Chapter 13 Steam
Nora POV
The house went quiet by degrees.
Bette’s door closed first, then Hank’s heavy tread on the stairs, then Arvid’s door. Jules had gone up earlier, and I’d heard his radio playing softly through the floorboards before that went silent too.
I sat on the edge of the spare room bed in a towel and nothing else, listening to the old house settle.
The wind had died, and Pine Harbor was holding still in that deep autumn quiet that only came after the lake calmed.
My shoulders ached from the hours spent on my back under the lift, and the muscles along my forearms burned from torquing fittings all morning. Good pain.
It was time.
I pulled on a flannel and shorts, left my feet bare, and went downstairs. The kitchen was dark except for the stove light Jules always left on. I crossed through without stopping, slipped out the back, and hurried over the cold ground to the sauna. I opened the changing room door.
Cedar hit me first. Then the banked heat leaking from the inner room, dry and close. Wade’s scent came with it, carrying pine, warm skin, and something underneath that made my wolf press forward inside me.
He was already inside. I dropped the flannel and shorts on the changing room bench, pushed open the inner door, and the heat folded around me like a hand.
Wade sat on the upper bench with his forearms on his knees.
Naked. The single low light caught the scars across his left side, the older ones on his ribs, the thick muscle of his thighs.
Steam rose from the stones in the corner, and his skin was already damp.
He looked up when I came in, and his eyes moved over me without pretending not to.
“You came,” he said.
“I said I would.”
I climbed the bench and sat beside him. The cedar was hot under my thighs. The heat pressed into my shoulders and loosened something that had been there since Rafe’s call, a band of tension across my upper back that no amount of wrenching had touched. I tipped my head back and let the heat work.
“The lift held all day,” I said. “No weep on any joint.”
“I heard.” Wade’s voice was low and unhurried in the dark. “Bette said Pete’s wife’s car might need a starter.”
“Might need a battery. The clicking could be either.”
“You’ll know when you hear it.”
“I’ll know when I test it.”
He almost smiled. I sensed it through the bond more than I saw it. Something in him eased. Wade carried his tension differently than I did. Mine sat between my shoulder blades. His lived in his jaw, his hands, the way he held himself still when he wanted to move.
The heat built. Sweat gathered at my collarbone and ran down between my breasts. I could feel my muscles softening, the soreness in my forearms turning liquid. Wade’s breathing was even beside me, and his scent thickened with the steam until I couldn’t separate it from the cedar.
I turned my head and looked at him.
He was already looking at me.
The bond between us hummed, low and constant, and my wolf answered his with a sound that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a purr. I didn’t fight it. I’d spent weeks pushing down every instinct that reached for someone, and I was done pushing.
I swung my leg over his thigh and straddled him on the bench.
Wade’s hands came to my hips. His palms were rough and hot from the cedar, and the contact sent the bond flaring between us, bright and immediate.
I felt his desire as clearly as my own. His pulse beat under my thighs, his cock thickened against me, and he held himself back, as Wade always did until I told him not to.
“Don’t be careful,” I said.
His fingers tightened on my hips. I rocked against his thigh, and the friction dragged a sound out of me that I didn’t try to catch. His right hand slid down from my hip, across my stomach, and between my legs. Two fingers found me wet and slid through my folds, circling my clit with firm pressure.
I ground down against his hand and his thigh at the same time, chasing the feeling. The sauna heated my back while Wade covered my front. His free hand spread flat against my lower back, holding me steady while his fingers worked.
He brought me to the edge and stopped.
“Wade.” My voice came out raw.
“Stay with me.” His mouth was against my jaw, his beard rough on my skin. His fingers kept moving in unhurried circles that held me right there at the crest without tipping me over. The pressure built until my thighs were shaking and every nerve in my body was pulled tight as a winch cable.
“You son of a bitch,” I said into his mouth, and kissed him. Hard. His kiss was hot and salty and unmistakably Wade. I bit his lower lip and he groaned, and his fingers finally pressed where I needed them, firm and fast, and I broke.
The orgasm seized me, amplified by the bond until his answering pleasure struck almost as hard as my own. I left damp handprints across his shoulders, fingers sliding on wet skin, and I felt Wade’s cock twitch hard against my inner thigh while I shook through the aftershocks.
The sauna’s heat had turned brutal. Sweat ran down my spine and pooled in the dip of my collarbone, and Wade’s chest was slick against mine. He pressed his forehead to my shoulder and breathed, his arms shaking with restraint.
“Come on,” I said. I climbed off his lap on unsteady legs and pulled him toward the inner door. “Before we cook.”
? ? ?
The adjoining washroom was cooler, and it hit my damp skin like a plunge. Wade followed me through, and I didn’t give him time to adjust.
I put both hands on his chest and pushed him back against the tiled wall. He yielded to me, his back hitting the cold tile with a hiss, and I dropped to my knees on the slatted wood floor.
His cock was hard and flushed dark, thick enough that my fingers didn’t close around the base when I wrapped my hand around him. I looked up. His eyes were black, and his hands hung at his sides as if he were afraid to touch me.
“Hands on the wall,” I said.
He flattened his palms behind him. I leaned forward and took him into my mouth.
He tasted like clean sweat and cedar and the salt of his skin. I took my time at first, working my tongue along the underside while I took him deeper. His hips tried to move, and I caught them with both hands, pinning him to the wall.
“Nora.” My name came out of him like something torn loose. “Fuck. Nora.”
I took him deeper. His thighs trembled under my palms, and the bond flooded with pleasure so intense it made my own belly clench.
I hollowed my cheeks and sucked hard on the upstroke.
His hands left the wall and closed around my shoulders as if to lift me away, but I pressed his hips back against the tile and kept my rhythm.
One hand found the back of my head, fingers threading through my damp hair. He didn’t push. He only held on.
I felt the moment his control broke. His breathing went ragged and his hips jerked once against my grip, and I relaxed my throat and let him come.
The taste of him was salt and heat and I swallowed every drop, working him through it until his hand in my hair loosened and his head fell back against the tile with a thud.
I sat back on my heels and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
Wade looked down at me. His chest heaved. His cock was still half-hard and thickening again while I watched.
“I’m not done with you,” I said.
His eyes darkened. “Good.”
? ? ?
We went back into the heat, leaving the door ajar behind us.
It closed around us, and the steam was still rising from the stones. Wade caught my arm as I climbed the steps and turned me toward the lower bench, built from thick cedar planks and braced solidly beneath us.
He bent me over it. My forearms braced on the hot wood and my back arched, and I felt him step in behind me, his hands on my hips, lining us up. The head of his cock dragged through the wet heat between my thighs and I pushed back against him.
“Now,” I said.
He thrust into me in one long stroke that drove the air from my lungs.
The stretch was almost too much. The angle was deep, and I felt him everywhere as he pushed all the way in. The bond roared open between us. Through it, I felt the tight, slick grip of my body around him, the heat of my skin under his hands, and his fierce satisfaction at being inside me.
The steam had left us both slick. Wade braced one hand beneath my stomach to keep me from sliding forward on the bench, and his other hand slid down between my legs to find my clit. He began with measured thrusts that grew rougher until the bench rocked and each stroke struck deep.
“Harder,” I told him, and he gave me harder, his fingers working my clit in tight circles while he fucked me so deep my knees nearly buckled. The wet sound of our bodies meeting filled the small room, and the steam grew heavy with cedar and our mingled scents.
I felt his teeth against my neck. Right there, at the junction where it met my shoulder, the place where a mating mark would go. He pressed his mouth to the spot and I felt his wolf surge through the bond, begging, claiming, desperate to bite down and seal us permanently.
His jaw clenched against the skin, and the bite never came.
His hips stuttered, and he came with a groan that vibrated through my bones, buried as deep as he could get.
The heat of him spilling inside me overwhelmed the bond, and his fingers kept moving on my clit, relentless even while his cock pulsed and his body shuddered against my back.
Cool air hit my wet spine through the door we’d left ajar.
Wade’s heat pressed against my back and his hand worked between my legs with the patience of a man who would not stop until I was finished.
His cock was still inside me, softening but there, and the combination of his fingers, the fullness, and the cool air across my skin wound the tension so tight I couldn’t breathe.
When it broke, I came so hard my arms gave out on the bench.
My forehead hit the cedar and I bit down on my own wrist to keep from screaming loud enough to wake the house.
The pleasure went on and on, pulse after pulse, and I felt Wade absorb every second of it through the bond, his hand gentling on me as I rode it out.
He leaned over me, his body heavy against mine, and licked the sweat from the place where the mark would go. His tongue traced the skin he’d held his teeth against. A promise and a question I wasn’t ready to answer yet.
I turned my head and looked at him over my shoulder. He held my gaze and asked for nothing.
“All of it,” I said. “Every bit.”
“I know,” he said.
? ? ?
We washed in the cooler room. Wade poured water over my shoulders and I rinsed the salt from his back, running my hands across the scars on his left side without asking about them. The water was cold from the pipes, and goose bumps rose on my arms as the heat left my skin.
We dressed in the changing room without talking. Wade pulled on his flannel and work pants, and I put my shorts and flannel back on over damp skin. My hair was wet and tangled and I twisted it up without a tie, knowing it would fall by the time I reached the stairs.
“Give me five minutes,” I said.
He nodded. I stepped outside, crossed the cold ground, and slipped through the back door into the dark kitchen. The stove light was still on. Jules’s radio was still off upstairs. No one stirred as I climbed the stairs with bare feet that made no sound on the old wood.
My room was cold after the sauna. I stripped off my shorts and flannel, pulled on the old flannel I slept in, crawled under the quilt, and lay in the dark while my heart rate came down. A deep, satisfied ache lingered through my body.
I felt Wade through the bond, close on the other side of the wall. I heard his door open and shut a few minutes after mine.
The other bond stirred.
It came thin and sour beneath my bond with Wade, pulling from somewhere far west. Rafe’s end of it carried illness tonight, a low throb of nausea and sleeplessness that I recognized from weeks of feeling it pulse at the edges of my awareness. He was sick. He was getting sicker. And he was coming.
I rolled onto my side and pulled the quilt to my chin. My body smelled like Wade and cedar and clean sweat. My hands ached from the day’s work and my thighs ached from the night’s, and both belonged to me.
Rafe’s sickness was real. I didn’t doubt that. But it was also the direct consequence of words he’d chosen to say while my sister stood beside him. The bond was still open, and that was all it knew.
I closed my eyes. Wade’s warmth pulsed evenly through the wall. Rafe’s thin, bitter thread pulled from somewhere on a highway, getting closer mile by mile.
I fell asleep between them, one bond bright and the other fraying.