Rafe
She was in his lap with her hands in his hair and the taste of her mouth on his tongue and his wolf was screaming.
Everything about her was heat. Her thighs gripping his hips, her weight shifting against him as she rocked forward, her fingers pulling at his hair with a roughness that went straight to his cock.
He was hard against her, straining through the denim, and every time she ground down against him the friction blurred his thinking by another degree.
He kissed her neck. Her collarbone. Found the spot below her ear that made her gasp and hips buck involuntarily, and the sound she made was enough to nearly end the conversation before it started.
His hands were on her waist, his thumbs pressing against the bare skin where her shirt had ridden up, and the warmth of her under his palms was making it very difficult to do the thing he knew he had to do.
He pulled back. She made a sound of protest that almost broke him.
"Wait," he said. "Isla. Wait."
"If you tell me to stop I won’t just push you into this lake."
"I'm not telling you to stop." He held her face in both hands.
Her eyes were dark, pupils blown, her lips swollen from kissing.
The starlight caught the silver in her hair.
She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
His wolf was howling at him to stop talking, to take her, but he needed thirty seconds of coherent thought before that happened. "I need to tell you something first."
"You already told me you loved me."
"This is different." He kept his hands on her face. Steady. Holding her eyes. "If we do this tonight, I need you to know what I am and what I'll want. Because my wolf is closer to the surface than it's ever been with you and if I don't say this now, I won't be able to say it later."
She went still in his lap. Her hands stayed in his hair but her grip softened. She was listening.
"The mating mark," he said. "I told you about it at your kitchen table.
Recognition doesn't equal bond. The bond only exists when both people choose it.
When it happens, it happens during intimacy.
A bite, placed here." He touched the curve where her neck met her shoulder, his fingers tracing the skin so lightly she shivered.
"It carries my essence into your blood. Once it's done, the connection is permanent.
You feel what I feel. My presence, my emotional state, a pull toward me when we're apart.
It goes both ways. I'd carry you the same. "
"And it can't be undone."
"No."
"You're asking my permission."
"I'm asking you to understand what it means before you give it. Because once I'm inside you with my wolf this close to the surface, I may not have the control to hold back. I need your yes now, clear, before we go further. Or I need your no and I'll hold the wolf down if it kills me."
Her hands moved from his hair to his jaw. She held his face the way he was holding hers.
"Yes, Rafe."
"You're sure."
"I've never been more sure of anything." She kissed him. Soft. Brief. Her lips barely touching his. "Mark me."
His wolf surged so hard his vision went gold at the edges.
He pulled her shirt over her head and she helped, arms up, the fabric clearing and dropping somewhere on the rock behind her.
Her bra followed, her fingers quick on the clasp, and then she was bare from the waist up in the starlight, her skin luminous, her breasts rising with each breath.
He put his mouth on her. Kissed the curve of one breast, then the other, his tongue tracing the underside while his hand cupped the weight of her.
Her nipple hardened against his lips and he drew it into his mouth, sucking, grazing with his teeth until her back arched and her hips rolled against him hard enough that he groaned against her skin.
She worked his jacket off his shoulders. Pulled his shirt up. He broke contact with her long enough to yank it over his head, and when their bare chests pressed together the skin-on-skin contact was electric, her warmth against his, her heartbeat rapid where her breast flattened against his chest.
She reached between them. Got his belt open, his zipper down, her hand inside his jeans.
When her fingers wrapped around him, firm, knowing, he dropped his head to her shoulder and let the groan roll through him.
She stroked him, her grip tight, her thumb sweeping over the head on each upstroke, spreading the wetness that was already there.
"I need you," she said against his ear. "Right here. Right now."
He lifted her. She rose on her knees while he shoved his jeans down far enough to free himself, then worked her pants and underwear down one leg while she kicked them off the other.
It was ungraceful, the mechanics of two people who couldn't wait long enough to do this properly.
She settled back onto his lap, bare, the cool night air on her skin, and when she sank down against him, the slick heat of her pressed along his length, he had to lock every muscle in his body to keep from thrusting up into her.
She was soaked. He could feel it, the wet heat of her coating him where their bodies pressed together, and the knowledge that her body wanted him this badly, that she was this ready for him, made him as hard as a rock.
She reached between them. Guided him to her entrance. Their eyes met.
"Yes," she said again and sank onto him.
Slowly. Inch by inch, her body opening around him, the tight wet grip of her pulling him deeper.
He watched her face as she took him, her lips parted, her brow furrowed in that expression that lived between pleasure and the effort of accommodating him.
When she bottomed out, his full length buried inside her, she exhaled a shaking breath and he felt her pulse around him, her body adjusting, accepting.
He held her hips. Held still. Let her set the pace.
Slow at first. Rising and falling in his lap, her hands braced on his shoulders, her thighs flexing with each lift.
The angle was deep, deeper than the bed, deeper than the counter, gravity pulling her down onto him with each stroke until he felt himself hitting the end of her.
She gasped every time he bottomed out, a sharp, breathy sound that went through him like current.
He kissed her throat. Tasted the salt on her skin, the faint trace of lake water, the particular scent that was hers alone.
His hands gripped her hips tighter, guiding her rhythm, pulling her down onto him harder.
She responded, her pace increasing, her breath coming faster, her nails digging into his shoulders.
"Rafe." His name broken in half. "God, right there."
He adjusted his grip. Tilted her hips forward by a fraction.
The next stroke hit the spot that made her clench around him so tight his vision narrowed.
She cried out, loud, the sound carrying across the still lake, and he did it again, angling his hips to hit the same place, grinding upward at the end of each thrust.
She was getting close. It was in the way her body tightened incrementally, her walls fluttering around him, her thighs shaking where they gripped his waist. Her movements had gone from controlled to desperate, her hips rolling in tight circles, chasing the friction, chasing the release.
His wolf was right there. At the surface, pressing against his skin, patient the way a predator is patient when it knows the moment is coming.
He felt the claiming instinct building in his chest, the need to mark, to bite, to seal the bond, growing stronger with every stroke, every sound she made, every pulse of her body around his.
"Look at me," he said.
She lifted her head. Her eyes were blown dark, her mouth open, her face flushed. She was beautiful, wrecked, completely his.
"When you come," he said, his voice barely holding together, "I'm going to mark you. You'll feel my teeth. You'll feel the bond. It won't be gentle."
"I don't want gentle."
He drove up into her. Hard. She screamed.
Her whole body locked around him, her head thrown back, her throat bared, and the orgasm hit her in a wave that clenched around his cock so tight he felt it in his spine.
She was shaking, convulsing, her release flooding over him, hot, soaking them both where they were joined.
She said his name, over and over, each repetition more broken than the last, and the sound of it shattered the last wall he'd been holding.
He came. The orgasm tore through him from the base of his spine outward, detonating through his entire body with a force that stole his breath.
He slammed up into her one final time, buried to the root, and at the peak of it, with her body still convulsing around him, her throat bared, her pulse hammering under the skin where her neck met her shoulder, he bit down.
His teeth broke skin. The precision of it was instinct older than language, his wolf guiding the placement with a certainty his human mind couldn't have matched.
The taste of her blood was copper and rain and that silver frequency that was hers alone.
The bite carried everything he was, his wolf, his essence, his devotion, through the wound and into her bloodstream.
The bond locked into place.
It was like the world split open and reassembled with a second pulse inside it.
Hers. Her heartbeat felt as if it were running parallel to his own, synced, steady, intimate in a way that went beyond skin or proximity.
Her pleasure still rippling through her body registered in his chest as warmth.
Her exhaustion echoed in his muscles. Every emotion she carried, the fierce satisfaction, the lingering grief she hadn't finished processing, the stubborn, brilliant love she'd declared on this rock under these stars, flowed through the channel between them with a clarity that knocked the air out of his lungs.
She gasped as her hand flew to the bite, fingers pressing against the broken skin. He felt her feel it. The bond. His heartbeat in her blood. His presence settling into her awareness like a frequency she'd been tuned to her whole life without ever having a name for it.
"Oh," she whispered. Then, softer. "Oh."
He was still inside her. Still pulsing. His forehead dropped to her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her, his breathing ragged.
Through the bond he sensed her processing what had just happened, the new channel of awareness opening between them, his emotional state flowing into hers, hers into his.
The feedback loop was staggering. He felt her feel him feeling her, a mirror held to a mirror, infinite and intimate.
"That's what the bond feels like," she said after a long silence. Her voice was raw, muffled against his neck.
He laughed. It shook both of them, her body vibrating against his, and she lifted her head to look at him. Her eyes were different now. Still blue-gray, still sharp, still hers. But behind them was something else. The particular glow of a woman who'd made a choice she was at peace with.
"I can feel you," she said. She pressed her palm flat against his chest. "Your heartbeat. Not just through my hand. Inside me."
"Goes both ways." He covered her hand with his. "I can feel everything. Your exhaustion. Your satisfaction." He paused. "Your hunger."
"Don't start."
"When did you last eat?"
"That is not a romantic post-bonding question."
"I'm your mate. Feeding you is part of the job description."
Her mouth twitched. The almost-smile became a real one, slow and warm, spreading across her face in the starlight. She leaned forward and kissed him, gentle this time, her lips soft on his, her hand still flat on his chest over his heart.
Through the bond, he felt her feel him feeling that kiss. The warmth of it. The rightness. The particular relief of a man who'd spent fifteen years on the water believing the river was enough, only to find out the river had been taking him somewhere all along.
She pulled back and looked at him with those changed eyes. "Take me home."
He gathered her against him. She wrapped around him the way she always did, legs locked, arms tight.
He stood, and the fact that they were both half-naked on a rock by a lake in the middle of the night with a fresh mating mark bleeding on her neck and his seed still warm between her thighs was the most absurdly, perfectly real thing that had ever happened to him.