20. Norah #2
I open my eyes, and I’m transfixed; his green eyes flashing amber behind the green. When he finally breaks, I go with it completely, my release exploding behind my eyes, leaving my ears ringing, my thighs clenching.
We hold on to each other, locked together like two animals, spent, exhausted. My breathing matches his as I focus on the hardness of his cock still in me. I clench around him, and he twitches.
And then his cock moving inside me—incredibly, unbelievably—makes me want to do it all over again. Without pause.
I reach up and bring him down to me. His mouth is hot—a cavern I want to explore with my tongue, my teeth. I nibble at the sensitive edges of his mouth, run my tongue over his lips and suck them gently.
He lowers his head and opens his mouth, finding my erect, sensitive nipples. Bringing them together, he flicks his tongue from one to the other, lapping and sucking until I want to scream. When my hand moves to my clit, he grabs my wrists, positioning them over my head.
“Uh-uh. If you want more, I’ll be the one giving it to you.”
I hear the teasing in his voice, but there’s a rough edge to it as well. I shudder and buck my hips into him.
“Silas, tell me what you want. What do you want me to do to you?”
He loosens his hold on my wrists as a growl rumbles from the back of his throat. It’s not a human sound; this is his wolf, still very much on the cusp. I’m not satiated, and I want the wolf even more than another orgasm.
I slip out from under him and quickly straddle him.
“Do what you want,” he moans.
“What I want more than anything is to bring your wolf as far forward as he’s ever been. Will you let me? Will you let yourself?”
He opens his eyes and looks at me, trying to decipher my meaning.
“I want to learn what you want too,” I say. “Don’t shut me out.”
Then I slide down the length of his body, caressing and kissing his neck, his stomach, then his lower abs.
I know now what the expression your body is your temple means.
They mean Silas Coulter. The man is solid muscle, thick dark hair covering his chest, with a treasure trail that is made to be explored.
I nibble, lick, and suck, until finally, my mouth is over the head of his cock.
“Arrgh.” Silas raises his hips, but I push him down. “Not yet. When I’m done, if you want to finish in me, it’ll be with me on top riding you with everything I’ve got.”
“Fuck.”
I bury my head in him, breathing in the soft scent of me. Then I begin to love him. First, I run my tongue up and down his shaft, lifting it gently and lap the entire length from the back.
His response is a growl. Not a throaty growl, but the sound a wolf makes defending their kill from interlopers. A growl that comes right before he sinks his teeth in the jugular.
I don’t stop. I don’t even blink. I’m too turned on to consider that I might be in danger.
As I run my tongue around the tip of his engorged cock, I start to throb.
I need this man inside me again. I take him in my mouth, as much as I can, and move quickly, at pace with his hips thrusting up and down.
“Oh, Norah. Don’t stop.”
I don’t. But I want this man inside me too badly. I can’t last much longer before I come again.
When my lips come off him, he sighs. He thinks it’s over. With one quick move, I’m straddling him, my hips positioned over the head of his cock. I move by feel, not even having to guide him into me. All I do is sit, and he’s in me up to his balls.
“Fuuck!”
I move off slowly as he tries to follow me, then roughly push him down. “You want more?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I lower myself again. “You’re doing so well. Tell me how you like it.”
“Faster.”
There’s no need for foreplay. This isn’t loving, or careful, or patient. This is a primal hunger to be satisfied. A need for release and nothing more.
Silas grabs my hips, moving me back and forth against the length of him.
My hands find his forearms, and I stop. The muscle under my palms is hard in a way that has nothing to do with effort—dense, coiled, a body built to run and hunt.
I look at his face. His eyes have gone fully amber, not a trace of green left in them, and I know without being told that I am not just with Silas right now.
I am with all of him. My heart hammers in my chest, and I gasp.
I hold his gaze anyway, and I don’t look away.
Leaning over him, every inch of me touches him, my breasts pressed against his chest. I’m so close as he works me against him.
When I’m on the cusp of becoming sore, he senses it. He holds me tight, stilling his body and I feel him growing in me. At the same time my body arches and I explode around his shaft, shuddering as the wet warmth of him runs down my legs.
I roll off him, totally drained and sated.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he moans.
I laugh softly.
“But what a way to die, eh?”
Afterward, we lie together, his still stiff cock laid out across his stomach.
He strokes my arm, starting at my shoulder and working his way down to my wrist. Soft, featherlight, his finger barely graze the raised hairs.
We lie there, the sounds of the late afternoon city on the other side of the wall. His breathing slows. Mine does, too.
His stillness changes into a kind I haven’t felt from him before, not the taut, controlled quiet of a man holding himself back, but the other quiet, the quiet of a wolf that has found what it was searching for.
He pulls back and looks at me.
His eyes are bright, the wolf still present, and I feel the effort it costs him to hold that stillness, the contained tension of a man barely containing the wolf pressing at the edges of his control.
“You’re using me to outrun whatever you’re avoiding,” he says.
His voice is rough. His hands are still on me. The wanting is still there.
“Yes,” I say. “And I still want this. Both things are true.”
He studies me.
“I’m not confused. I’m choosing it. Right now. With complete disclosure that my crazy, dysfunctional family has me acting kind of kooky. I’m choosing it, anyway.”
His composure drops, and what’s underneath is honest—the wolf looking for the truth beneath the words.
He finds it. It’s there.
His forehead drops to mine.
“Norah,” he says, and the word has everything in it.
“I know,” I say. “Be here with me.”
The wolf goes completely, absolutely still.
He pulls back slowly.
Not far. Just enough. His hands stay where they are—one at my jaw, one at my waist, looking at me in the low light of the bedroom with an expression that’s not an apology and isn’t a question.
He tips his forehead to mine, and we stay there for a moment, both of us breathing, the charged air of the last few minutes giving way to simple closeness.
He scoots me up to the headboard with him, and we fall back against the pillows in a tangle that is slightly graceless, and he tucks me against his side. My head rests on his chest, his arm around me, as the ceiling fan moves lazily above us.
His hand moves slowly up and down my arm, raising the fine hair with every stroke.
I’m so relaxed, I’m almost unable to move. He’s everywhere, the warmth of him, the weight of his hand, the steady sound of his breathing. My pulse hasn’t entirely returned to normal and neither has his.
“That was a lot,” I say finally, meaning Claire and the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry that happened,” Silas says.
“I know she loves me. But what she said…” My words trail off.
“I know.”
His hand stills on my arm for a moment, then resumes. I trace an absent pattern on his bare chest, running my fingers through the dark hairs, still wet with our combined sweat. The room is silent except for the two of us not needing to fill the silence.
“I’m not running,” I say.
“I know.”
“I only wanted…”
I stop and start again. “I wanted to be here with you. That’s the whole truth.”
His arm tightens around me slightly.
“I know,” he says again, and somehow it lands differently each time.
I prop myself up on one elbow and look at him.
He looks back. His face is warm and present and not going anywhere.
When I reach out and push his hair back from his forehead, he catches my palm and brings it to his mouth.
His warm breath, his soft lips pressed against the sensitive skin of my palm, sending shivers up my spine.
I stare at the ceiling for a while.
“I know why she did it. Not the reason she gave herself,” I say. “The real one. She watched my mother love someone that cost her everything. For the last thirty years, Aunt Claire has believed that was the only possible outcome.” I pause. “She actually thought she was protecting me.”
He nods gently.
“She’s not wrong that it’s complicated,” I say. “She’s wrong that complicated means impossible.”
“Yes,” he says. “She is.”
I turn my head and look at him. He’s looking back at me. Present. Certain. Grounded underneath everything.
“I chose this,” I say.
I see the real warmth underneath it.
“I know.”
“Good,” I say.
“Tell me something,” he says, after a while. “Something about you. Something I probably wouldn’t know about until we’d known each other for years.”
“You mean the fast-track information that turns a new relationship into a do-or-die?”
He nods, smiling. “I promise I won’t run screaming out the door.”
I think about it until I have one.
“I broke into the dean’s office when I was seventeen, a freshman in college,” I say.
He looks at me, eyebrows raised.