Chapter Seventeen #3
My back hit the edge of the mattress and the charcoal linen was soft against my palms, and Braham’s mouth was on my throat and his hands were working my jacket off my shoulders with the focused attention of someone dismantling something that had outlived its usefulness.
He was careful with the bandaging. His fingers traced the edge of the gauze where it met skin, checking the tape, adjusting his grip to avoid pressure on the wound underneath.
The consideration lived in the set of his jaw—the tension of a man who was holding himself back from something his body wanted to do—and I appreciated it with every functioning nerve ending I possessed and refused to acknowledge it out loud because acknowledging it would ruin the moment, and the moment was too good to ruin.
His shirt came off next. One-handed, the buttons giving way under his fingers with the ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more.
The firelight caught him full-on then: all that muscle, corded and defined, the sparse dusting of hair across his chest tapering to a line that disappeared into his waistband, the gash across his shoulder from the garage already closing—pink and angry and half-healed in the span of hours that would have left me bedridden for a week.
“It is genuinely unfair to look like that,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, the split lip making the consonants sound wrong, and the words landed somewhere between observation and complaint.
“You’re one to talk.” Braham’s hand ran flat down my stomach, palm warm against skin, fingers tracing the ridges of muscle that my Army Ranger years had left behind and my writing career had not quite managed to erase.
His thumb hooked under the waistband of my jeans, and whatever I’d been planning to say next evaporated into the silence of a man who had just been rendered temporarily stupid by competent hands.
He got me down against the linen. The sheets were cool against my back, the contrast with Braham’s warmth sharp enough to register as its own kind of sensation, and then his mouth was on my throat—slow, deliberate, the drag of his beard against my skin sending a current straight down to my toes—and his hands were working my jeans open with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that clothing was an obstacle he was no longer interested in tolerating.
He took his time. I had expected fast. I had expected hungry.
What I got was Braham Wolfe with his mouth on my chest, his tongue circling one nipple and then the other with the kind of attention that suggested he had been thinking about this specific activity for considerably longer than was polite, and when his teeth grazed the sensitive peak and my back arched off the mattress and my fingers dug into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks, the sound that came out of me was cutting and breathless and filthy in a way that would have embarrassed me if I’d had any embarrassment left, which I didn’t.
He took it as encouragement. Because of course he did. The man had built an entire business empire on reading subtext, and the subtext of me clawing at his shoulders while he wrecked my chest was not particularly subtle.
He worked down, his mouth dragging a wet line from my sternum, over the compression wrap, to my navel, his beard scraping a path that left my skin humming, and then lower.
His hands were on my hips, fingers pressing into the bone, holding me still while his mouth found the inside of my thigh with the kind of focus that made the timber ceiling swim in and out of focus above me.
I stared at the beams and thought, with the clarity of someone whose brain was determined to function even when the rest of him was thoroughly compromised, that I was going to write absolutely none of this into my manuscript.
Petra would read it and know immediately, and the knowing would live in her editor’s notes forever, and I would have to change my name and move to Argentina.
Then Braham’s mouth was on my cock, warm and wet and thorough, and I stopped thinking about the manuscript entirely. My hand found the back of his head—not pushing, just there, fingers threading through his hair, holding on.
The sound he made around me vibrated through every nerve ending I possessed and turned my spine to something that existed exclusively to conduct sensation from point A to point B.
I stopped trying to stay quiet. The timber walls were thick.
The nearest pack member was fifty yards and several thousand trees away.
The fire popped and the sheets rustled and the wet, rhythmic sound of Braham’s mouth working me filled the room alongside the low, broken noises I was making that I would categorically deny ever producing if anyone asked.
He pulled back before I finished. One moment his mouth was on me, warm and relentless, and the next he was sitting back on his heels between my legs with his hair messed from my hands and his gold eyes dark and satisfied in a way that made my chest do something complicated.
“That’s rude,” I said.
“I know.” The satisfaction in his voice was specific and deliberate and the kind of thing that would have made me want to punch him if I hadn’t wanted him inside me more.
He reached for the nightstand. The drawer slid open, and the bottle that emerged was familiar in the way things become familiar when you’ve spent enough time in a man’s bedroom to know where he keeps his lube, which was not a sentence I had planned to construct in my lifetime but here we were.
He poured it warm over his fingers, and the first press was careful—one finger, working slow, his eyes on my face the whole time with that focused attention that made the air between us feel charged.
When he found the angle—that specific spot that made my whole body arch off the mattress like I’d been plugged into a wall socket—the sound that came out of me was loud and desperate and the kind of thing that would have embarrassed me if I’d had any pride left, which I didn’t.
His free hand came down on my hip, holding me still, and his expression did the thing—the firm set of his jaw that happened when Braham Wolfe had found something he wanted and was preparing to take it.
Two fingers. Then three. Careful and thorough, working me open until I was loose and slick and pulling at his wrist with my good hand and telling him in very specific terms that I was done waiting, done being patient, done with the performance of restraint when what I wanted was him inside me right the fuck now.
He pushed in slowly, giving me time, letting my body adjust to the stretch and the heat and the particular fullness of being taken by a man Braham’s size.
I exhaled long and deliberate, my ribs protesting the expansion, and then I rolled my hips in invitation—one deliberate movement that said, in the clearest language my body possessed, that I was ready and he was welcome and whatever came next was exactly what I’d been asking for.
He let go.
The sex was rough and consuming and feral in a way that lived somewhere beyond civilized and several miles past careful. Braham drove into me hard and steady, one hand gripping my hip with enough force to leave marks, the other braced beside my head, his weight a solid, specific fact against me.
Each thrust traveled through my body like a live wire, lighting up nerves I didn’t know I had, and I took it and gave it back—nails scoring down his back, my legs locked around his waist, meeting every drive with the stubborn physicality of a man who did not surrender easily and was choosing to surrender now.
The pain in my ribs was minimal compared to the pleasure moving through my entire body. I could handle the pain because I wanted the pleasure, desperately.
His mouth found my throat. My jaw. My collarbone. His teeth grazed the curve where my neck met my shoulder—the place where the claiming bite would go—and I felt him pull back. Once. Twice.
The restraint in it lived in the set of his shoulders and the tight line of his jaw, and I could feel what it cost him. The tension of a wolf holding back from something his biology had been built to do.
I turned my head. Chin up. Eyes on his face. Deliberate. Certain.
“Do it.”
He went still above me. Gold eyes dark, jaw tight enough to break, the muscle along his hinge standing out like cord under skin.
His hips kept moving—slow, deep, the rhythm unbroken—but everything else stopped.
The room held its breath. The fire murmured.
The timber ceiling watched us with the patient indifference of something that had been standing here longer than either of us had been alive.
“You’re sure.” Not a question. A verification.
“I said it once.” My voice was steady. Steadier than it had any right to be with Braham Wolfe inside me and his teeth inches from my throat and the warmth of the thread already humming somewhere in my chest like a door I hadn’t known existed was starting to open.
“I’m not saying it again. Do it or don’t. ”
He did it.
The bite was sharp and deep. His teeth broke skin at the curve of my throat and shoulder, and the pain was immediate and bright—a white-hot line that traveled from the point of contact through my chest and down my arms—and then something else hit.
Warmth. Spreading outward from the bite through my chest, my limbs, the backs of my hands, like a door swinging open in a room I’d been standing outside of for weeks.
The thread.