Chapter Eleven #2
He closes the remaining distance, and that’s the end of our discussion.
His mouth is demanding in a way that matches the rest of him, not rough for roughness’ sake but thorough, absolutely committed, a kiss that doesn’t hesitate, already committed to where it’s going.
I respond in kind, my hands finding the back of his neck, pulling him down, because the anger is still in my blood alongside everything else, and all of it wants the same thing.
When my fangs catch his lower lip and draw the smallest bead of heat, his groan vibrates through every point of contact between us like something seismic.
His hips press into mine, pinning me against the trunk with his full weight, and the solid fact of him there, immovable and warm, unravels something in my chest that has been wound tight for days.
His hands find the hem of what remains of my shirt and pull it over my head with a single, decisive motion. The cold air hits my skin and does absolutely nothing. Then his hands are on my bare waist, and the heat of them registers at a depth that has nothing to do with temperature.
Large hands.
Roughened palms.
The kind of hands that know exactly what they’re doing and do it without apology, mapping the curve of my waist, my ribs, traveling upward with a focus that makes me press harder into the tree behind me and reach for him at the same time.
“You’re incredible,” he says against my mouth, low and rough, like the words were dragged out of somewhere he keeps things he doesn’t usually say out loud. “You know that?”
“I’m a disaster,” I breathe the words back.
“Yeah.” His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, and I feel him smile against my skin. “My disaster.”
My palms press to his chest, warm, solid, marked with scars that feel like history under my hands, and I want to follow every one of them.
The scar on his left shoulder is the one my fingers find first, tracing its ridge in the dark.
He goes still for a half-second when I touch it, a barely perceptible pause, and the weight of what that scar represents settles between us without either of us naming it.
“Does it bother you?” I ask, my fingers resting over it. “That I’m touching it?”
“No.” His voice is quieter for a moment, stripped of everything else. “Nothing about you touching me bothers me, Charlie.”
His hand slides up my naked back. I haven’t been able to wear a bra since I got here, because it is stained with blood.
The cold night air that meets my bared skin lasts about three seconds before his mouth replaces it.
The sound I make is entirely undignified, and I do not care in the slightest. His hands find my hips, ripping off my shorts and panties with ease, his lycan strength making a small sound of surprise escape me as I stand naked before him.
My eyes instinctively drop to check out his cock, and I am not disappointed.
Rogue moves back toward me, his grip tightening on my hips with a force that would leave spectacular bruises on anything human, and does nothing to my vampire body except make every nerve I have stand at attention.
He lifts me with a casual demonstration of lycan strength that should not be as appealing as it is, and my legs wrap around his hips and lock, the position bringing us flush together in a way that leaves absolutely no ambiguity about where this is going.
“Hold on,” he says, his voice a low command against my ear, and the authority in it sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, and tighten my legs around him to prove it.
The sound he makes at that is deeply satisfying.
He’s thick and warm where he presses against me, and when he thrusts forward, I breathe out a sound against the side of his throat that the trees probably hear.
His answering sound is lower, rougher, the wolf in it unmistakable, and his hips pull back and drive forward again in a rhythm that is unhurried and devastating in equal measure.
The bark at my back, the cold air on my skin, and the scorching, overwhelming heat of him everywhere else create a collision of sensation that my vampire-sharpened nerves translate into something so vivid it borders on unbearable.
Every nerve ending in my body is operating at a sensitivity I am only now beginning to understand the full implications of.
“R-Rogue.” His name comes out ragged, and I don’t try to smooth it out. There is no point pretending to be composed right now.
“I’ve got you.” The words are low, pressed against my temple, unhesitating.
“I’ve got you, Charlie.” He moves, and I move with him, and the tree behind me doesn’t stand a chance.
Bark splinters under the pressure of his hands, braced beside my shoulders.
My own fingers dig into the muscle of his back and leave marks that his lycan healing will close in minutes.
The knowledge of that, the ability to hold on without managing myself, without throttling back, without the constant anxious monitoring of a body that might break under too much, loosens something in me that has been coiled tight since before the turning.
My hips roll to meet him, and the rhythm between us sharpens, becomes something urgent and specific, and his breath against my temple turns ragged.
“Don’t hold back,” he says through his teeth. “Not with me. Never with me.”
“I’m not,” I manage, and prove it.
“Good girl.” The words come out guttural and low, scraped from somewhere primal in a way I was not prepared for.
“Say that again…” I growl, “… and I’ll bite you.”
“Charlotte.” His hips drive forward hard, slow and deliberate, making his point with considerably more eloquence than words. “Go ahead.”
My head bows back. My fangs have been down for the last four minutes, and I haven’t been pretending otherwise.
“That’s not the threat you think it is,” I tell him, breathless.
“Wasn’t meant as one.” His voice has gone rough in a way that tells me the man is losing ground to the wolf by the second, and he doesn’t sound remotely sorry about it. “Been waiting days, Charlie. I’m not in a hurry.”
“You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It is.” His forehead drops to mine, gold eyes burning through the dark from an inch away, and there is nothing calculated in them, nothing guarded, just the wolf, present and certain, and the man underneath it wearing the same expression.
“Everything that’s mine is yours to take. You understand that?”
My insides clench at his words, my head bows forward in delight, and my fangs find the curve of his shoulder where it meets his neck, the thick muscle, and I sink in.
The taste of him runs through my veins, electrifying every nerve ending.
Not the bloodlust.
Not the screaming, desperate, annihilating need that has been trying to eat me alive for four days.
This is something else entirely, something I have no category for, lycan-warm, ancient and his, a flavor that is specific, particular, and runs through me like light through water, illuminating everything it touches.
I take only a thread of it, barely a mouthful, less than a mouthful.
The restraint of stopping there is both the hardest and the easiest thing I’ve done all week, hardest because his blood is extraordinary and my every instinct wants more.
Easiest because the part of me that wanted to stop is Charlie Harris, is me, and she’s here, she’s present, she held.
His groan is long, resonant, and seems to come from somewhere below his ribs, a wolf-sound more than a man, deep enough to vibrate through my chest where we’re pressed together.
His hands grip harder, his teeth find the junction of my neck and shoulder in return, blunt and claiming, not the pierce of fangs but the press of jaw that communicates something his species has always known how to say without words.
I shudder against him, my spine arching away from the tree and into him simultaneously.
“Mine,” he growls against my skin, and it is not a question.
The word lands in my chest and takes root before I can argue with it.
“Yours,” I breathe back, and the terrifying part is that it doesn’t feel like surrender. It feels like the truest thing I’ve said in my entire life.
The rhythm between us builds. The cold, the dark, and the distance from everything else fall away, and what is left is only this.
The movement, the heat, the texture of his skin under my hands.
The sound of his breathing rough and close against my ear, and the extraordinary sensitivity of this body that has been nothing but a source of terror since I woke up in it and is, right now, for the first time, something magnificent.
The pleasure that builds is nothing like what I remember from being human.
It is vaster, sharper, more layered, arriving in waves that start deep and radiate outward and multiply rather than peak and fade, and I hold onto him and chase it with everything I have.
“Rogue.” His name is all I have. The rest of the sentence has dissolved entirely.
“Right here.” His voice is wrecked, pressed against my hair, and hearing that roughness, the absolute ruin in it, does as much for me as everything else. “I’m right here, Charlie.”
And then something happens inside of me that I can’t explain.
It happens at the exact crest of a wave so consuming that I’ve lost the thread of every thought I’ve ever had, the base of him swelling, expanding outward in a slow, relentless pulse that locks us together from the inside, stretching me open in a way that has no human equivalent, pressing deep and holding, and the sound that tears out of me is nothing I have a name for.
Not pain.
Not remotely painful…
“What—” I gasp, my nails finding fresh purchase in his back. “What is—”