Chapter 3
Gemma
Day two starts with commands.
“Don’t cross ahead of me.” “Watch the root on your left.” “Drink water. Not in a mile—now.” “Tighten your hip belt.”
I’ve been doing everything he says since six this morning and by ten AM I’ve stopped parsing it as orders and started experiencing it as something else.
He tells me where to put my feet and my body does it before my brain has caught up.
My brain has stopped trying. I don’t know when that shift happened—somewhere between the third ridge and the creek crossing, where he put his hand on my lower back to guide me around a loose rock and the touch lasted maybe two seconds and I felt it everywhere.
The swimming hole is at the base of a canyon—water so clear the bottom’s visible, walls of grey granite on three sides, a slick flat shelf that runs into it like a dock. Decklan stops at the edge and sets down both packs.
“Rest here,” he says. “The hardest section’s above this.”
I’m sweating and my legs are tired and the water looks incredible. “Can we swim?”
He looks at the hole. “Cold.”
“I know it’s cold. Can we?”
He looks at me. His jaw tightens, then eases—gone before I can name it. “Yeah.”
I drop into a crouch and start unlacing my boots and he’s turned away, looking at the canyon walls, giving me privacy or pretending to.
The air is warmer down here, sheltered, and the water’s dark in the deep middle and shining pale at the edges.
I strip to my sports bra and underwear—practical, not intended to be looked at—and I look up and he’s watching me.
He’s not looking away.
He’s enormous and still and looking at me like there’s nothing else in any direction.
My mouth goes dry.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“Yeah.” No apology. No attempt to recover. He pulls his shirt over his head in one motion and I lose my train of thought completely.
His chest is—there aren’t words for this.
All wide, dense muscle, a line of dark hair down the center of his stomach, forearms corded with it.
The beard makes him look feral and the lack of expression doesn’t help.
He starts unlacing his boots like I’m not staring at him. He doesn’t care that I’m staring.
He steps out of his jeans and I get a second to appreciate the sheer scale of him before he goes into the water in a clean dive and disappears and I’m standing on the rock shelf with my hands at my sides trying to remember what century we’re in.
He surfaces. Pushes his hair back. Looks up at me.
“Cold?” I ask.
“No.”
I jump in.
It is very cold. I come up gasping and he’s right there—close, huge, the water beading on his shoulders.
“Okay, you were right, it’s cold.” “I know.” I grab his arm because I’m treading water and his arm is just there.
He’s not moving at all. He doesn’t need to tread.
He stands in the deep part and I hold his forearm with both hands.
“Put your feet down,” he says.
I feel for the bottom. I can touch it on my toes. “Better.”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s looking at my face. The water comes up to my collarbone and his to the middle of his chest and the canyon walls rise on both sides of us and the whole world has gone completely quiet.
“Decklan.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what.”
“Like you’re deciding something.”
“I decided it yesterday,” he says. “At the trailhead. I’ve been arguing with myself since.”
My heart is going too fast for cold water. “What did you decide?”
He reaches out. One hand cups my jaw, thumb at my cheekbone, and he tips my face up and kisses me.
Not gentle. Not questioning. His mouth comes down on mine with a day of waiting in it, and his hand moves from my jaw to the back of my head and I stop touching the bottom. I just hold on to him, both hands at his shoulders, and let him.
He breaks it. Not far—inches. “Tell me to stop,” he says.
“No.”
“You know what I’m asking.”
“I know what you’re asking. No.” I pull him back down and he makes a sound against my mouth, low and caught, like something he didn’t mean to let out.
He lifts me out of the water. Just—picks me up, my legs wrapping around him, and walks us to the flat rock ledge at the water’s edge.
He sets me on it and I’m sitting at his shoulder height and he’s standing in the shallows with his hands at my hips and looking at me like I’m something he’s been waiting to be allowed to touch.
“Can I?” His voice is lower than it’s been all day.
“Yes.” I don’t ask for what. Both of us already know.
He peels the wet sports bra up over my head and drops it on the rock. Then he hooks his fingers in my underwear and draws them down. I help get them off. His hands are on my inner thighs, easing them apart. He dips his head.
His mouth on me is nothing like I expected—deliberate, thorough, no rush.
His tongue parts my pussy slow and then his lips close around my clit and he sucks and I grab the back of his head with both hands because I need something to hold onto.
He keeps that pressure—soft, insistent—and then his tongue drags down, circles, pushes inside me, and I make a sound that bounces off the canyon walls and I’d be embarrassed but I can’t.
“Decklan—”
“I’ve got you.” He says it against me. Vibration. Then, low: “Good girl. Stay with me.”
I stop making words.
He takes me apart like he’s got the rest of the day and nowhere to be.
His tongue at my clit, then inside me, then back—a rhythm that builds and builds and every time I get close he eases back just enough to keep me from going over.
I’m shaking. My thighs are shaking. He’s got his forearm across my hips pinning me and he is absolutely in control of this and it is the most maddening and devastating thing that has ever happened to me.
“Please,” I manage.
He flicks his tongue fast and precise and I come apart with my hands in his hair and my voice ringing off the rock.
He doesn’t stop. He eases me through it. When I’m loose and breathing he lifts his head and looks at me. My face is probably undone, and he doesn’t look sorry at all.
“More,” he says. It’s not a question.
“Yes,” I say. “God, yes.”
He reaches back and strips his underwear off in the water and then he’s standing there, reaching for me, and I see him for the first time.
His cock is—God. I can’t look away. The size of him wipes out every assumption I had. He is enormous. Long and thick and already hard and I stare at him like I’ve never seen one before. I’ve never seen one like this.
“I’ll go slow,” he says.
“I believe you,” I say. “Keep that promise.”
He picks me up again—lifts me clean off the rock, my legs around his waist—and walks us to the wall of the canyon where the shelf is wide and dry.
He sets me on my feet on my sleeping pad, which is already spread out there, and I don’t ask when he did that, because he set the packs down on this exact shelf before either of us got wet and I did not once see him take his eyes off the canyon wall.
He was planning this before I got my boots off. I find that unreasonably good to hear.
Then he says, “On your knees.”
He’s given me a dozen orders in that exact voice in two days.
“Step where I step. Drink water now. Stay behind me on the switchback.” I’ve done every one of them without thinking about it.
I’m down on the pad with my palms flat on warm rock before it registers that this one has nothing to do with the mountain.
I look back at him over my shoulder.
“Yeah,” he says. “You heard me.”
“I’m already down here.”
“I noticed.” He goes to his knees behind me. His hand comes down my spine, and he’s so much bigger than me that his palm covers me shoulder blade to shoulder blade. “You’ve been doing what I tell you since the trailhead.”
“You’ve been telling me useful things.”
“This is useful.” Both hands now, unhurried—over my ass, my waist, the outsides of my thighs and back up, like he’s been planning this exact route for two days.
My skin is still cold from the water. His hands are so hot it makes me shake.
His knuckles are dark with hair against my brown, and I want to look at that forever. “Look at you.”
“Decklan.”
“I’ve been walking behind you for two days on purpose.”
I laugh. It comes out wrecked. “You have not.”
“Every switchback.” He bends over me. His beard drags across my shoulder. “The sun on your back. Your hips. You talking the whole way up and me two feet behind you with my hands full of my own straps so they’d have somewhere to be.”
“That’s—” I lose the sentence.
“Yeah.” He puts one hand flat between my shoulder blades and presses me down until my forearms are on the pad, and he does it the way he moves everything, like the object gets no say. “Down.”
I go down.
“Good girl.”
He lines up. The head of his cock drags through how slick I am, and I make a noise I’ve never made before.
“Breathe,” he says.
I breathe.
He pushes in and he doesn’t stop.
It’s one long unbroken shove and it takes everything I have. He’s enormous. I knew that looking at his cock. I know it differently now, with my body opening around him whether I’m ready or not. I’m making sounds into my own forearm. He doesn’t slow down. I don’t want him to.
“Take it,” he says. Rough. Nothing careful left in him. “You can take it. You’re taking it right now.”
“Oh my?—”
“All of it.” His hands close over my hips and hold me exactly where he put me. “That’s it. That’s all of me.”
He’s seated. I can feel his cock in my stomach. I can feel my own pulse beating around him.
“Decklan—”
“I know.” His mouth is at my ear now, and he isn’t steady either. “I know. Hold on.”
Then he moves.
He is not gentle, and it takes about four strokes to find out I never wanted him to be.
The canyon walls stand close on three sides and every sound I make comes straight back at me doubled, and I quit trying to be quiet somewhere in the first minute.
One of his hands fists in my hair. The other clamps on my hip.
He sets a pace I couldn’t slow down if I begged. I don’t beg. I push back into him.
“There she is,” he says.
“More—”
“You’re so slick for me.” He drags almost all the way out and drives back in, and I go up onto my hands. “You were ready before we hit the water.”
“I was ready for you at the parking lot.”
“Yeah.” Another stroke, deeper. “So was I.”
He changes the angle and finds something that whites out the edges of my vision. I say his name. Then a lot of things that stop being words.
“I’m going to fill you up.” His rhythm breaks its own pattern, faster, less controlled. “Going to give you everything. You’re going to walk out of these mountains full of me.”
“Yes—”
“Say it.” He drives in deep and holds there, buried, both of us shaking. “Say you want it.”
“I want it. I want everything you’ve got. Please, Decklan?—”
He moves and I lose my grip on language completely. It builds fast and hard and mean. I come with my face against my own arm, clenching around his cock, and he does not stop and he does not slow.
He’s still going. Still that deep. Harder.
And then he changes.
It hits me before I understand it—a swelling at the base of his cock, pressing against where I’m already stretched past anything I’ve taken before. Growing. Thickening. Catching at me on every stroke and dragging.
“Wait—” My hands scrabble at the pad. “What—what is?—”
“That’s my knot.” His voice is at my ear, low and completely steady, and he doesn’t stop moving. “You’re going to take it. Hold still.”
I hold still.
He works it into me in short insistent strokes and the stretch of it is enormous and I have no control over the sound I’m making. Then it seats. It locks. I can’t move at all.
“There,” he says. “That’s it. You’ve got it.”
“That’s your—” I can’t turn around. I’m bent over on a rock shelf in a canyon, locked around something no man is supposed to have, and I can’t get far enough to see his face. “Decklan. What was that.”
He’s quiet for a second. His hand comes up and spreads over my belly and holds me back against him.
“Wolf,” he says. “I’m a wolf shifter. I should have—” He stops. His jaw sets against my shoulder. “I should have told you before.”
The knot swells again and I make a helpless noise and his arm tightens.
“A wolf shifter,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Your knot.”
“Yeah. It comes up before I do, when it’s my mate. When my wolf knows—” He’s holding very still behind me, braced for me to run, and there is nowhere on this earth I could run to. “I can explain everything. After.”
I get all of it at once. The pressure. The fullness. His forearm across my hips. The canyon. The echo off the water.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay.”
“You’re going to have to keep going, though.” I push back against him as much as the knot allows, which is not at all, which is the point. “Because I’m not done.”
He makes a sound against the back of my neck that isn’t a word.
Then he starts to move—small rocking pulses that work with the knot instead of against it, and every one of them drags over something that takes my arms out from under me. I go down onto my forearms. He follows me down and covers me completely.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
“I know.” I mean it. I’ve known since the parking lot. I don’t tell him that yet.
He comes with a low, broken sound torn out of him, and he fills me, his cum flooding hot and deep as the knot locks harder. I’m gripping the edge of the pad with everything I have, and I’m crying. I don’t know when that started.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey. Are you?—”
“I’m fine.” I’m actually fine. “That was—I’m fine.”
He’s still buried inside me, still knotted. He gets an arm under me and turns us onto our sides, careful about it, and the knot shifts and I make a sharp sound and he goes still immediately. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” I settle back against his chest. “Don’t move. Just—don’t move.”
“I can’t,” he says, which is true, which is actually very clarifying.
We’re locked together in a canyon in the northern Rockies, and somewhere below us a creek is running. He wraps both arms around me, and I can feel his heartbeat at my back—fast, like mine. I wait for panic. Panic doesn’t arrive.
I’m warm and full and exactly where I want to be.
“Wolf shifter,” I say again.
“Yeah.” A pause. “You’re not running.”
“I can’t run. We’re knotted.”
His chest moves against my back. Not a sound exactly. “When we’re not,” he says.
I think about it. I think about the parking lot and the creek crossing and his hand on my lower back and the food at camp that I could eat for the rest of my life and the way he listened to every word I said all day like it all mattered.
“I’m not going to run,” I tell him.
He doesn’t answer with words. His arms tighten, just slightly. His chin drops to the top of my head.
In the canyon, the creek keeps moving. The knot holds. I stay.