Lark
THIRTY-ONE
He kissed her neck. Her collarbone. The hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse hammered.
Each kiss precise, reverent, placed with the focus of someone whose life was built on knowing the value of what he held.
His mouth was hot. His hands tracked the curve of her waist, her hips, learning her, and from deep in his ribcage came a continuous, low hum she could feel through her skin.
The private sound of a lion who had found the thing his entire body was oriented toward.
She pulled his shirt over his head. The claw rake from the night before—three shallow lines across his left shoulder, already healing at a speed that was distinctly not human—caught the light. She touched them. His breath hissed.
“Does it hurt?”
“No. It—” His jaw worked. “It’s sensitive. The healing is—” Another hiss as her fingers traced the edges. “You’re not helping.”
“I’m not trying to help. I’m investigating.” She kissed the uppermost line. His hips jerked involuntarily. “Your body heals from lion fights in twenty-four hours. My brain is making notes.”
“Your brain is making notes. During this.”
“My brain is always making notes. You should know this by now.” She kissed the second line. “Note one: the healing rate is remarkable. Note two: the scar tissue is sensitive to touch.” She kissed the third. “Note three: you made a sound when I did that and I intend to hear it again.”
He responded by removing her shirt with an efficiency that suggested he’d been thinking about this specific sequence of events with a level of planning he normally reserved for quarterly acquisitions.
Her bra followed. His hands found her bare skin and stilled—fingers spread across her ribcage, palms absorbing the heat of her, and the focus in his face deepened into worship.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m studying.” His voice was low, wrecked, barely recognizable. His thumbs traced the undersides of her breasts—slow, testing, watching her reaction with the concentration of an expert learning a new medium. She arched into the touch and his pupils blew wide and the blue disappeared into black.
He bent his head. His mouth found her breast and she gasped—embarrassingly loud—and his hair brushed her skin and stood on end at every point of contact, each golden strand reaching toward her like a separate, sentient expression of want.
His tongue was hot and slow and methodical, circling, tasting, and when he sealed his mouth over her nipple and sucked, the hum in his chest deepened until she could feel it through her own body, through the bed, through the base of her spine.
“Rune—”
He switched to the other breast. Same thorough care. Same unhurried pace that was making her hands shake and her hips roll and her vocabulary shrink to his name and a series of sounds that she would deny making if questioned later.
His mouth traveled lower. Kisses along her stomach, her hip bones, his hands moving ahead of his mouth to unfasten her trousers and slide them down her legs with the same focused efficiency he’d applied to every step—as if undressing her was a process he intended to execute flawlessly.
Her underwear followed. He paused. Knelt between her legs on the too-neat bed and looked at her—all of her—and the expression on his face was naked hunger held at bay by a reverence that made her breath catch, because no one had ever looked at her like she was the answer to a question they’d spent their whole life asking.
“You’re staring again.”
“I’ll be staring for the rest of my life.”
Oh. That wasn’t fair. That was a weapon deployed without warning and she had no defense against sincerity from a man who didn’t know how to be anything else.
He lowered his mouth to her inner thigh and bit—gently, a scrape of teeth that made her gasp—then kissed the spot.
Moved higher. His breath was hot against her skin, each exhale a pulse she could track, and when he finally put his mouth on her, she grabbed the sheets with one hand and his hair with the other and his entire scalp rose under her grip and he groaned against her—deep, primal—and the sensation traveled through every nerve ending she had.
He was thorough. She’d expected that. He brought the same obsessive focus to this that he brought to everything he valued—methodical, patient, lethally precise with his tongue.
He read her reactions like data, adjusting his technique based on what drew the sharpest response, noting (because he was a collector of details too, she realized, they were both compulsive organizers, they were both impossible) each sound she made.
When she tugged his hair harder, he growled and the intensity almost finished her.
When she said his name, he responded by sliding two fingers inside her and curling them and she stopped being able to form words in any language.
She came with her fingers tangled in his mane and his mouth still on her, the orgasm rolling through her body in waves that made her thighs shake and her back arch off the mattress and his hair rise in a full golden halo as if her pleasure was a current running through them both.
He stayed with her through it—tongue gentling, hands steadying her hips, the hum in his body dropping lower until she could feel it in her bones.
When she could think again, she pulled him up by his hair.
“Take off your pants.”
He complied. Standing beside the bed, stripping with an efficiency that suggested he’d been given an instruction and the instruction was time-sensitive.
She watched. She’d seen him naked on a SoHo sidewalk—she’d been too shocked to appreciate the view.
She appreciated it now. Six-three of supernatural muscle, golden skin, the proportions of a Renaissance sculpture that some ambitious artist had decided to make anatomically generous.
“Note four,” she managed. “Proportional.”
“You’re making notes. Still.”
“You’re a lion shifter who looks like Michelangelo’s David had a growth spurt. I am absolutely making notes.”
He dropped over her. His body covered hers—the weight and heat of him over her, bearing her down into the mattress, his hips between her thighs, and the contact was electric.
All of him against all of her, skin to skin, nothing between them.
She wrapped her legs around him and his forehead dropped to hers and his breathing was ragged and the hum was everywhere—in his hands, in his ribcage, in the hair that framed both their faces.
“Lark.”
“I’m here.”
“I need—” His hips moved. The first press of him against her entrance and they both went still. His arms trembled. His eyes held a sheen that wasn’t entirely human—the lion so close she could see both of them looking at her through the same face. His voice was barely audible. “I need you to know—”
“I know.” She pulled him closer. Tilted her hips. “I know.”
He pushed inside her.
Slow. The restraint it took was visible in every locked muscle—his arms shaking, his teeth clenched, his hair standing vertical, giving her time to adjust because he was not small and the stretch was significant and she half-gasped, half-laughed because of course the Lion King of Scandinavia was built like this, of course even this was an exercise in excess.
“You’re laughing.”
“I’m—” She shifted her hips. He slid deeper and the laugh became a moan. “I’m adjusting to the full scope of the situation.”
“The full scope.” His voice was shattered glass, bound by willpower alone.
“The scope is considerable, Your Majesty.”
The name undid him. He kissed her—hard, open, claiming—and began to move.
Not gentle. Not cautious. The restraint burned off like fog under direct sun and what replaced it was need—the focused, consuming need of an alpha whose mate was beneath him, around him, saying his name in a voice that kept breaking.
His hips drove forward in deep, measured strokes that hit a spot inside her that made the Manhattan skyline blur.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. Her nails raked his shoulders and a sound tore from his throat—raw, predatory, the kind that traveled through his body and into hers at every point of contact.
The pace built. His strokes deepened, angled, each one finding and returning to the places that drew the sharpest sound from her throat.
She gripped his hair and the lion broke through—his eyes flashing reflective in the dark, and for a stuttering, breathless moment, she was looking at a man and an animal and the line between them was a distinction that meant nothing because both of them wanted the same thing, both of them were moving toward the same edge, both of them were hers.
“Rune—I’m—”
His mouth found the curve of her neck. His teeth scraped—not the claiming bite, not yet, but the echo of it. The promise. His voice against her throat: “Let go.”
She did. The orgasm crashed through her and she cried out and her body clenched around him and his control—the last filament of it, the gossamer thread he’d been holding since the fourth stage—snapped.
He drove into her once, twice, his rhythm shattering, his face buried against her neck, and when he came, he said her name—torn from a place deeper than language, his hair risen and humming against her cheek, his arms locked around her as if letting go was a physical impossibility his body wouldn’t permit.
Something shifted in his body. The intensity drained into a deep, rolling hum—like a bass note sustaining long after the chord resolved. She could sense it everywhere they touched. In her skin. In her bones. In the golden strands of his hair pressed against her face.
The silence after was the loudest thing she’d ever heard.
They lay on his sheets in the wreckage of clothes and reserve, his head on her chest, her fingers in his hair.
The Manhattan skyline glittered through the uncurtained windows.
The summer night pulsed against the glass.
His breathing had slowed from ragged to deep, and his body—the impossible, supernatural, recently-a-lion body—was heavy against hers in a way that was less weight and more anchor.
She’d tracked the lifts. The stands. The involuntary rises.
This was different. Beneath her fingers, the golden strands were vibrating.
Not the agitated rise-and-fall of arousal or the bristling of threat.
A steady, quiet hum that she could sense through her fingertips, consistent and soothing, like the idle of an engine settling after a long drive.
“Your hair is vibrating.”
His voice came from somewhere in the vicinity of her collarbone, muffled and wrecked. “That’s a feline response to sustained physical—”
“Your hair is purring.”
“Hair does not purr.”
“Rune.” She ran her fingers through it, slowly. The vibration intensified. “Your hair is literally vibrating with a steady rhythmic frequency that is indistinguishable from a purr.”
“Lions don’t purr. That is a biological impossibility. What you’re experiencing is a post-shift autonomic—”
“Your hair is purring because you’re happy.”
A long silence. The vibration continued. His arms tightened around her.
“Maybe.”
She kissed the top of his head. His hair hummed against her lips.
“I’m adding this to the taxonomy. Category: Lion Tells, Previously Unclassified. Subcategory: post-coital purring.”
“I am formally requesting that you never use the phrase ‘post-coital purring’ in any context again.”
“Denied.” She stroked his hair. Watched it rise and settle under her touch like a living thing. Which, she supposed, it was. “Your Majesty.”
The nickname. He lifted his head. Looked at her.
His hair was a disaster—standing in every direction, humming, post-sex chaos that made the normally immaculate Lion King of Scandinavia look like he’d lost a fight with a wind tunnel.
His eyes were blue and open and unguarded in a way she’d never seen—the king gone, the alpha receded, just a man with nothing left to perform.
“Say it again.”
“Your Majesty.”
He kissed her. Slow. Smiling against her mouth—the rare smile, the one that transformed his entire face from monarch to mischief, the one he didn’t know he was making and she’d been waiting to see up close.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She’d transferred it from her pocket at some point during the fifth stage—habit, survival instinct, the unshakeable millennial reflex.
The group chat.
Breezy: Status report. You went radio silent two hours ago. Should I activate the contingency plan?
Sybil: What’s the contingency plan?
Breezy: I drive to the den, assess the situation, and extract Lark if necessary.
Sybil: I think she’s fine, Breezy.
Oliver: She’s MORE than fine. Her location says Upper East Side. The den is on the Upper East Side. Math isn’t hard.
Breezy: I’m not speculating. I’m monitoring.
Oliver: SIS IS AT THE LION’S DEN. Literally. THE LION’S ACTUAL DEN. Someone tell Dad.
Sybil: Nobody is telling anyone’s father anything. Oliver Rafael Coleman, put down your phone.
Oliver: This is the greatest day of my life.
Lark turned the phone facedown. Looked at Rune, whose expression suggested he had heard enough of the notification sounds to form a hypothesis about the content.
“My brother knows I’m here.”
“I gathered.”
“He’s texting in all caps.”
“I heard the enthusiasm from here.”
“Tomorrow he’s going to look you in the eye at a family dinner and you’re going to have to sit across from him knowing that he knows.”
Rune’s hair, which had been settling into a peaceful, post-purr calm, rose sharply at both temples.
“That’s a problem for tomorrow.” She pulled him back down. “Tonight, you’re mine.”
Something in his chest made a sound—not the hum, not the growl.
A chuff. Low, pleased, the feline equivalent of a laugh.
His arms folded around her and his hair settled against her cheek and the night folded around both of them, and the city glittered through the windows, and somewhere in a stockroom in SoHo, Dekel’s phone lit with a single text from Breezy:
Breezy: She’s staying at the den tonight.
Dekel: I know. His security detail confirmed thirty minutes ago.
Breezy: Are you monitoring your boss’s romantic life through his security infrastructure?
Dekel: Are you monitoring yours through her iPhone location?
Breezy: …Touché.