wrong. She's choosing to give me the space to be wrong in, and the generosity of that is worse than the anger would be.
I kneel in front of her, put my hands on her knees, and look up into her face. Her hand comes up to my jaw. Her thumb traces the muscle that's been clenched since Stellan's study, and the touch is so careful that it opens something in me I don't have the resources to close again.
I turn my head and press my mouth to the inside of her wrist, where her pulse beats fast and close to the surface, and the taste of her skin with the omega scent bleeding through is enough to rearrange every priority I possess into one.
I rise from the floor, strip off my clothes and press her back onto the bed.
My mouth finds the place just left of the hollow of her throat where the bone angles toward the clavicle, and I hold there.
My lips against the unmarked skin where a bonding bite would go, feeling her pulse kick against my mouth, breathing her in from the place where claiming starts.
The place that Grimnir intends to mark. The place I'm kissing now with the full knowledge that this goodbye is one she doesn't know she's receiving.
My hands move slower than they have before.
I undress her the way I'd dismantle a mechanism I wanted to remember how to rebuild: carefully, precisely, with attention to every seam and every layer and every place where fabric gives way to skin.
Her shirt comes off and I follow its path with my mouth, tracing the line of her collarbone, the ridge of her shoulder, the soft inside of her elbow where the skin is thin and the veins run blue beneath the surface.
Her trousers come off and my hands map her hips, her thighs, the sensitive crease where her thigh meets her pelvis that makes her breath catch when I press my thumb against it.
She watches me. Her eyes track every movement with the focused attention of a woman assembling data, and the data is telling her that the man undressing her tonight is not the same man who pinned her against a pine tree in the mountains.
"You're different tonight," she says, and the observation is quiet, stripped of the tactical edge her voice usually carries.
I don't answer. My mouth is at her hip, tracing the bone, and the scent of her slick is already reaching me from between her thighs, warm and sweet and dark with the concentrated essence of an omega whose suppressant has thinned to nothing.
The smell of her bypasses every rational system and speaks directly to the wolf, and the wolf's response is a low, sustained ache that pulses in time with every heartbeat, the ache of a man learning the geography of something that's about to be taken.
I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, where the skin is soft and the warmth radiates against my lips, and she makes a sound that isn't quite a moan.
More like a question formed from breath instead of words.
I answer it with my tongue, spreading her thighs wider and tasting her where the slick is thickest, the flat of my tongue dragging from entrance to clit in a slow, thorough stroke that makes her hips lift off the bed and her fingers twist into the furs beneath her.
I stay there. This is not where I usually stay.
The previous encounters have been about urgency, about penetration and pace and the physical claiming the wolf demands.
Tonight the wolf wants something different.
The wolf wants to catalog every response, every sound, every way her body moves under my mouth, and the cataloging is its own kind of possession, quieter and more devastating than force.
My tongue works her clit in slow, firm circles while two fingers press inside her, and the slick coats my hand and my chin and runs down my wrist in warm trails that carry her scent directly into my skin.
She gasps, and the gasp becomes a moan, and the moan becomes my name spoken with a broken cadence that I'm filing away in the place where I keep the things about her that I refuse to lose.
I bring her to the edge with my mouth and hold her there, reading the tension in her thighs and the pitch of her breathing and the rhythmic clenching around my fingers, and when she breaks, I feel the orgasm roll through her body from the inside, her walls gripping my fingers in convulsive waves while her back arches and her hand finds the back of my head and holds me against her with a strength that has nothing controlled about it.
I kiss her through the aftershocks. My mouth moves back up her body, tracing the same path in reverse, hip to ribs to collarbone to the bonding site, and the taste of her slick on my lips mixes with the taste of her skin as I settle over her, my weight braced on my forearms, my cock hard against her thigh and aching with a need that goes deeper than arousal.
She pulls me down. Her mouth finds mine, and she tastes herself on my lips and doesn't flinch from it, and the kiss is slow and open and raw in the way of two people who have run out of pretense.
Her legs open beneath me, and the wet heat of her presses against the head of my cock, and the slick is so abundant that the first inch slides in without resistance, a smooth, hot glide that makes me groan against her mouth.
I push deeper, slowly, the way I've been doing everything tonight, and the feeling of her body opening around me in increments is a sensation I'm cataloging alongside her sounds and her scent and the way her fingers dig into my shoulders when I bottom out.
She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me closer, and the angle changes, and the depth becomes absolute, and for a suspended moment I hold still inside her with my forehead pressed to hers and our breathing ragged and tangled between us.
The pace I set is unlike anything before.
Slow, deep, thorough, each stroke a deliberate mapping of the space inside her body that fits me, each withdrawal a loss I feel and each return a reclamation.
The slick eases every thrust into a smooth slide, and the wet sound of our bodies connecting fills the room alongside her breathing and mine.
My mouth finds the bonding site again, and I kiss the unmarked skin with the careful attention of a mouth pressing against something sacred, and the kiss carries everything I can't say: that this skin belongs to me, that the wolf who marks it should be me, that the order sitting in the back of my mind is the thing I'm touching her against.
She feels the weight of what I'm not saying.
I can tell because her hands change, moving from my shoulders to my face, her palms cupping my jaw, her thumbs tracing the bone.
Reading the shape of what she's holding.
The look in her eyes tells me she knows something is wrong, and the way she pulls my mouth down to hers instead of asking tells me she's choosing to let the bodies have the conversation the mouths can't.
The pressure at the base builds again, stronger than the mountain, the swelling pressing against her entrance with each stroke and catching on the withdrawal.
The precursor that my body keeps rehearsing, the knot it wants to form and can't yet complete.
She feels it and her hips tilt to accommodate the width, and the trust in that adjustment, the physical acceptance of whatever my body is becoming, guts me in a way that the tenderness hasn't managed to.
I drive deeper, harder, the pace climbing despite the deliberateness I started with, my body overriding everything with the urgent need to be as close to her as two bodies can be and then closer.
Her moans climb with the pace, and the sounds she makes when I hit the depth that takes her words away are sounds I'm recording against the silence that's coming.
The swelling catches and releases. Still not locking.
Still not complete. But closer than the mountain, and the frustration of the incompletion compounds the other ache, the one that has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the fact that I'm inside the woman I'm about to lose and my body is trying to form a lock that would make the losing impossible.
She comes a second time with my name on her lips and my mouth where the claiming bite should be and my cock buried so deep inside her that the swelling presses against places that make her entire body shake.
The orgasm pulls mine out of me with a force that blanks my vision, and I spill into her in long, pulsing waves while the swelling throbs against her entrance and the wolf howls inside my skull with a sound that is rage and grief and possession fused into something that doesn't have a name in any language I speak.
I hold still inside her while the swelling subsides.
My arms shake. My forehead is pressed to her shoulder.
Her fingers move through my hair with a gentleness she has never shown me before and that I don't deserve tonight, because the man whose hair she's stroking is carrying an order he hasn't delivered and a goodbye he's performing with his body because his mouth is too much of a coward to speak it.
The room settles around us. The fire crackles in the hearth.
Her scent and mine have merged in the warm air until the boundary between them is indistinguishable, and the room smells like us, like the thing we are when the walls and the titles and the assignment fall away and what's left is two wolves who found each other in a cage and built something that should not work and does.
She lies against me afterward with her back to my front, my arm across her waist, and the position mirrors the way I held her in the mountain passes before we let go at the torchlight, except this time neither of us has anywhere to be and the staying makes everything worse because staying means she trusts me and the trust is the thing I'm about to break.
Her breathing is steady. Her body is warm against mine. The suppressant is almost gone, and her scent is the richest it's been, sweet and dark and threaded with the aftermath of sex, and every breath I take of it is a reminder that Grimnir will smell this too when she's his.
"Torben." Her voice is quiet against the dark. "What did Stellan say?"
My mouth finds the place where I should be inflicting a claiming bite to make her mine.
The skin is warm and unmarked and I can feel her pulse under my lips, and the pulse doesn't quicken when I press my mouth there.
She trusts me enough that the proximity of teeth to the claiming spot doesn't trigger the fear response.
The trust is a gift I'm holding in bloody hands.
"Not tonight," I say, and the cowardice of it sits on my tongue alongside the taste of her, and both are going to keep me awake until dawn.
She's quiet for a long time. Her fingers find mine where my arm crosses her waist, and she laces them together the way we laced them in the dark on the walk home from the mountain, and the gesture is a kindness she's offering to a man she knows is holding something back.
The kindness is worse than the anger would be.
She doesn't ask again.
The fire burns low. I hold her against me and breathe her in and press my mouth to the skin that should carry my mark and doesn't, and the order sits in the silence between us like a blade neither of us has drawn yet.
Tomorrow I'll tell her. Tomorrow I'll watch the strategist reassemble the mask and the fear return to her eyes and the woman I just held retreat behind the walls she builds from information and necessity. Tomorrow the briefing happens and the handoff begins and the assignment ends.
Tonight, I hold what's mine and pretend the holding is enough.