Chapter 4 #2
The effect is not small. A pulse of heat travels from my hand straight to between my legs and settles there with an insistence that makes me shift on the stool.
My skin is too warm. The dress is too thin.
I can feel every thread of it against my breasts, and I’m very aware that my body is advertising what I’m feeling in ways the dim light only partially hides.
“I need to use the restroom,” I say abruptly.
“Down the hall on the left.”
I slide off the stool. His eyes follow me, and I feel them on my back the whole way across the room.
The restroom is small. Two stalls, a sink, a mirror with a crack across one corner. I run the cold water and press my wet hands to my face. The chill helps for about three seconds before the heat returns.
I’m breathing hard. I don’t need to look in the mirror to know what I’ll see. Flushed cheeks. Eyes too bright. The dress showing every line of a body that’s decided what it wants and is tired of waiting for my brain to agree.
Get it together. You’re on a mission. He’s a local. This is the last thing you need.
My wolf disagrees. Vocally. She’s frantic inside me, straining toward the door, toward the bar, toward him with a single-mindedness I’ve never experienced. This isn’t attraction. Attraction is manageable. This is a magnet in my chest pulling me back to a man I’ve barely known a few hours.
I dry my face. Straighten the dress. Breathe.
I open the door.
He’s standing in the hallway.
Two feet away. So close I could reach out and touch him.
And God, do I want to touch him. The noise of the bar is behind him, music and voices muffled by the corridor, and in this narrow space, his presence fills everything.
The width of his shoulders. The way he’s looking at me: direct, focused, his breathing not quite even.
“Somebody was heading back this way after you,” he says. His voice is husky. “Wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Oh. Um… thanks.” I’m not sure how to respond because my body wants to do the talking for me.
We stare at each other. One second. Two. The air between us is so dense I can taste it.
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe both of us.
Maybe neither. Maybe the space just collapses, and his mouth is on mine, and my back is against the doorframe, and the kiss is nothing like a first kiss should be.
It’s graceless and frantic, teeth and lips and the raw collision of two people who’ve stopped thinking.
His hands grip my waist. My fingers twist into the front of his shirt.
“Fuck,” he growls against my mouth—low, rough—and the vibration travels through me, making me squirm with inexplicable need. My hands slide down his sides to grip his hips. I’m grinding against him. When the hell did I get like this?
Doesn’t matter. He’s not complaining. His lips leave my mouth to trail along my jawline before moving down my throat.
A day’s worth of stubble leaves a path of fire down my neck, setting my skin tingling.
I drop my head back and suck in air as my nipples stand to attention, puckering so hard they’re almost aching.
I practically start panting when he raises a hand to cup my breast through the fabric of my dress.
“God! Please…” I gasp out, but any other words I might have said are swallowed by another mind-numbing kiss as his mouth covers mine again.
Willow, you idiot! What are you doing?
But right now, I couldn’t bring myself to stop, even if I wanted to.
And I don’t want to.
He pushes me backward through the restroom door. Kicks it shut behind him. His hand fumbles, finds the latch, and turns it without breaking the kiss.
My shoulders hit the wall. His body pins me there—chest to chest, hip to hip—and I can feel him, his cock hard against my stomach through his jeans. The reality of that sends a spike of arousal through me so sharp I moan into his mouth.
His hands slide down my sides, find the hem of the dress, and push it up my thighs.
His fingers are rough, calloused, and the scrape of them against my bare skin makes me arch against him.
He grips the back of my thigh and lifts.
I hook my leg around his hip, and the change in angle presses him right against my mound.
The friction, even through denim and cotton, makes me groan low in my throat.
He lifts me. Both hands under my thighs, up, and I’m sitting on the edge of the washbasin with my legs wrapped around him and his mouth on my throat, working down to my collarbone with a hunger that’s barely controlled.
I lean back against the mirror. The cold glass against my shoulder blades is a shock that does nothing to cool the heat building between my legs.
His hand slides up my inner thigh. Pushes the dress higher. His fingers find the edge of my underwear and pull it aside without hesitation, and then he’s touching me—two fingers on my clit, working in tight circles with a precision that makes my vision blur.
“Yes,” I hiss. Because that’s the only word left. “Yes… there…”
He watches my face while he works me. Reads me. Adjusts pressure, speed, angle, all without asking, and every adjustment is right. My hips roll against his hand, chasing the friction. The sounds coming out of my mouth are not sounds I make in public. The bathroom amplifies them. I don’t care.
His free hand is already at his belt. I help, my fingers shaking as I work the buckle, the button, the zipper.
I get my hand inside and wrap my fingers around him, and my brain short-circuits.
He’s thick and heavy and hot in my grip, big enough that my hand doesn’t close fully around him, and the combination of intimidation and want makes me tighten my legs and pull him closer.
“Now,” I say. “I need… I need… Now!”
He makes a sound that’s pure wolf, and I feel a flood of wet gush from me.
Glancing down, he pulls my underwear further aside and lines himself up.
The first push is slow, and I feel every inch of it; the stretch, the sting, the impossible fullness of him seated deep.
My head drops back against the mirror. When he bottoms out, the sound I make is half pain, half relief, and entirely involuntary.
He stills. “You okay?”
“If you stop, I swear to God—”
He doesn’t stop.
His hips roll forward, and I wrap both arms around his neck and look down.
Between us, in the fluorescent light, I can see everything.
His cock sliding into me, slick and flushed.
The way my body opens for him, lips spreading wide around his girth.
The wet sounds we make, raw and obscene and unbearably real.
He grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls my head back to expose my throat. His mouth drags along the line of my neck, and his teeth graze the tendon—not biting, not quite, but the threat of it sends a contraction through me that makes him swear under his breath. He slams in harder.
“Oh… fuck!” I choke out as heat begins to build low in the pit of my belly. “Yes! Oh… oh fuck!” At this rate, I’m going to come faster than I ever have in my life.
The pace builds. The washbasin creaks under our weight. His thrusts are deep and measured at first, then harder, faster, driven by whatever is unravelling in both of us.
The angle is perfect; he’s hitting something inside me with every stroke that winds the pressure tighter and tighter.
I’m gripping the edge of the basin with one hand and his shoulder with the other, and my legs are shaking, and my wolf is howling inside me with a sound that isn’t lust…
It’s recognition, wild and triumphant, as if she’s found something she’s been searching for.
When he slides a hand between us and rubs his thumb over my clit, I come so hard my vision flares white.
Not a slow build; an ambush. One second, I’m climbing, and the next I’m gone, my whole body locking around him, inner muscles clamping in waves that pull him deeper.
A sound tears out of me that I’ll be embarrassed about later; raw, loud, nothing I can control.
He follows within seconds. His hips snap forward once, twice, and then he’s buried in me and shuddering, his forehead pressed to my shoulder, his breath ragged and hot against my skin.
I feel him pulsing inside me. Feel the heat of him.
The intimacy of it—his weight, his breathing, the tremors running through his arms—is more than I was prepared for.
We stay like that. Both breathing hard. His face is against my neck. My fingers are still twisted in his hair. The fluorescent light hums overhead. A faucet drips.
My wolf is silent for the first time since we walked into this bar. Not restless, not pushing. Quiet. Settled. Content in a way that terrifies me more than anything else tonight.
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His expression isn’t smooth or satisfied. It’s stripped open, confused, like he’s trying to understand something, and the answer isn’t where he expected to find it.
I know the feeling.
He eases out of me. Steps back and tucks himself away. I slide off the washbasin on legs that don’t entirely cooperate and pull my dress down. My underwear is twisted and damp, and I straighten it with hands that are not steady.
We stand in a bar restroom a foot apart, both breathing like we’ve been running, and neither of us speaks for what feels like an eternity.
“Are you okay?” he asks. His voice is rougher than it was.
“Yes. Fine. I’m… Yes.” The words come out in fragments. I don’t stutter. I’m not a woman who stutters. But my brain isn’t fully back online, and my body is still rippling with aftershocks. My wolf is doing something inside my chest that I can’t interpret.
He glances back at the door. “Should we—?”
“I have to go!” I blurt.
“Can I get your number? Or—”
“No.” I’m already moving. Adjusting the dress, finding my balance, reaching for the latch. “I need to— I- I have to go.”
His hand catches the edge of the door. Not blocking me. Just holding the question open.
I look at him one more time. Dark eyes still dazed. The scar through his eyebrow. His shirt half untucked where I grabbed it, revealing an expanse of taut belly.
God, he’s gorgeous.
He looks as undone as I feel, and the urge to stay—to close the distance and press my mouth to his again and find out what happens when we’re not in a bathroom but somewhere with a bed and hours ahead of us—is so strong I have to physically turn away from it.
“Goodbye,” I say quickly. And then I’m through the door, through the hallway, through the bar. I don’t look back. If I look back, I don’t know what I’ll do next.
The night air hits me like cold water. Stars. Trees. Gravel under my boots. I stride to the truck, clamber in, and pull out of the parking lot. Fast. The motel is a couple of miles out of town, and it passes in a blur, the dress riding up my thighs with every gearshift.
What the fuck was that?
Not the sex. Sex I understand: stress, adrenaline, a good-looking man, an evening that got away from me. The sex makes sense. At least I’m not in cycle—pregnancy isn’t a risk outside of my wolf heat—but I still should know better than to let a stranger that close without knowing a thing about him.
What doesn’t make sense is my wolf. The way she went quiet when he was inside me.
Not restless the way she normally is, but settled.
Like she’d found a den she’d been looking for.
Like he was a place she belonged. And the pull I feel now, leaving him, is physical.
A hook somewhere behind my breastbone, tugging me back toward a man I don’t know, in a town I can’t trust, in the middle of a mission that doesn’t have room for whatever this is.
I keep driving. The pull doesn’t fade. It aches.
Briar is sitting in the dark when I get in. By the window, legs crossed, knife across her knee. She looks at me—my hair messed, dress creased, face flushed—and says nothing.
I wait for the comment. The raised eyebrow. The lecture on why sleeping with a local is a compromising move.
“I found a secondary approach to the creek crossing,” she says. “Gonna take a closer look at dawn.”
“Good.” I don’t say more, just turn and stumble out of the room, my cheeks burning.
I change out of the dress in the bathroom, then stand under the tepid shower, scrubbing as if my life depends on it. I get out. Pull on a T-shirt and shorts. Lie down. Close my eyes.
I can feel him. Not just the physical aftereffects: the pulse between my legs, the tenderness where he gripped my thighs. Something else. A thread, thin and new, stretching from somewhere deep in my chest toward a house I’ve never been to, attached to a man whose last name I didn’t ask for.
My wolf curls tight inside me, facing the echo of him, and does not let go.