Chapter 17 #2
He followed her to his massive SUV, a silent, powerful shadow at her back. She fumbled with the passenger door handle, her fingers clumsy with the cold and the emotional storm raging inside her. She slid into the leather seat, the scent of pine and spice wrapping around her like a second skin.
Korran settled into the driver’s seat beside her, and Tess tried to steady herself.
The engine remained off, the silence between them thick and charged.
He stared straight ahead through the windshield at the empty, snow-dusted parking lot, his knuckles white where they gripped the steering wheel.
His profile was a study in conflicted strength—the hard line of his jaw, the shadow of grief still etched around his eyes, and the rigid set of his shoulders bracing for a blow.
He thinks I’m going to run, Tess realized.
He’d laid his soul bare, confessed the one truth that could upend his entire world and the expectations of his clan, and he expected her to recoil.
To ask for the first wormhole back to Earth.
But the thought of leaving now sent a sharp, visceral pang through her chest, worse than any grief, sharper than any fear.
It felt like tearing out a part of herself she’d only just discovered she possessed.
“Wait,” she said, the word cutting through the tense quiet.
He froze, his shoulders tightening further. The air in the SUV grew taut enough to snap.
Tess took a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t…
I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know how this is supposed to work, or what happens next.
” She turned in her seat to face him, forcing him to meet her gaze.
His dark eyes were pools of wary hope and raw vulnerability.
“All I know is that I’m falling impossibly, illogically, completely in love with you.
Every sensible part of me is screaming that this is a catastrophe waiting to happen, that it’s too complicated, that I should protect myself. But I can’t stop it.”
The admission hung between them, fragile and monumental.
Korran’s breath hitched. He turned fully toward her, one large hand lifting to cradle her cheek.
“It’s the mate bond,” he said, his voice a low, rough rumble that vibrated through her.
“It doesn’t ask for logic. It doesn’t negotiate.
It just is. Maybe… maybe we’ve both been fighting the one thing that’s meant to be. ”
The last of her resistance crumbled. Was it the bond, humming between them like a live wire?
Was it the raw vulnerability of the funeral, the shared grief, the terrifying certainty of his confession?
She’d never believed in soulmates, in destiny.
She believed in data, in evidence, in the hard-won conclusions of a rational mind.
But the evidence was here, in the way her heart hammered, in the magnetic pull that drew her across the console, the impossible rightness she felt when he touched her.
Then she closed the distance. Her lips met his, and this kiss was nothing like their first. That had been hunger and surprise, a collision of want.
This was a surrender. A claiming. It was deep and slow and consuming, filled with all the longing she’d bottled up and all the acceptance he’d just offered.
His tongue swept into her mouth, tasting of salt and sorrow and a rising hope.
She met him stroke for stroke, her hands flying up to tangle in the thick, dark hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer.
A fire ignited in her blood, burning away the chill, the grief, the endless questions.
There was only this—his taste, his scent, the hard planes of his body straining toward hers.
A desperate, primal need overtook her, a need to erase the distance, to fuse with him, to feel alive after so much death.
She broke the kiss, her breathing ragged. Without a word, she pushed open her door and climbed out into the cold.
“Tess?” Korran’s voice was confused, edged with a pain she couldn’t bear.
She didn’t answer. She yanked open the back passenger door and slid across the cool leather of the bench seat.
She was a woman who planned, who calculated risks, who’d never once considered the backseat of a car as anything but transportation.
But she wasn’t that woman right now. Right now, she was pure instinct.
The driver’s door opened and shut. A second later, he filled the space of the open rear door, his big frame blocking out the pale light from the twin suns.
His eyes gleamed, understanding dawning, followed by a heat that mirrored her own.
Then he climbed in, his movements fluid and predatory, and pulled the door closed.
The world shrunk to the shadowy interior of the SUV, their breath fogging the windows, creating a private, steamy cocoon.
They moved in a frantic, silent symphony.
Her fingers worked at the intricate fastenings of his formal jacket, pushing the heavy fabric from his shoulders.
He shrugged it off, his own hands going to the zipper at the back of her simple black dress.
He peeled the dress down her arms, his touch urgent but not rough, and she shimmied out of it, the fabric pooling at her waist. His hands slid to her hips, his thumbs stroking the sensitive skin just above the lace of her panties as he finished pushing the dress down her legs.
She tugged his crisp white shirt from the waistband of his trousers, her hands sliding beneath to roam over the hot, hard expanse of his abdomen.
He made a low, growling sound in his throat and captured her mouth again, kissing her as he dispensed with her bra with a deft flick.
The cool air kissed her skin, followed immediately by the scorching heat of his palms covering her breasts, his thumbs circling her nipples until they tightened into aching peaks.
She fumbled with his belt buckle, her usual dexterity lost to urgency. He helped, making quick work of it, pushing his trousers and boxers down just enough. He kicked off his shoes, his movements efficient and fierce. She wriggled out of her panties, the last barrier gone.
Naked in the backseat, surrounded by the scent of leather and their own arousal, the reality of where they were—in a vehicle, in a deserted parking lot after his father’s funeral—should have shocked her.
Instead, it felt wildly, recklessly perfect.
A rebellion against duty, against death, against every reason this shouldn’t be happening.
His hands gripped her hips, lifting her as if she weighed nothing. She straddled his lap, the hard ridge of his erection pressing against her inner thigh, a blunt, demanding promise. The feel of him, so powerfully aroused and utterly hers, sent a fresh wave of slick heat between her legs.
She kissed him again, deep and slow, as she reached between them. Her fingers wrapped around his cock, thick and velvety steel, and she guided him to her entrance. The broad head nudged against her, and she sank down onto him, inch by devastating inch.
A ragged gasp tore from her throat as he filled her, a stretch that bordered on pain before melting into the most profound fullness she’d ever known. She paused, seated fully, her inner muscles fluttering around him as she adjusted, her forehead resting against his.
His grip on her hips was iron, his breath coming in harsh pants. “Tess,” he growled, her name a prayer.
She began to move, a slow, deliberate rock of her hips that dragged his cock along every sensitive nerve inside her.
The friction was exquisite, building a coil of tension low in her belly with each pass over that perfect, sweet spot.
His hands slid from her hips to cup her ass, his fingers digging in as he helped her set a rhythm, meeting each downward stroke with an upward thrust of his own.
The pace soon quickened, turning primal.
The leather seat creaked in protest. The windows steamed completely, sealing them in their own private, desperate world.
She rode him with a frantic abandon, chasing the pleasure that was building like a storm inside her.
His mouth found her breast, his tongue and teeth working her nipple, and the dual sensation pushed her closer to the edge.
“Korran,” she cried out, the sound muffled against the solid muscle of his shoulder as she buried her face there.
“I’ve got you,” he rasped, his voice guttural. “Let go.”
His words shattered the last of her control. Her orgasm exploded through her, a detonation of light and sensation that clenched her core around him in rhythmic pulses. She shook with the force of it, a broken cry escaping her lips.
The feel of her tight channel milking him was his undoing.
With a roar he smothered against her skin, he drove up into her one last, deep time, his body shuddering as he spilled himself inside her.
She felt each hot pulse, the intimate claim, and held him through the tremors that racked his powerful frame.
They stayed locked together, slick with sweat, their hearts hammering against each other in a frantic, slowing syncopation. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her tight against his chest, his face buried in the curve of her neck.
In the quiet aftermath, the reality of what they’d just done—where they’d just done it—filtered back in. Tess, the controlled scientist who planned every detail, had just had wild, desperate sex with a bear prince in the back of his SUV after his father’s funeral.
And unlike the frantic coupling in her guest suite, which she’d dismissed as a mistake born of wine and stress, this felt like a choice. A declaration. Messy, complicated, potentially disastrous, but utterly, irrevocably hers.
She didn’t know how any of this would work. The stolen vials waited in his fridge. A kingdom was in mourning. A council expected him to choose a politically expedient mate. An entire belief system labeled their bond a fatal weakness.
But curled in his lap, his strong arms creating a fortress around her, she didn’t care about the how.
For this single, stolen moment, she simply let herself feel the rightness of it.
The bond between them hummed, not just in her blood, but in her bones, a silent, joyous song she finally stopped trying to mute.