20. Norah
Chapter twenty
Norah
I’m almost running by the time we reach my rowhouse. I don’t give myself time to reconsider what I’m about to do.
Thinking is very useful until it isn’t. Right now, it isn’t.
Because if I think about what happened on the street, I’ll have to feel it. And if I feel it, I’ll have to deal with the fact that my dead mother’s love story just got used as a weapon against me. On a public sidewalk. In front of the man I’ve been trying to figure out how to trust.
I’m not ready for that yet.
What I am ready to do is this.
I turn around and grab his shirt, and I pull him down to me.
The kiss starts how I intend to start, not soft and exploring like last week after the lake.
It’s hard and immediate, no preamble, no testing the edges.
It tastes like the afternoon and like a month of wondering what his cock feels like inside me.
A month of being wound up like a cuckoo clock ready to start singing.
His eyes widen at my urgency, but his hands find my waist before I’ve finished deciding to do this, telling me everything I need to know about where his head is.
I lean into it, the warmth of him moving through me immediately.
Decision made. I want this man, and if stopping means I’m thinking, then I don’t want to think; I only want to feel.
His mouth is hot and certain on mine, the kiss deepening before I ask it to. I slide my hands up his chest and feel the solid reality of him under the fabric and decide the fabric is a problem.
I start working his buttons.
I don’t bother being careful.
One button. Two. My fingers are shaking so hard he helps me with them. The fabric parts, and my hands find skin—hotter than I expected, hotter than makes sense, and whatever that does to me, it does it immediately, and I stop pretending I have any interest in slowing down.
He makes a sound against my mouth.
It is low and rough, nothing like his usual control.
I feel his attention coming closer to the surface, and instead of pulling back from it I lean into it, because I’ve seen the wolf, and it didn’t scare me, and I’m not afraid of it now. I welcome it now.
His hands tighten at my waist.
Then one of them slides up my back, under the hem of my shirt, and his palm is hot and rough against my skin.
The contact sends a sharp rush of heat through me that moves faster than thought, arriving in my chest and my stomach simultaneously, and I rise onto my toes because I need to be closer to whatever this is.
“Off,” I say against his mouth.
He pulls his shirt off and over his head. His eyes are doing the thing—the green gone wolf-bright, the luminous thing that has no business existing in a man this controlled and which my body has been reading as arousal rather than threat.
I have appreciated him in fitted shirts with the measured appreciation of a woman exercising restraint.
This is not that. This is the reality of a man who works with his hands and carries himself with the unselfconscious ease of someone who has never once worried about whether his body is adequate to the moment.
I press my hip bones into him and find him more than adequate to the moment.
I move my hands on him, trying to memorize the shape, the solidity, the absolute beauty of him. I feel the ridges in his chest, graze my fingers in wonderment over the muscles outlined in his shoulders. The geography of muscle moves under my palms when he breathes.
He reaches for the hem of my shirt. His hands slide it up and over and it goes somewhere I don’t track. His eyes move over me. It is the wolf looking, focused and certain and entirely decided, and I feel the intensity of his attention across my skin.
“Norah,” he says.
Low. Rough at the edges—new information about what he sounds like when the control is shattered.
“Don’t stop,” I say.
He doesn’t. Not yet.
He kisses me deeper, and I tip my head back, my hands tightening in his hair. The heat of his breath against my skin makes my knees shake. His hands move over me as he walks me back until the bed meets the back of my thighs.
There is no restraint.
No considerations.
And then there is no space between us at all.
What happens next is not gentle. It is not rough, either.
I raise my head, exposing my bare neck, begging Silas to place his entire mouth on the soft space between my collarbone and ear. He grabs my earlobe with his mouth and sucks on it ever so softly.
I moan and arch myself toward him, leaning back as I feel the hard length of him against my stomach. This is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve craved from the first time he showed up on Norwood Street and disrupted everything I thought I had figured out and woke up my cozy, boring little world.
With one hand he unsnaps my bra in the back.
I snicker. “Way too slick, dude. Looks like you’ve had lots of practice.”
He buries his head between my breasts, and I gasp, running my hands through the damp curls at the back of his neck.
“Tell me what you want, Norah.”
His voice is guttural, his wolf on the cusp, and I close my eyes, relishing the goosebumps starting on my thighs and traveling up.
When he finally flips me around, his hands almost spanning my waist and bends me over the bed, I let out a sigh.
“That’s right.”
I hear him growl, low in his chest. Shivers run up my back, the hair on my arms standing on end. This isn’t pure lust. I recognize it for what it is—a survival instinct.
It’s irrational, but I want to push him to the edge, see what he does, what he can do. Because, truth be told, I’m only a little frightened of this man I barely know. A wolf who could tear me apart—or wreck me so thoroughly I’d thank him for it.
He flips my skirt up over my ass, cool air hitting me where I’m burning hot. His finger is under the elastic of my panties, and I squirm, helping him until they are around my ankles. I easily step out of them and spread my legs, arching my back and lifting myself as high as I can.
Silas reaches around and cups my bare breasts, rolling my nipples gently between his fingers and lightly squeezing them until I pant.
“Let me look at you,” he growls.
He holds me away from him, and I look over my shoulder to see him gazing at me, wide open and waiting for him.
I’ve never been so turned on. Watching him devour me with his eyes—I could come right now, but I need to feel him in me.
I gaze at the head of his cock. I can’t drag my eyes away.
It’s as large and hard as a plum, with nearly the same thickness.
I shudder, knowing he’ll fill me in every way, exactly how I’ve imagined.
I’m impatient. Reaching between my legs, I grab him, rubbing him back and forth against my slit. I’m wet, slick with anticipation. I let his head grab the edge and then buck slightly, pushing him out, teasing him until I move him back into position, only to push him out again.
He snarls in frustration and slides his arm all the way around my waist, dragging me tightly against him.
“What do you want? Tell me.” His breath is hot on my neck, sending quivers up my spine. I’m panting now, my breath coming hard and raspy.
His other hand reaches around and down, caressing my opening, his knuckle grazing my clit.
“Please.” It comes out as a wail, a plea for satisfaction.
He has the audacity to laugh. “Beg me.”
I whimper as his fingers slide into me. It feels as if it’s his entire hand, but that’s not what I want. Not this time. I arch harder, moving away from him, seeking his cock.
I whimper again, twisting my hips, searching, hungry for him.
“I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you,” he says. “I could have bent you over that counter and taken you right there with all your books. If I’d asked you nicely in your back room, over tea, would you have let me?”
My breath catches in my throat. All that time sipping tea from mugs and chatting over trivial things, and what he wanted to do was bury his cock in me. I shiver.
“I would have made you eat me out first,” I say tauntingly over my shoulder, knowing it’s true and what I’ve been wanting since that shared moment. “But you can do me now.”
He acts as though he’s been waiting for the command. With one move, he flips me over, and I squeal. I scoot my ass up on the bed, my legs open for his inspection.
“I didn’t know you were such a naughty girl, Norah. I’m going to punish you with my mouth.”
Before I know it, his dark head is between my thighs, buried in me, and I’m splayed out on the bed, aching, calling his name, arching my back for even more contact with his tongue.
“Kiss me.”
And he does, his mouth open on my clit, laving it, sucking it, moving in tandem with my hips as they rise, my climax coming closer and closer.
I yield to him fully, for the moment forgetting Aunt Claire, letting the screwed-up world fall away, and imagine we are simply two people who only want to pleasure each other.
I moan. I’m on the edge, my orgasm so close, he can tell.
“No, not yet.” He raises his head and roughly slides me down to him. “Not before I fuck you so deep, you’re going to think I’m splitting you in two.”
When he enters me, I gasp, the shock of his fullness at first a slice of pain and then an itch finally getting scratched.
We go together. Like a well-fitting glove.
I take every inch of him, tight, welcoming.
He plunges in, at first slowly and then harder, every stroke deeper until he knows I can take him.
“Norah.”
He says my name like a prayer—reverent, careful, as if he’s been saving it.
Like he knows exactly what it does to me.
I can’t get enough breath in my lungs. I feel like I’m levitating, my eyelids flicker. I raise my hand to feel his chest, the beat of his heart, the heat radiating off him, both of us building. His body is a ramrod, and I am taking him every bit of him, matching him stroke for stroke.