Chapter 4
Decklan
The knot releases after half an hour.
She’s half-asleep against my chest when it does, and when she feels the shift she goes still. “Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.” I ease back, careful. She hisses softly and I stop.
“No—keep going. I want to see.”
I pull free. She’s watching me over her shoulder, chin tipped down, eyes heavy. She looks—she looks like mine. She smells like mine. My scent worked into her skin from half an hour pressed against each other, and my wolf comes up so hard I have to breathe through it.
Not done. Not close to done.
Three years of nothing and then this and my wolf doesn’t know how to make it slow.
“Decklan.” She’s watching my face.
“I need a minute.”
“Why?”
“Because if I don’t take a minute I’m going to?—”
“I know,” she says. She rolls over and looks up at me and says, “I’m telling you it’s okay.”
“You should sleep.”
“I’m awake.” She lays her palm over my heart, fingers spread, the warmth of it soaking straight through. “Tell me what you need.”
I have spent three years not asking anyone for anything. The words don’t come easy. “You,” I say. It comes out rough. “All of you. For—I don’t know how long this lasts when it’s been compressed.”
“What’s been compressed?”
“Rut.” I sit back on my heels. “Wolf thing. When a male finds his mate—when it’s been suppressed—it releases all at once.”
“Okay. And that means what, exactly.”
“It means days.” I make myself say the rest, because she should have it before she decides anything.
“It means I’m going to want you constantly and I’m not going to get better at hiding it.
I need you to understand what’s happening to me.
It’s two days back to the trailhead and I will walk you out every step of it if you say the word. Before it gets worse.”
She takes her time with that one. Out here I can hear her heartbeat change, and it doesn’t.
“Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Then stop offering.” She sits up. She’s wrecked and unafraid and there’s rock dust on one shoulder. “Show me what you need.”
I pick her up. She goes willingly, legs wrapping around me like she’s done it a hundred times.
Then I put her down long enough to get us both into dry clothes—she’s shivering and hasn’t noticed—and I shoulder both packs and carry her up to the flat ground above the canyon and put the tent up one-handed while she watches.
I don’t slow down about it. She doesn’t say anything about how fast I’m working.
We go inside. The sun is still up through the wall, and I don’t care.
She’s out of those clothes before I’ve got the door zipped. She reaches for me and I catch her wrist.
“Not yet.”
“Decklan—”
“Up here.” I lie back and pull her up the length of my body by the backs of her thighs, and she gets as far as my chest before she works out what I’m asking for.
She goes rigid. “No.”
“Yeah.”
“Absolutely not. I’ll suffocate you. I’ll break your nose. I weigh?—”
“I know exactly what you weigh.” I carried her and two packs up a hundred feet of loose rock forty minutes ago. “Come here.”
“Decklan, I’m serious, I’m not a small?—”
“I know what you are.” I get both hands over the tops of her thighs and pull her down onto my mouth, and whatever she was going to say next comes out as a noise instead.
She’s still cold from the canyon everywhere except here.
I take my time. I part her pussy with my tongue and go slow, one long pass, and her thighs jump against my ears.
I do it again. I find her clit and work it with the flat of my tongue until she stops holding herself off me, and the second she lets her weight down I make a sound into her that she feels, because I have wanted her sitting on my face since she got out of that rental car and started narrating her own pack.
“Oh my God?—”
I get an arm across her hips and hold her there. She can rock. She can’t leave.
“That’s—” Her voice climbs. “Decklan, I’m going to?—”
I suck her clit and she does.
She comes on my mouth with both hands fisted in my hair, and I don’t stop, and I don’t let her lift off, and she takes a second one out of it about a minute later that surprises both of us.
Her thighs are shaking on either side of my head.
Her slick is all over my beard. My cock is so hard it’s a problem I’ll deal with later.
She slides off me sideways and collapses. “You are—” She’s out of air. “That was—okay.”
“Say it.”
“That was the single best thing that has ever happened to me and I have been to Italy.”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “You fought me.”
“I’ve had opinions about my thighs since I was twelve, Decklan, it’s not personal?—”
“It’s personal to me.” I roll and put her under me and take her face in one hand so she has to look at me. “You’re going to do that again tomorrow. And the day after.”
She stares up at me. Then she laughs, that big loud sound, in a two-person tent, at eight thousand feet.
“Okay,” she says.
I push into her.
Her pussy is soaked and open and I don’t have anything careful left in me, which is fine, because the canyon used up the last of it.
She takes all of me on one stroke and arches off the pad.
I fill her deep and fast. Her hands clutch the sleeping bag.
She meets every thrust, pushing up into me, taking everything and asking for more.
“God.” She grabs my shoulder. “You’re so—Decklan?—”
“I know.” I get a hand under her lower back and tilt her up into it and she loses the rest of the sentence. My other hand spreads over her belly, over the soft of her, and I hold her there and watch what I’m doing to her.
“More—”
“You’ve got all of me.” I grip her hips tighter. “Every bit of it. You’re going to take all of me and when I’m done you’re going to drip with it for the rest of the night.”
She makes a sound I feel in the base of my spine.
I put my mouth against the side of her throat. “You feel that?” My rhythm doesn’t break. “That’s three years of telling myself I was fine.”
“Yes—” She pushes up hard into me. “Yes, Decklan?—”
“Say my name again.”
“Decklan—”
“Again.” I drive deeper. “Don’t stop saying it.”
I get a hand down between us and find her clit. She comes fast and hard, clenching around me. I push through it—keep her there, keep her going—and she’s shaking by the time I follow her over.
I fill her, cum flooding out of me. The knot locks hard and fast, faster than the canyon, the rut running the cycle down.
I get an arm under her back and take us both over onto our sides before it seats, because half an hour is a long time to hold myself off her.
She’s loose and shivering and her heart is going like she ran here.
I press my mouth to her throat and breathe her in.
“You okay?” My voice isn’t working right.
“I’m outstanding,” she says, without air. “I’m doing the best I’ve ever done.”
I laugh. Out loud, into her hair. I didn’t know I had a sense of humor left and apparently she’s just going to keep finding it.
We separate when the knot releases. She’s breathing hard, warm all the way through, dark curls damp at the temples and spread everywhere. She looks up at the tent ceiling. “So. Wolves.”
“Yeah.”
“You could have led with that.”
“Most people panic.”
“I’m not most people.”
“I’m aware.” I meant it. I knew it at the trailhead.
She got out of a car and fixed her own pack and told me she’d watched videos and didn’t panic once on the steepest section of the ascent and I was gone, I was completely gone, before I’d even found out what her voice sounded like at a sustained volume.
She rolls over and faces me in the tight space of the tent. Her eyes are heavy and satisfied, already thinking about the next round.
“The rut,” she says. “Is it going to be like this the whole time?”
“Probably.”
“How long does it last?”
“Days. Maybe shorter since—” I stop.
“Since you’re not alone anymore,” she finishes.
“Yeah.”
She considers this with a focused expression I’m starting to recognize—the planning face, the one she gets when she’s working something out. It’s just how her mind moves. “We’re still two days from the trailhead.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll need?—”
“I’ll be able to manage the trail,” I say. “It’s manageable when I know—” I stop again.
“When you know you’re coming back to me,” she says. Like she’s just noting a fact.
My wolf goes completely still.
“Yeah,” I say. “When I know that.”
She looks at me. I look back. Neither of us says anything for a long moment.
“Okay,” she says. “Then we’re fine.”
I can’t make sense of how easy she says it.
I’ve been bracing since the canyon for her to reckon with the full reality of what I am—shifter, rut, knot, the permanence of the mate bond—and she just. Adjusts.
Takes it in and moves forward. Same as she moved up the trail.
Same as she fixed the pack strap herself in the parking lot before I’d figured out how to be near her.
“You’re not worried,” I say.
“About you?” She tilts her head. “No.”
“About—” I search for the right words. I don’t have many of them and the rut makes it worse. “All of this. What it means.”
“I’m an event planner,” she says. It comes out like a non sequitur.
She reads my face and her mouth curves. “I mean—my whole job is walking into situations where nothing is settled and figuring out how to make it work. Vendor cancels at midnight. Venue floods three hours out. Keynote speaker loses their luggage in Dubai.” She touches my jaw, lightly, two fingers.
“This is the most settled I’ve felt in two years. ”
I look at her. This woman who just had her entire understanding of reality revised and is talking about venue floods and lost keynotes.
I cup the back of her neck. Pull her up and kiss her. She makes a soft sound into it and moves against me. The rut flares immediately. She laughs against my mouth—that big loud laugh, in a two-person tent in the backcountry—and I don’t care, I don’t care if the whole mountain hears it.
“Again,” she says.
“I told you it would be days.”
“I’m not complaining.” She pulls me down. “I’m confirming.”