Chapter 12
NASH
She tastes like woodsmoke and jasmine and two years of wondering if I’d imagined how delicious she tastes. The reality is better than I remember.
I take my time.
That’s the thing she doesn’t know yet—that I’ve thought about this.
Not just the wanting of it, though that’s been a constant low-frequency hum since the moment she walked back into my life in that corridor.
But the how of it. The specific intention I’ve carried around like something precious and breakable: that if I ever had her again, it would be nothing like the first time.
The first time was urgent. Stolen. Two people who knew it was temporary, allowing themselves one night of pleasure before going back to their separate lives. It was extraordinary, and it wasn’t enough, and I’ve known both those things for two years.
This time, I’m going to learn every inch of her before I’m done.
I drag my blanket closer with one hand and lower her onto it slowly, one hand cradling her head, and she lets me—which is its own kind of gift, Mia letting anyone guide her anywhere.
The fire is low and warm behind us, throwing amber light across her face, and I hold myself above her for a moment, just looking.
She looks back at me with those green eyes that are her wolf and her real self and everything in between. Her expression is open, almost uncertain, stripped of the careful management she applies to everything else.
“Nash,” she says. Quiet. Unsteady.
“I’ve got you,” I say.
Something in her exhales.
I kiss her again. Slow this time, no urgency, just the specific pleasure of her mouth and the way her hand comes up to the back of my neck like she’s decided to stop fighting it.
I learn the shape of her by touch: the line of her jaw, the curve of her shoulder, the place below her ear that makes her breath catch when I find it, which I file away with the focused attention of someone building a map he intends to memorize.
She makes a sound against my mouth. Small. Involuntary. The same kind she made this morning over the rabbit that she was immediately embarrassed about, except this time, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, and I intend to earn as many of those sounds as she’ll give me.
I work my way down her throat. Her collarbone. The soft skin at the base of her neck where her pulse is fluttering. She arches slightly into me, and I take my time there, too, because she’s been running at full speed for so long and somebody ought to make her stop.
“You’re doing this on purpose,” she says. Her voice has gone lower. Slightly smoky.
“Doing what?” I ask innocently.
“Taking way too long,” she says, a slight snarl of impatience in her words.
I chuckle. “Yes,” I agree against her skin.
“It’s starting to make me—” I nip her earlobe, and she gives a sharp exhale.
“Yes?” I drawl, pulling back so I can look at her.
She glares at me, but the fire in her eyes is one I only want to stoke hotter.
“Just let me,” I tell her. “And enjoy yourself. I know I am.”
A pause.
Her ire cools to wariness. Then desire.
“Okay.”
It’s the smallest word, but I feel it land in my chest like a key turning.
I take her apart with patience and attention, and she lets me.
Her hands are in my hair, gripping, releasing, gripping again; her way of showing me what she won’t say out loud.
When I work my way down her body, peeling off her pants and settle between her thighs, she makes a sound that isn’t small at all.
I pull her panties aside, licking a trail to her center. Her hips buck, and her fingers tighten, and I feel her wolf close to the surface, pressing at the edges of her control.
Good.
I want all of her. The controlled professional and the wild thing underneath. The strategist and the wolf. The woman who built walls out of necessity and the one who just said okay in the dark and let me take over.
She tastes better than my fantasies.
The sounds she makes are going to ruin me. Not just now. Forever. I’m going to be in a strategy meeting somewhere in six months, thinking about the way she says my name when my tongue is tasting her, and I know in that moment, I’m going to be useless.
And I find that I don’t mind at all.
She comes apart slowly, then all at once—a long shuddering exhale and her hand fisted in my hair and my name on her lips like something she didn’t mean to say out loud.
I stay with her through all of it, through every aftershock, until she’s breathing again and her hand has loosened and she’s looking up at the canopy above us, slightly dazed.
I work my way back up her body, but when I don’t move fast enough, she pulls me up the rest of the way. Her eyes are dark emeralds, and she looks at me like she’s made a decision that I can only hope goes past tonight, even if she’s not ready to say so.
When I finally settle myself between her thighs, she wraps her legs around me like she’s been doing this with me her whole life and makes a sound that goes straight through every layer of composure I have left.
I go still for a moment. Just feeling. Just looking.
She makes an impatient sound.
“Give me a second,” I say, my voice already hoarse, and we haven’t even begun.
She smirks, full of awareness of the power she wields now.
“Take your time.” But her hands are moving against my back, and her hips are kneading mine in a way that contradicts the tone entirely.
I snort, then lean down and press my forehead to hers. “I'm trying to make this last.”
She pulls back enough to look at me. Something in her expression shifts—the impatience dissolving into something quieter. More real. She reaches up and touches my face with a gentleness she’d probably deny if I mentioned it, fingertips tracing my jaw like she’s memorizing something.
“Let’s make sure it does,” she says. Softly.
Like a promise.
And then there are no more words.
She’s responsive in a way that makes thought difficult. Present in a way that makes everything else irrelevant. The firelight moves across her skin, and her eyes are on mine, and I understand, with a clarity that bypasses analysis entirely, that I am completely done for.
Not because of tonight.
I was done for two years ago in a solarium at an alpha’s party.
I knew it for sure the moment I walked out and left her there.
I’ve known it every day since then; I just didn’t know how to get back to her.
I’ve spent two years finding a way, and now I’m here at last, and I know with the certainty of something bedrock-deep that I will not walk away from this woman again.
Fated mate or no fated mate.
She’s mine in every way that matters, and I am categorically, irreversibly hers, and the mate bond can catch up when it’s ready.
I feel the moment the slow pace starts to break.
The way her breathing changes. The way her hands stop being gentle and start being urgent, pulling rather than guiding.
She arches into me and makes a sound that dissolves the last of my restraint, and I let the pace build the way it’s been building for two years—inevitable, unstoppable, irreversible.
Her fingers dig in. Her head tips back.
She comes with her arms around me and her face pressed into my neck and a sound that is completely unguarded. I feel her shudder through it. Feel her grip tighten and then go loose. Feel her exhale against my skin like something she’s been holding for a very long time finally let go.
I follow her over the edge, shuddering with the intensity of it.
And stay there for a long moment after—forehead against hers, both of us breathing, the fire popping softly beside us and the woods dark and quiet all around.
Her hands, which had been urgent and gripping, have gone soft. She’s tracing something against my back—slow, absent, like she’s not aware she’s doing it.
After a while, she says, “You’re heavy.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to have to move.”
I lift myself so I’m hovering rather than pressed against her. “In a minute,” I say against her neck.
A pause. Then her arms, which should by any reasonable expectation be pushing me away, tighten slightly instead.
“In a minute,” she agrees.
I lift my head and look at her. The firelight is catching the edges of her face, and her hair is a mess, and she looks… beautiful.
I brush her hair back from her face. She lets me.
Eventually, I settle beside her in the grass, and she doesn't move away, which is the most Mia thing she could have done—not reaching for closeness, not retreating from it. Just staying.
Echo appears from somewhere in the dark and sits on the rock above our heads and regards us both with his small dark eyes and the expression of a creature whose opinion has been entirely validated.
“Don’t,” Mia tells him.
He blinks. Looks at me.
“She’s right,” I tell him. “Not a word.”
He deposits a small shiny object on the rock—another button—and settles in with the satisfied air of a chaperone whose work here is done.
Mia exhales. Looks up at the canopy. The stars are visible through the branches, cold and distant.
“Nash,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t make this into something tonight.” Her voice is quiet. Not hard. In fact, she sounds almost pleading. With herself. With me. “Just let it be what it is. Okay?”
I look at her profile against the firelight. The line of her nose. The curve of her mouth.
“Okay,” I lie.
She exhales again.
And somewhere in the trees, an owl calls once and goes quiet, and the fire settles, and Mia Reyes lies in the grass beside me and doesn’t run, and I think that is the most she can give me tonight, and I think it is enough, and I think I am going to love her so completely that she runs out of reasons not to let me.