16. Chapter 16
Sable
His mouth is warm.
That is the first thought, stupidly simple and devastating. I have measured his temperature, counted his pulse, checked his pupils, watched his breathing under sedation for two weeks, and none of that prepared me for the living heat of his lips on mine.
He kisses carefully at first, learning the shape of my mouth the way he seems to learn everything now: with focus, with restraint, with a kind of fierce attention that makes my knees weaken.
Then my hand slides into his hair. His breath catches against my cheek.
The careful part ends.
His arm comes around my waist and pulls me into him.
The kiss opens, his tongue finding my lower lip, his hand tightening on my hip.
The heat of it pours down through my chest and pools low in my belly.
He tastes like smoke and cold water, and underneath that, pure male.
My fingers grip his hair. He groans against my mouth, and the sound vibrates through me.
He pulls back. Just far enough to see my face.
“Sable.” His eyes are like sapphire in the firelight, and the man is right there, no sign of the wolf.
“I’m here,” I say. “Stay with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Can I touch you?”
He nods.
I reach for his shirt and slide my fingers under the hem.
His stomach tightens under my knuckles. Hard muscle, sudden flinch. I stop with my hand half under the fabric and make myself wait.
His eyes are wide, fixed on mine, and for a moment, the cave disappears from his face. Wherever he’s gone, it isn’t here. It isn’t with me.
So I give him stillness.
No pushing. No coaxing. No pretending I haven’t felt the way his body braced for harm.
Just my palm against his stomach and the fire working gold over his skin.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Yeah.” His voice is thick. “Just…not used to it.”
I keep my hand where it is until his breathing changes. Not calm exactly, but willing. His abdomen eases under my palm, one guarded inch at a time.
Then I push the shirt up.
He lifts his arms and lets me pull it over his head.
Firelight spills over him: scars, muscle, shadows, the dark line of hair disappearing beneath his waistband. I know this body by wound and fever and sedation charts. I know the map of damage they left behind, and the places where healing has begun to knit over it.
But I have never had him looking back at me while I touched him.
I press my palm to the center of his chest.
His heart slams against it.
Beneath the heartbeat, the other current wakes. I’ve felt traces of it before in sickroom silence and drugged sleep, but here, with his skin hot under my hand and his eyes open on mine, it rises with a different shape. Quieter. Deeper. Drawn toward me instead of pushing me away.
It travels through my wrist, up my arm, and settles low in my body.
I lean forward and press my mouth to his collarbone.
His breath hitches.
My lips move along the ridge of bone to his shoulder, and I feel his hand come up, hovering near my waist, not quite touching, the restraint costing him.
“Touch me,” I murmur against his skin.
His hand settles on my waist. His thumb finds the strip of bare skin above my waistband and moves there once, slowly enough to make my stomach tighten. The gentleness of it sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with cold.
I straighten and take his hand, guiding it to the top button of my shirt.
He understands before I say anything.
The first button opens under his fingers, and his knuckle brushes the hollow of my throat.
He pauses there, watching my face, then moves to the next.
Fabric loosens by inches. Firelight slips beneath cotton.
His thumb follows the edge of my bra, not quite crossing it, and that single touch makes my breathing catch.
By the fourth button, my shirt hangs open, and his fingers are moving over the newly bared skin with the concentration of a man learning a language by touch: sternum, rib, the soft place between my breasts where my pulse seems to have moved.
By then, my breathing is ragged.
He pushes the shirt off my shoulders. It falls. The cold air hits my skin, and I shiver, but his hands are there, warm, broad, sliding up my arms and over my shoulders and down to the clasp at my back.
He undoes it. His hands are steady. When the fabric falls away, he goes still.
His eyes move over me. Not the wolf’s hard stare. A man looking at a woman he wants, and the naked hunger on his face makes my nipples tighten.
“You’re lovely,” he breathes, and I swallow hard.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I murmur, trying to keep my tone light. Because this is intense, and I’m not quite sure what to do with the emotions.
His hand cups my breast. His thumb drags across the peak, and the sensation shoots straight down between my thighs. I arch into his palm. He does it again—watching my face, reading my reaction the way he reads everything—and when I bite my lip and squirm, his pupils blow wide.
“Come here,” he says.
I move into him. Mouth to mouth. The kiss is different now; deeper, urgent, his tongue stroking mine while his hands learn the shape of my waist, my ribs, the curve of my hips. I press against him and feel his cock hard against my stomach through his pants, and the heat of it makes me clench.
His mouth drops to my neck. The hollow below my ear—where he breathed me in earlier—and his lips drag down the tendon to my shoulder.
His teeth graze the skin, and I feel the wolf in it.
The edge of something held back. But his hands are careful on my waist, and when I press closer, he lets me set the pace.
My hand moves down his chest. Across the flat planes of his stomach. Lower. I trace the line of muscle above his waistband. His belly tightens. When I slide my hand lower and palm him through the fabric, he jerks, a full-body snap, his hips pushing into my grip, a rough sound punching out of him.
I still my hand. Watch.
His eyes are squeezed shut. His jaw is locked. But his hips are pressing forward, chasing the pressure, and the sound he made wasn’t pain.
I squeeze gently. His head drops back.
“Fuck.” The word is guttural, wrenched from him. His hands grip my waist hard enough that I’ll have marks.
I undo the front of his pants, taking my time with it…the button, the zip, my knuckles dragging against him through the fabric. He’s panting by the time I push the waistband down and wrap my hand around his shaft.
He’s thick. Hard. Hot against my palm. When I stroke him—slow, root to tip—his whole body shudders. His hands leave my waist and brace against the cave floor, fingers digging into the tarp.
“Look at me,” I say.
He opens his eyes. The blue is burning. His chest is heaving. He looks like a man on the edge of something he doesn’t know how to fall into, and the vulnerability of it hits me harder than the hunger.
I stroke him again. Slower. My thumb sweeps across the silky head, and his hips jerk off the ground. The sound he makes is almost broken.
“Too much?” I ask.
“No.” His voice is torn. “Just— It’s been— I don’t—”
He breaks off, jaw tight, eyes bright and fierce with the effort of staying present. I understand enough. Years of hands on him, and none of them like this. Years of touch meaning restraint, pain, sedation, control.
Now my hand is around him, my mouth is on his skin, and pleasure is hitting a body trained to brace for harm.
I lean down and kiss his chest, then his stomach, then the ridge of muscle along his hip. He trembles under my mouth, a deep shudder that moves through him in waves, and his hand comes into my hair.
He doesn’t push.
His fingers curl against my scalp and stay there, holding on while he lets me choose the pace.
I rise back up and kiss his mouth. His hands find my remaining clothes, less steady now, tugging at fabric, his knuckles bumping my hip bone, his breath coming short against my lips as he works the last barrier down my legs.
I help him, kicking the cloth free, and then there is nothing between us. Bare skin against bare skin.
The shock of it takes the air from both of us.
“God, you feel good,” I exhale.
He is all heat and hard muscle against me, chest to breast, stomach to stomach, his cock pressed between us as I hook my leg over his hip. His hand closes on my thigh, fingers digging into the muscle, and pulls me tighter.
His mouth finds my throat. My collarbone. Lower. His lips close over my nipple, and my back arches hard, a moan tearing out of me. He stays there, tongue working, teeth grazing as his hand slides between my thighs. His fingers find my clit, and my hips buck.
“Rafael!” I gasp.
He stills. Reads me. Then he does it again, circling, pressing, adjusting the pressure when my breathing changes.
The precision is devastating. He pays complete attention, with a focus that leaves no room for error.
When I whimper and press into his hand, he gives me more. When I pull back, he eases.
“There,” I manage. “Right there! Don’t stop—”
He doesn’t stop. His fingers work me with a patience that makes me want to scream, building the tension in slow, relentless circles until my thighs are shaking and my hand is fisted in his hair.
“I want you inside me,” I say. “Now.”
His hand leaves me. I almost protest, but he’s already moving, settling between my thighs, his weight braced on one arm. I reach down and guide him, wrapping my fingers around his shaft, sliding the head of his cock along my slick folds. We both shudder.
“Slow,” I breathe. It’s been years, and he’s big, and I need the adjustment. “Go slow.”
He pushes in. Inch by inch. My body opens around him…the stretch, the burn, the fullness that borders on too much. I grip his shoulders and breathe through it. He stops halfway, every muscle locked with the effort of holding back.
“More,” I tell him.
He pushes deeper. All the way. My breath leaves me. His forehead drops to my shoulder, and for a moment we’re both still, him buried inside me, his arms trembling, the cave dark beyond the fire and the two of us at its center.
I feel his heartbeat where we’re joined. Or I imagine I do. The pulse of him everywhere, his chest against mine, his cock inside me, the hum vibrating through his ribs into mine.
I move first. A slow roll of my hips that makes us both exhale.
He answers. His hips meet mine, and the rhythm starts, slow, deep, his hands gripping my hips, finding the angle that makes me gasp. He holds the angle. Stays with it. Each thrust deliberate, measured, reading my body’s response.
My legs wrap around him. My nails drag down his back. The rhythm builds; not frantic, but inexorable. His mouth on my throat, my collarbone. His teeth scrape my shoulder, and I feel the wolf surge behind his ribs—the pressure, the need to let loose—and his jaw clenches as he holds the man in place.
“Stay with me,” I whisper.
He groans. His pace picks up. I match him, hips meeting every thrust, the friction building to a tightness that coils through my core. His hand slides between us, his thumb finding my clit again, pressing in time with his thrusts.
The orgasm builds like a wave, the kind that pulls back before it crashes. My thighs tighten around him. My fingers dig into his back.
“Close,” I gasp. “God! Right there, just like that—”
His thumb presses harder. His cock drives deeper. And it breaks—pleasure ripping through me in waves that make my eyes roll back, my body clenching around him, a sound tearing out of my throat that I’d be embarrassed about if I could think. I can’t think. All I can do is feel.
“Fuck,” he chokes out as he follows me over.
His rhythm shatters. His hips drive deep, his arms lock around my waist, and I feel him come inside me: the pulse of his cock, the heat of it, the rough sound torn from his chest as his face presses into my throat.
The power comes with him.
It doesn’t break outward this time. It doesn’t crack stone or shiver the air or make the fire gutter in the pit. It moves through the places where we’re joined, through his body into mine, a low chord of sensation that turns my bones liquid and makes every nerve answer at once.
My fingers go numb against his back. My spine arches. For a second, I can’t tell where his heartbeat ends, and mine begins.
Then I understand.
The sound. The force. The thing they tried to carve out of him and turn into a weapon. It was never only violence.
It’s his magic.
We stay tangled on the tarp. His arms around me. His face in my neck. The sweat cools. His breathing slows.
His hand traces up my spine. Stops between my shoulder blades and rests there, palm flat.
“Sable,” he says against my skin. My name, said with a wonder that makes my throat tighten.
I curl closer. The hum fades to something barely there, a warmth under my skin that pulses in time with his heartbeat.
The fire has burned to embers. The cave glows with the last of the coals. Outside, the snow has silenced everything.
His hand tightens on my back. “I remember something. About the music.”
“What?”
“A piece I used to conduct. I can hear the cellos.”
I hold still. Listening to him.
“I want to find it again,” he says. “The music. When this is over.”
My chest tightens. When this is over means he thinks there’s an after. An after where he’s not running, not caged, not sedated. An after that includes me.
Am I ready to think about that?
“We’ll find it,” I say.
His breathing evens. Sleep takes him gently. Just a man falling asleep with a woman in his arms.
I lie in the ember-light and think about the word that’s been sitting between us all evening. The one neither of us said by the fire when the conversation turned to bonds and wolves and the gravity of recognition.
Mate.
It sits in my chest the way his heartbeat sat under my palm for weeks. Steady. Patient. Waiting for me to stop pretending I don’t know what it means.
Outside the cave, Aurora’s people are looking for us. Brenna is waiting for an explanation. The world hasn’t stopped being dangerous because a man said my name the way every woman longs to hear it.
I close my eyes. His arm is heavy around me.
My wolf is quiet. Not dormant. Not suppressed.
Content.
That confuses me more than anything else.