8 Sloane #4
I took him into my mouth, swirling my tongue over the sensitive ridge, tasting the salt and the dark, musky scent of his arousal.
He tasted like smoke and power. I sucked hard, drawing the thick length of him deep.
A guttural, animal groan tore out of his chest. His fingers dug into my scalp, holding me there, his restraint fraying with every stroke of my tongue.
When he was slick and shining, I pulled back and shoved hard against his chest.
He hit the stone floor flat on his back. His eyes widened in surprise.
I straddled his hips, rising onto my knees. The cold air raised goosebumps on my skin, my breasts bouncing as I positioned myself over him. He stared up at me, his gaze dropping to my chest, his pupils blown wide.
“I’m not pulling out.” The words were barely controlled. A warning and a vow wrapped in the same ragged breath.
“You better not.” I sank down, impaling myself on him in one slow, agonizingly smooth motion.
The stretch of it—the gorgeous, aching, full-body stretch—made us both cry out. I filled completely, the thick, hot length of him stretching my slick inner walls. I braced my hands on his chest and began to ride.
My hips snapped up and down, setting a frantic, demanding pace.
My breasts swayed with every downward thrust, slick with his saliva.
His large hands reached up to cup them, his thumbs rolling over my tight nipples.
The friction was exquisite. The wet smack of our bodies meeting echoed off the granite walls.
Every nerve ending I owned was alive and screaming.
I rode him hard, demanding everything he had, my wolf howling in triumph.
Then, with a sudden, fluid surge of power, Finn gripped my hips. He rolled, using his massive weight and momentum to flip us over. The world spun, and my back hit his ruined coat.
He settled between my thighs. His eyes were solid, luminous wolf-gold. His jaw set in that devastating line of absolute discipline.
He pulled almost completely out and drove back in, burying himself to the hilt in one long, devastating stroke that pushed the air out of my lungs and sent the pleasure spiking through my core in a blinding rush.
My inner walls clamped down around the impossible thickness of him, every nerve ending alive and screaming.
I locked my legs around his waist and pulled him deeper. He gave a rough, broken moan against my throat that I would carry to my grave.
“Move,” I demanded. “Finn—”
He moved. The deep, grinding strokes of a man who was paying attention to every sound I made. His pubic bone pressed hard against my clit at the base of each stroke, and the dual pressure—inside and out—built the tension in a spiraling climb that tightened my entire body around him.
Through the bond I caught the staggering depth of what he was feeling—
Here, the bond carried. His refrain, running under everything. I’m here. I’m here.
Finally, mine answered. Family.
I pulled his mouth down to mine and kissed him while he moved inside me, swallowing his groans, tasting the salt and the mountain wind and the sweet, dark smoke of him.
His hips snapped harder, the pace building, the stone floor scraping against the coat beneath us with every thrust. The wet sound of our bodies meeting filled the tower—skin on skin.
“Sloane.” My name came out of him wrecked.
He shifted his angle, driving the thick head of his cock against the sensitive spot deep inside me, and the pleasure crested so hard my vision tunneled. “I need—I’m close, I can’t—”
He braced one arm under the small of my back, lifting my hips off the stone, and drove into me with a force that rattled my teeth and set every nerve in my body on fire.
The new angle hit so deep I screamed—an inarticulate sound that bounced off the granite walls and came back to us doubled—and the tension that had been building at the base of my spine detonated.
The orgasm tore through me. My body locked around his, every muscle seizing, my inner walls convulsing in violent, rhythmic pulses that milked the entire length of him.
Through the bond I felt his control shatter—the discipline cracking apart at every seam—and he buried himself to the hilt and came.
The golden heat of it. Goddess, the heat of him, pulsing inside me in heavy, claiming surges that I felt all the way to my spine.
Nothing between his body and mine. Just the raw, intimate reality of my mate emptying his seed into me while the bond roared between us and gold light erupted along my spine.
Spent, he gently pressed his mouth against the bite mark at my throat.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and held on to the only solid thing left in the world.
We lay tangled on his ruined coat, and for a while neither of us spoke.
His heartbeat slowed against my ribs. My wolf curled up inside my chest, sated and drowsy, a creature so profoundly content that her quiet, golden hum was almost indistinguishable from silence.
I pressed my cheek to his sternum and listened to his breathing and felt, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, the absence of fear.
The Saint was still out there. Reed’s pack was still walking blind. The danger hadn’t gone anywhere.
But the fear was gone.
I traced the ash mark at his wrist with my fingertip—my safehouses, my people, my Oath, living in his skin now—and the enormity of what we’d done settled over me.
“Finn.”
“Mm.”
“We just made a decision that’s going to change the entire war.”
His chest moved under my cheek with a silent exhale that might have been a laugh. “We just made a decision that’s going to change everything.”
I tilted my head up. His pale eyes were open, staring at the timber ceiling, and there was something in them I couldn’t read—a vast, quiet thing that lived deeper than the hotshot and the wolf and the Treaty Court heir.
The man underneath all of it, holding still in the aftermath, doing math I couldn’t see.
“The radio,” I said.
His jaw tightened. “Yeah.”
I pressed my mouth against his collarbone. “Reed needs to know about Severance. About the fake coordinates. About the clusters converging on Santos’ map.” I drew a breath. “We need to get off this mountain and find some signal.”
“The Saint is sitting on every frequency below the ridge. And the ward you drew on the door is holding, but it’s your magic, not mine. I don’t know how long—”
“It’s your magic now.” I tapped the ash mark at his wrist. “Treaty Court. The Oath recognized its source. It’ll hold as long as your blood does.”
Something moved across his face—grief, wonder, the weight of a burden he hadn’t asked for but would carry without complaint until it killed him.
“Then we have time,” he said. “Not much. But enough.”
“Enough for what?”
He looked down at me, and the corner of his mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Enough to figure out how exactly to tell my alpha I found my mate and we completed his quorum all in the same night.”
A laugh tore out of me—sudden, bright, in the gray silence of the tower. It was the first real laugh I’d produced in longer than I could remember, and it echoed off the stone walls and came back to us warm.
He caught it with his mouth. Kissed the laughter right off my lips, slow and thorough, and when he pulled back his eyes were full of something I would spend the rest of my life looking forward to.
But outside the cracked glass, the sky over the eastern ridge had gone from ash to pale gold.