Chapter Twenty
CHARLIE
His hands tighten.
A sharp, immediate response that moves through me like a current.
“I’m not holding back,” he says against my throat, low and roughened. “I’m taking my time.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“They’re not.” His mouth traces downward, deliberate and specific. “When I hold back, you’ll know.”
“How will I—”
His hand slides between my thighs, and the sentence abandons me entirely. The warmth of him there is its own category of sensation, in a way that my vampire-sharp nerves have absolutely no framework for managing it.
Every touch is too much information.
Every touch is something to withstand rather than receive.
His hand between my thighs is not something I can withstand.
It’s something I fall into.
He’s the same patient, methodical attention he brings to training, to strategy, to everything he decides deserves his full focus, and I am apparently something he has decided deserves his full focus.
My body has incredibly strong and immediate feelings about that.
His fingers move with a certainty that is worse than urgency, that is more than urgency, because urgency I could match and meet and get through.
But this… this slow, specific, devastating knowledge of exactly what he’s doing and exactly why strips away every form of composure I was still pretending to.
“Rogue.” His name comes out wrong… too rough, too much.
“I know.” He doesn’t stop.
I delve my free hand into his shoulder, my nails digging in.
The vampire-sharpened sensitivity that has been a liability for days, that has made every accidental contact a negotiation and every loud sound a small catastrophe, turns out to have a different emotional value entirely when the input is this.
When it’s his warmth and his hands and his specific, unhurried attention.
Every nerve ending I have is reporting at full capacity.
Instead of the overwhelm of too much information arriving with no purpose, there is only this, only him, only the sensation that builds in slow, deliberate increments until I stop having thoughts that are not made of heat.
His mouth finds the curve of my throat, and his hand doesn’t stop.
I make a sound that I categorically do not try to manage. The ceiling of the dark bedroom receives my complete loss of dignity and keeps the secret.
“There,” he says, low, against my pulse. He notes something, the same way he notes things in training, quietly and with attention.
“Don’t,” I manage.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t be…” The thought breaks apart. “Don’t act like you’re…” then the thought dissolves, “… calm,” I finish, considerably later. “Don’t be fucking calm about this.”
“I’m not calm.” His voice has roughened, and his breathing has changed.
The patience is costing him. I can feel it in the tension of his jaw against my temple and the quality of his restraint, the effort it takes, and the knowledge that it costs him is its own thing running through me, another layer of warmth on top of the warmth that’s already building low in my stomach, spreading outward.
“You sound calm,” I tell him.
“Charlie…” My name in his mouth, rough and specific. “Stop talking.”
The sound that replaces my response is not a word, but a fractured moan.
The sensation builds with his attention, steady and deliberate, like there’s no question of where it’s going.
I can feel every individual component of it, vampire-sharpened and specific, the warmth of his palm.
The exact pressure, the rhythm he has found and is maintaining with the same focused patience he brings to everything, and, underneath all of it, the slow-building heat that starts at the base of my spine and radiates forward, outward, turning my thoughts into something non-verbal and my hands into things that grip.
I grip him. His shoulder, his arm, wherever my hands land, and he makes a low sound against my throat.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “Let go.”
And I do.
Not because he told me to.
Because my body has been building toward this since he put his hands on me and has now arrived somewhere it has no interest in departing from.
The sensation that moves through me is full, rolling, and total, a heat that starts where his hand is and breaks open.
The kind of break that leaves me arching against him, the kind that empties my lungs of whatever sound I might have made and leaves only his name.
It spreads outward from the point of contact until it reaches my teeth, my fingertips, the back of my skull.
My vampire-sharp nerves, which have spent weeks making survival miserable, make this extraordinary.
I feel it at a depth no human body is wired to reach, every nerve reporting at full capacity, and I stop being a person with a complex interior life for approximately thirty seconds and become something very simple.
I breathe out his name. “Rogue!”
His hand goes still. His mouth presses to my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my jaw, small and warm and unhurried.
“You were saying?” he murmurs.
“I was building to a very important point,” I inform him, once I’ve located my lungs. “You’ve completely derailed the argument.”
“What was the argument?”
I tip my head back and look at him in the dark, the gold of his eyes, the curve that is almost but not quite a smile at the corner of his mouth. The mate bond hums between us, warm and alive, and something inside me has gone liquid in a way it didn’t know how to do before.
“I’ve forgotten… it’s completely your fault,” I say.
Something shifts in his expression as the smile becomes real. Something in his eyes I’ve been circling for days has finally landed.
His eyes, half-lidded and burning gold in the dark, find mine and hold. “You with me?” he asks, and his voice has gone rough and low, stripped of its usual layers, just the man underneath.
“Extremely with you,” I manage. “Aggressively with you. Don’t stop.”
Something in his expression shifts. “Good,” he says. “Then stop trying to rush me.”
I make a sound of frustration that transitions into something else entirely when he continues what he’s doing, patient and ruinous. I learn that there are worse fates than being thoroughly attended to by someone who has decided that this is worth doing properly.
He lowers me to the bed with hands that know exactly what they’re doing, not demanding, not performing consideration, simply certain, the way he is certain about everything. I pull him down after me because the distance between us has become genuinely intolerable.
He moves over me, settling his weight between my thighs, and lowers his mouth to my collarbone, my sternum, tracing downward.
My fingers curl into his hair and tighten.
When he pauses, his mouth warm against my hip, his eyes lift to mine, asking nothing and offering everything, and I feel my body answer before my mouth does.
My hips lift.
His breath catches.
He comes back up to me slowly, and when his body settles against mine fully, the warmth of him, the weight, the pressure, every point of contact lighting up at vampire-sensitivity, and I stop directing and let the sensation be the entire world.
“Rogue.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know… I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You were about to tell me to stop being careful.”
“I was.” I look up at him. “Stop being careful.”
His eyes, half-lidded and darker than I’ve seen them, hold mine for a moment. The last thread of patience frays. “Careful…” he says, his voice dropping to something rough and specific, “… is the only reason you can still think straight right now. You want me to change that?”
When he finally moves back up to settle over me fully, his chest against mine and his weight a solid, immovable presence that my body registers as exactly right, he pauses with his mouth at my temple and his breath warm against my hair.
“Mine,” he growls, his wolf shining through.
Not a question.
Not a claim requiring my agreement.
Just a fact, carried in a voice that has known it for longer than he’s admitted, the wolf threaded through every syllable.
His thumb drags slowly across my hip—a brand without a burn.
“Yours,” I say back. “Now stop being still.”
He makes a sound that is definitely a laugh, and then his hips pull back, drive forward, and the laugh becomes something else entirely.
So do I. The sound I make is not a word and not a name, just the sharp, undignified noise of my body registering what it’s been wanting for days and getting all of it at once.
His forehead drops to mine. His breath is hot against my mouth.
He stays still for one beat, letting me feel him, letting me adjust, letting the vampire-sharp sensitivity calibrate to this, and then he moves again.
He’s warm everywhere. The heat of him, inside and against me, his chest against mine, his mouth at my temple, his hands framing my hips, warmth at every point of contact, and the weight of him, the solidity, the sense of something immovable choosing to be here, choosing me, settles against something in my chest that has been restless for days and goes quiet.
Not the hunger going quiet.
Something else.
Something older.
His rhythm is unhurried and devastating in exactly equal measure, and I stop managing my responses because managing them would require resources I don’t currently have.
The sounds I make are his, and the sounds he makes are mine, low, roughened, and carrying the quality of the carefulness finally coming down.
His hands tighten at my hips, a grip that would be impossible for anything human, that the vampire in me registers as perfect, exactly right, anchored.
“Look at me.” The command is low, roughened, the wolf present in it. “Charlie… look at me.”
I hadn’t realized my eyes had closed. I open them, find his, and they’re closer than I expected.
“Don’t fold on me now, Harris.” His voice is rough, definitely not gentle.
“I’m not folding,” I grit out. “I’m—”
“I know what you are.” His mouth finds my jaw hard. “Show me.”