Chapter 20 First Surrender #2
“Bedroom,” I say against his mouth. “Now.”
He stands with me, still wrapped around him, my legs locked at his waist, and carries me through the cottage like I weigh nothing.
His mouth doesn’t leave mine. He navigates by instinct or memory or some wolf sense I don’t understand, and when we reach the bedroom, he lays me down on the unmade bed with a gentleness that contradicts every desperate, frantic thing about the last sixty seconds.
Then he pulls back and looks at me.
I’m spread across my own sheets, breathing hard, lips swollen, hair tangled, wearing a jumper and leggings, and nothing about this moment is elegant or composed or any of the things I imagined my first time with someone new would be. But the way he looks at me—
He looks at me like I’m sacred.
“Don’t,” I say, because if he’s gentle right now, I’ll shatter. “Don’t be careful with me. Not tonight.”
Something shifts behind his eyes. The restraint he’s been holding, the careful, measured control he’s maintained since the moment he walked through my door, lets go.
I watch it happen. I watch the man step back.
Something older, wilder, steps forward. His eyes are pure gold now.
No brown. No amber. Just molten light pinning me to the mattress.
He pulls his shirt over his head, and I take in his hard body.
Broad chest, stomach, the kind of muscle that comes from use rather than vanity.
Three faint lines across his left ribs, barely visible.
Scars from the rogue’s claws. The wounds I treated in the forest, fully healed, marked only by thin white traces on his skin.
I reach up and touch them. He shivers.
“That’s where I found you,” I say.
“That’s where you found me.”
He lowers himself over me, and the weight of him, his heat, is so overwhelmingly good that I arch up into it with a moan I don’t try to muffle.
His mouth finds my neck again, my jaw, the spot beneath my ear that makes my hips roll against his.
His hands slide under my jumper, palms flat against my stomach, and the skin-on-skin contact sends the bond into overdrive.
I feel everything. Not just his hands but the emotion behind them: want, tenderness, a possessiveness so fierce it should frighten me.
It doesn’t. The bond transmits it directly, bypassing thought, and in return, I know he feels what I feel.
The hunger. The relief. The staggering, terrifying joy of being touched by the person your body has been screaming for.
He pulls my jumper over my head and unclasps my bra, tossing them both on the floor. When the air hits my bare skin, I gasp, and when his mouth follows the air, I stop breathing altogether.
“Roan—”
“I know.” His voice is wrecked. He kisses down my sternum, between my breasts, across my ribs. Every point of contact blazes. “I can feel it. I can feel everything you’re feeling.”
“Then you know I need you to stop going slowly.”
He makes that sound again, the one that’s not human.
His hands find the waistband of my leggings and strip them down my legs along with everything underneath.
His fingers trail fire down my thighs as he drags the fabric free, and he pauses just long enough to look at me, and the expression on his face isn’t hunger anymore, it’s something closer to devastation, like seeing me like this has broken something inside him that was barely holding together in the first place.
Cool air for half a second. Then his body covers mine. Nothing between us except his jeans. I reach between us. Deal with them. Patience is a luxury neither of us has left.
My knuckles brush against him as I work the button and the zipper, and his hips jerk involuntarily.
The sound he makes against my collarbone is something I want to bottle and keep and replay on every bad day for the rest of my life.
He kicks the jeans off the rest of the way, and then it’s skin against skin, and the bond hums at a frequency I can feel in my teeth.
He settles between my thighs, and I feel him there, the hot, hard length of him pressed against me but not yet inside, and he stops.
His forehead drops to mine. His breath is ragged, and his arms are shaking where they bracket my head.
I feel him fighting himself—not reluctance, not hesitation, but the last threadbare attempt to make sure this is something I’m choosing rather than something being done to me.
Even now. Even with his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still.
I answer by tilting my hips up and pulling him closer, and I say yes. The restraint in his expression collapses like a condemned building.
When he pushes inside me, the bond detonates.
There’s no other word for it. Every sensation I’ve been carrying for weeks—the warmth, the desire, the pull, the ache of separation, the slow-building heat that I mistook for fever—all of it converges on the point where our bodies join and explodes outward in a wave that tears a sound from my throat I’ve never made before.
My back arches off the mattress, and my fingers clench in the sheets, and for a disorienting, shattered second, I can’t tell if the fullness I feel is physical or something deeper, something the bond is doing to the architecture of my chest. Both. It’s both.
I feel him rasp against my neck, his whole body trembling.
I feel what he feels. Completion. Relief.
A rightness so absolute my mind goes blank trying to hold it.
Beneath that, a staggering vulnerability.
The sensation of a door being opened that can never be closed again, and the terrifying, exhilarating knowledge that he doesn’t want it closed.
He buries his face in the curve where my neck meets my shoulder.
Just breathes. His ribs expand against mine.
I hold him there, one hand in his hair, the other spread flat between his shoulder blades, his heart slamming against my palm.
Then he thrusts, and there is nothing careful about any of it.
It’s raw, desperate, graceless. Driven by separation.
A biological imperative that has finally been given what it needs.
The bed frame hits the wall. My nails dig into his shoulders, and I feel the skin give.
He hisses but doesn’t slow down; if anything, it makes him rougher, his grip tightening on my hip hard enough to bruise.
I want the bruises. I want evidence of this on my body tomorrow.
He says my name like a prayer, a curse, something in between.
His voice cracks on the second syllable.
My pussy is so wet, it should embarrass me, but doesn’t, as his thick cock thrusts deeper, harder. Faster.
His being this close isn’t close enough; it will never be close enough.
He shifts his angle, and something lights up inside me like a flare, and I gasp.
He does it again, deliberate this time, watching my face with an intensity that would be clinical if his expression weren’t wrecked.
I can feel his satisfaction layered underneath my own pleasure—he likes this, likes knowing exactly what undoes me, and the bond has made him fluent in my body overnight.
Every adjustment he makes is precise, even in the chaos of it.
His thumb traces the hollow of my throat.
His mouth finds the spot below my ear that makes my toes curl, and he memorises the reaction and uses it ruthlessly.
I’m losing language. The thoughts in my head have stopped forming complete sentences and devolved into fragments.
There, yes, more, please. I don’t know if I’m saying them out loud or just broadcasting them, but he responds to every one.
His breathing has gone ragged and uneven, and his rhythm is faltering at the edges, losing its steadiness, and through our primal connection, I can feel his control fraying like a rope under too much weight.
The orgasm builds like a wave I can feel coming from a long way off.
It starts where his cock is filling my pussy like I was made for it.
It radiates outward through my hips, my spine, the backs of my thighs.
I feel his building too, a mirror of mine, the two sensations feeding into each other in a loop that escalates beyond anything I’ve experienced or imagined.
My soaking wet pussy clenches around him, and he groans, low and broken.
That sound pushes me closer to the edge, and my response pushes him, and we are caught in a feedback spiral with no ceiling.
When it breaks, it breaks through both of us at once, as if the bond has synchronised us down to the cellular level.
My vision whites out. Every muscle in my body contracts and releases in a cascade that starts at my centre and rolls outward to my fingertips.
The sound he makes against my throat, the sound I make against his shoulder, are the same sound in two different registers, and for one suspended, infinite moment, there is no boundary between his body and mine.
Then I feel an immense pressure that is almost painful.
I gasp, and his eyes close for one brief moment before he groans so loudly, I think the neighbours are going to hear.
His knot swells, even in his human form, and I rasp out a breath as he stretches me so wide, I think I’m going to split open.
But I don’t. I feel nothing but this insane pleasure, edged with pain that tries to break through but doesn’t.
The peak holds longer than it should. Longer than is physiologically reasonable.
The knot sustains it, stretches it, keeps us locked at the crest for minutes, but who knows how many, until the intensity tips from pleasure into a brightness that is too much for the nervous system to contain.
Then, slowly, in increments, it ebbs. The wave recedes.
The world reassembles itself in fragments.
I press my forehead against his chest. Breathe him in.
Cedar, salt, skin. For the first time since I got here, my body is quiet.
Not suppressed, not overridden. Quiet. As if the static has been tuned to a frequency I can actually hear, and what it’s playing is something that sounds, against all evidence and reason, like peace.
“Stay,” I say.
His arm tightens around me.
“I’m not going anywhere.”