Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
He’d been running hot for days.
It had started in Paris. A bone-deep heat that twisted through him like a wild yearning. A craving he desperately wanted—no, needed—to satisfy.
At first, it had been low. An odd awareness of his own body that had started a few days after Adric had used his blood to save Chase. There, but barely enough to notice.
Over time, the odd awareness had become a slight tingle, then a hot pressure, then need and want so intense his cock ached for release, a beautiful kind of torment that had slowly backed off.
He’d filed it as venom damage, an unexpected remnant of the wolf bite. A heat that sat in him now and never quite banked.
In France, it had been even more wild and intense, but the newly trained crew of Europe-based Hunters had needed a steady hand, and so he’d done what he always did.
He’d shoved the want into the work and kept moving, fighting the feral need the way he fought everything—by throwing himself at the job. Training. Patrolling. Teaching.
Most of all, taking out the mares one by one in the dark under the city. More than three dozen in the few days he’d been there, and with each kill, the fire in him seemed to gutter, only to flare back to life hours later, distracting him from sleep, from thought, from every goddamn thing.
The hunting should have spent him.
Except it wasn’t about the hunting. It was about a different kind of hunger. Need. A dark, feral craving that no kill could touch.
Cora.
That was it, of course. The need. The pull. He wanted her. Craved her. Missed her. And he’d been a continent away from her for the better part of a week. No wonder he was crawling out of his skin, desperate to touch her again. To be inside her. To feel her curl up against him and whisper his name.
Tonight, he and Griff had wrapped the hunt and crossed back late to the Griffin’s Nest for a quick debrief before Chase headed home.
Now he was settled in his apartment, dark and stale and too quiet.
He’d wanted to go to Cora first—had, in fact, worked very hard to talk himself out of it. It had been well past midnight Florida time when he’d returned, and he knew she was deep in a paper she was writing for one class or another.
Showing up to haul her out of bed would’ve been the move of a man who couldn’t stand to be alone with himself for one night.
He could stand it.
Probably.
Just to up his odds, he poured a whiskey, grabbed the book off the coffee table, and dropped onto the couch, hoping the prose or the alcohol would scratch—or at least quiet—the damnable itch.
Fanny Hill. He’d pulled it off the back shelf at the Griffin’s Nest before they left, and Griff had rung it up without so much as a blink. “Solid prose,” Griff had said, with an uncomfortably knowing look.
Chase had shrugged. “The English in the eighteenth century understood pacing in a way modern prose can’t emulate.”
It sounded good, but he was hardly a literary scholar, and he damn sure hadn’t bought the book for its prose. Or rather, he’d bought it for a very particular style, genre, and temperature of prose.
But after forty minutes and only three chapters, he was running hotter, yes, but with no release. It wasn’t a fictional woman he wanted—he wanted Cora.
With a frustrated groan, he tossed the book onto the table, downed the whiskey, closed his eyes, and let pure, basic, feral need consume him.
Why not? He was a grown man—more so than most—and he was alone in his own apartment, and he was allowed to want her—to think about exactly how he wanted her.
The way she curled naked against him when she shared his bed. The way her hair fanned across his pillow. The small sound she made when his mouth found her neck while she was still half asleep. The way she arched toward him when he slid his hand under the hem of her shirt.
His cock strained against his jeans as he let the movie play. Cora in his lap, knees bracketing his thighs, her skin hot, her clothes somewhere on his floor. Her mouth on his throat. Her hands in his hair. The low laugh she gave him when he tried to be gentle, and she didn’t want gentle.
He rubbed his palm along the hard line of his cock through the denim and let the fantasy run.
And then the heat changed.
It rose up underneath the fantasy like a tide lifting a boat off the sand—taking him somewhere he hadn’t steered. The want in him doubled, then doubled again, and somewhere in there it stopped being his. It was bigger than his. Wilder.
It had no patience in it, none of his careful control, just a vast and total craving that poured into him from somewhere outside and drowned the line between his body and the feeling until there was no line at all.
He should have stopped. Some far-off part of him knew the heat was coming from the wrong direction—that this wasn’t his to feel.
He didn’t stop.
He couldn’t. It felt too damn good.
Because it wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It was happening to him.
Hell, it was in him, as real as anything his own body had ever done.
The slow drag of pleasure building low in his gut, the unbearable tightening, the sensation of being buried deep and held tight.
The sublime sensation of moving, of skin against skin, and a warm, wet heat.
Hell, it was like a wet dream but without the dream.
With no pictures at all—just the pure, drowning, full-body fact of it, the pleasure of a man inside the woman he wanted, climbing toward a release that Chase felt in his own spine, his own balls, his own clenched fists, as surely as if he were the one moving.
It was, in fact, almost too much, and he fumbled to unbutton his jeans and wrap his hand around himself. Time to stop pretending this was his fantasy. This was more, and consuming, and all he could do was ride it.
The wild heat carried him, redoubling on itself, cresting higher than his slow strokes had any right to take him, the need building past anything he’d ever built alone in the dark, and Cora was the center of all of it, his Cora, conjured out of his own longing to fit the shape of the pleasure pouring through him, and he wanted her, needed her, felt himself impossibly close to having her.
His whole body went rigid. For half a heartbeat, the wrongness of it surfaced, and then the wave broke over him, and he didn’t care about the wrongness or anything at all.
He arched up off the couch as it tore through him, harder than he’d come in longer than he could remember, and he cried out her name, lost in a mind-blowing cloak spun of lust and love.
He came back to his senses slowly, rolling to reach for her and pull her against his chest the way he always did after—and his hand closed around nothing.
He was alone. His hand in his open jeans, his heart slamming, the book on the floor where it had fallen. He wasn’t inside her. He hadn’t been at all. And yet he knew it wasn’t a fantasy.
It was a connection.
Mine.
A feeling, not a word. But Chase heard it anyway—a word filled with a satisfaction that wasn’t his, riding pleasure that he’d only piggy-backed on. A pleasure shared with the woman he loved.
He sat up. His hands had gone steady. The heat was gone, drained out of him with the thing that had hijacked it, and in its place was a cold, clean clarity.
He understood it now. The blood. His brother’s blood.
Their blood.
They’d shared that blood for longer than any human could contemplate. And now, it seemed, they shared it again. And in that moment, he knew exactly what was happening less than a mile away while he sat alone in his apartment with his hand in his jeans.
Something hard and cold rose up inside him. She’d agreed to the betrothal to save Chase’s life. That didn’t make her Adric’s, though. Not by a long shot.
And Chase was going to make sure she understood that very, very completely.
He buttoned his jeans, got to his feet, and headed for the door.