Chapter 13
Her hand on him was the answer to the question her body had been screaming for an hour. The heat of him in her palm, the tip smooth, moist, demanding her mouth. The weight of him. The pulse of him against her fingers as she ruthlessly jacked him off, her thumb swirling.
She was no longer alone in her cells. She had something to hold. She had something that belonged to her. She had something that wanted her with the same gravitational pull her body had been generating without an object.
She pulled her hand out of his shorts and dragged it up his stomach, grabbing the hem of his T-shirt in both hands and tearing it in half, all the way to the tantalizing hollow of his throat.
She pushed the pieces aside, clamped her mouth over the flat disk of his nipple and sucked him hard, bit him just as hard, the contact with his skin a shock that made her whole body jolt as if she'd been struck.
She kept moving her hand. Up his ribs, still sucking him.
He was moaning, his back arched, all hers.
She traced the chakana with her nail. Heat radiated out of it. His ink answered hers like two stones humming at the same frequency. “I never gave you permission for this.”
“Yes, you did. You took my clothes, and you took my heart. You asked me to watch the skies. That was a promise,” he rasped out, his chest heaving.
She reeled, her mind spinning, words coming to her like in a dream. I watched you and I hungered. I had no words to get through to you, but even then, every line of you belonged to me. Those words were in her head, in his. Both of them were frozen in the recognition.
His hand came up and pressed over hers on his ribs, holding her palm flat against the scar. “You marked me with silver and fear. Permission was taken and granted in blood. I gave before you took, and I accepted that end.”
His intent, unwavering gaze was on her face, and a sob escaped her. The words were strange, a language she didn't know she spoke, but the truth of them resonated in her bones like a memory.
Before she could even figure out if he’d said them out loud, or they were an echo in her head, he grabbed the back of her head, his mouth colliding with hers, biting her lips over and over, and she met that energy with her own, the power of it climbing through bone and sinew, through air and breath, between heartbeats, and lifeblood, consuming all that she was, fusing her to him, into him as if she was nothing but the half that made him whole.
The recognition was too much.
It was too much because it was too close to what she'd run from in the bedroom upstairs.
It was too close to what she'd felt when their tattoos had touched in the library an hour ago and the force had pulsed out of them and the whole team had felt it.
It was too close to the vision of her body becoming gold in the courtyard.
It was too close to whatever was waiting on the other side of letting him have her completely.
She tore her hand out from under his.
Terror consumed her at the need that was like living fire in her gut, burning her mind with the promise of her surrender. Giving in didn’t come easy, it never did, and anything worth having was worth earning. She was a woman at war with her very essence.
She shoved off his chest with both palms, stumbling back from him, breathing like she'd been running. She stared at him with her teeth bared and her hair coming loose from her braid, and his bite marks on her mouth, his heart in her hands, his scent in her lungs, and the words poured out of her.
"You say you’re the key? Show me you fit.
Show me you know how to make me open.” He understood.
She saw him understand. His silver eyes narrowed, then exploded into molten gold.
A wave of pure sexual desire blasted into her, knocking her almost to her knees, wind whipped through the room, demolishing the braid until her hair swirled around her in a vortex of need, pushing at her body with an aching, tangible force.
Golden threads emerged, gripping her in uncontrollable ecstasy until she couldn’t breathe.
They were on her as if her clothes had disappeared, suctioning to the hard, aching knots of her nipples, as if his tongue and mouth knew exactly the code of her desire, others sliding over her body like liquid, molten fire, others brushing over her sex with a tantalizing tease, then harder, rubbing and sucking her clit, entering her body, thick and scorching, thrusting deep until she was part of him.
The power of him coursed through her like stars, the cosmos bursting in her breasts, her throbbing nipples, the core of her clenching with such pleasure she cried out in the grasp of Flash’s pure will.
She came so hard, her body bowed from the force of the release. She went limp before him, her breathing ragged and filled with gasping pleasure that crashed and boomed over and over.
Then it built all over again, that need that wouldn’t abate. Her blue threads burst from her, pushing away the gold, pushing him back and away from her. Then, in a blind, aching panic, she turned and ran.
She bolted across the library and through the door at the back, the one that led to the private wing, and without even having to look, she was aware he was behind her.
She wanted him to chase her, catch her. Every cell in her body was a beacon pointed at his pursuit.
The wing was empty. The staff had been cleared somehow.
She didn't know how. She didn't care. She ran past the carved wooden doors, the runners woven by her great-grandmother, the high windows that looked out on the cloud forest. Her bare feet on the cold tile of the corridor were the only sound she could hear besides her own breathing and his footsteps behind her, gaining.
The mountain sang, dark, aching chords that told a story she couldn’t understand, chiming through her like sorrow and grief.
Those golden threads chased her, caressing her hair, kissing her mouth as if it were his delicious lips, slipped beneath her clothes and wrapped around her breasts, feasting on her nipples, flicking at her clit until she thought her legs would falter, and she’d fall onto the floor to wait for the weight of him.
She crossed the threshold, the door wide open. He needed to enter. He needed to close it. He needed to make the decision to come into her room and stay.
She reached the foot of her bed, turning to face the doorway.
He filled it again.
He had a hand pressed to the bite at the base of his neck where she'd drawn the deepest mark. His chest was bare, her nail patterns crisscrossing his skin, proof of her aching madness. His pupils had eaten his eyes.
He stepped through the doorway and closed the door behind him with his foot.
The lock clicked.
With deliberate slowness, he reached for his waistband, and anticipation climbed in her, a howl trapped in her throat. “Yes, let me see you. Bare it all for me.”
“I hope you got all that running out of your system.” He pushed the shorts down with his underwear, his cock sprang free, thick, pulsing, the heat of him reaching across the room and making her sweat.
“I’ll show you how exquisitely I fit into you, babe, and you’ll have no breath to even scream, let alone run,” he rasped, his voice humming with power and intent.
All the oxygen in the room disappeared. Yes. Oh, please, yes.
He was the most dangerous and desired man she'd ever seen in her life.
* * *
Chasing her heightened every moment, the way his body moved, prowled, stalked her.
He’d felt every single drop of her desire though his threads, and he was harder than was physically possible.
He'd been a SEAL for ten years. He'd hunted men.
He'd cornered targets. He’d taken lives and knew the cost and the pledge.
The operator was always alive in him, but she’d activated the sensual predator in him, and his body was a honed weapon that she had no defense against. Somewhere, on the edge of his consciousness, he realized he’d always been a warrior.
That knowledge lived in his DNA. But somehow being that man had kept him from her, a place where he wasn’t free to take her mouth, touch her skin, fuck her slow and deep until they lost the thread of reality and slipped into an intimate place that he craved with a longing that flooded moisture to his eyes.
Barriers were gone. No guardrails, no denial, no stepping back.
The pull toward her was unbearable. The mountain wanted him moving.
The bond wanted him moving. The golden threads wanted completion.
Every instinct in his body screamed to follow.
He took two steps before a colder realization hit him hard enough to slow him.
What if this wasn't her? What if the pressure was making the choice for her?
His chest tightened. He could fight men.
He could fight Chaos. He could carry a team through folded space.
But he couldn't survive discovering the woman he'd spent a year loving wasn't actually choosing him.
The thought cut deeper than any knife. If she turned around and told him no, he would stop.
No matter what the mountain wanted. No matter what the Veil wanted.
No matter what he wanted. He refused to become another thing that happened to her without permission.
This was the part of him that had been a hunter before humans had learned to write down what hunting was. His blood was running hot in a pattern that his body recognized from another lifetime.
She tried to run. Chasing her had fired the dangerous response in him that had him sending out his threads to show her she was his only focus, his aching desire. When he came, he wanted her to feel every ounce of his penetration, his pleasure, his possession.
The pattern had been set the moment she'd turned and bolted from the library. Some part of her had asked him, with her flight, to demonstrate that he was capable of catching her. He was. He had. The chase was over.