28 Tommy #2
I rinsed the towel and the water in the basin went black, and I did it again, the curve of her throat, careful around the ash-mark because that one stayed, that one was hers now.
Her shoulder where the collar of my shirt fell away.
Her hands—I took each one and opened the fingers and washed the dried blood out of the creases of her knuckles, the blood that wasn’t hers, and I cataloged every place the day had marked her.
The bruise blooming purple on her forearm where the hex-cuff had bitten.
The scrape on the heel of her palm. The raw place at her wrist.
She watched me do it with an expression I didn’t have a name for, and through the bond I felt the thing crack open in her—the grief, the contrast, the body that had only ever known clinical hands and needles and gray-coated cruelty trying to understand a man on his knees washing her clean like she was the most precious thing the fire had spared.
“They never—” she started, and stopped.
“I know.” I pressed my mouth to the bruise on her forearm, light as I could. “I know, sweetheart.”
“You don’t have to be gentle with me.”
“I do, actually.” I rinsed the cloth a last time and set it aside and looked up at her.
“Not because you’re breakable. You’re the least breakable person I’ve ever met.
I have to be gentle because you’ve had enough hands on you that weren’t, and I’m going to spend the rest of my extremely long wolf life changing that.
” I let the under-voice come up, the one from below all the jokes.
“Grandma used to say you can tell what a man worships by what he does with his hands when nobody’s making him. So.”
And that was when Kaia Thorne reached down, fisted both hands in the front of my undershirt, and hauled me up off the floor.
“Stop,” she said against my mouth, and then, when I froze, she smiled against my mouth. “Stop being careful, I mean. I’ve had careful. I want the rest of it.”
The kiss broke whatever was left of my restraint.
I got us up onto the bed, my weight braced on my forearms because she was small and I am not, the mattress groaning under the sheer, sudden impact of us.
She got my shirt off over my head, her hands frantic, the cool air of the room instantly replaced by the blistering heat radiating off her skin.
She pressed both palms flat to my chest the way you’d check a heartbeat, and I felt her feel it—the way the lethal apex predator she’d cuffed and commanded was shaking under her hands.
Knowing I was doing that to her was a different kind of fire. Knowing she was doing it to me was the whole world.
Her scent crashed over me, completely unfiltered for the first time—rain on slate, wild honey, dark earth, the smell of a hillside the morning after a storm finally breaks.
It flooded my lungs and I dragged my mouth down the line of her throat, agonizingly careful around the ash-mark, and stripped away my shirt.
The sight of her flushed, bare, and reaching for me in the firelight ended every higher cognitive function I owned.
The lush, hidden curves she had spent her life suppressing beneath shapeless gray tunics were finally exposed, the pale skin flushed with a violent, beautiful heat.
Ours, the wolf roared, tearing at the leash. Ours forever. Mark her. Take her.
Wait, I commanded the beast, though my own pulse hammered a frantic, deafening rhythm in my ears. She sets the pace. We do not hurt her.
I worshipped my way down. I dragged my rough hands over the delicate slope of her ribs, marveling at the soft give of her stomach.
I found a purple bruise on her hip, and I kissed it once, twice, a silent apology and a vow.
My mouth moved upward, closing over the soft, heavy curve of her breast. I took the tight, flushed peak between my lips and sucked, my teeth grazing the sensitive nerve endings.
The sound she made—broken, surprised, hungry—nearly took me out at the knees. She arched into my mouth, her fingers fisting desperately in my dark hair, dragging me closer instead of pushing me off.
“Tommy,” she gasped, her voice shattering on the syllables.
“I’m right here,” I rasped against her damp skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I parted her thighs, the scent of her arousal hitting me so hard my vision literally went amber at the edges.
The dark earth and wild honey were drowning in a heavy, musky sweetness that drove the animal inside me completely feral.
I pressed my mouth directly against her slick, swollen folds.
She tasted incredible, a rush of salt and storm-rinsed honey that obliterated my logic.
I traced a slow, deliberate circle over the swollen bundle of nerves with my tongue, lapping up her dripping wetness, and Kaia’s spine bowed off the mattress in a violent arc.
A ragged sob tore from her throat. My wolf surged, drunk on the taste of her, on the sheer power of reducing the controlled, untouchable Steward to this desperate, thrashing creature.
I kept my mouth there, working my tongue in a relentless, wet rhythm, drinking from her until she was blindly bucking her hips against my face to beg for more.
I slid two thick fingers deep into her dripping heat.
She was impossibly slick, the wetness coating my knuckles as her inner walls clamped down around my intrusion with a crushing, greedy grip.
“Please,” she begged, her toned thighs locking around my shoulders to drag my mouth closer. She didn’t want careful. Out of her mind with desire, she was ruthless in trying to take what she needed. “Please.”
I sucked the swollen knot into my mouth, the wet friction bringing her straight to the boiling point. Kaia shattered. The climax ripped through her like a shockwave. She screamed my name, her inner walls spasming violently, milking my fingers as the release tore through her.
I dragged my heavy body upward over hers, bringing the intoxicating taste of her own slick arousal to her skin.
I propped myself on my elbows, the aching head of my erection resting exactly where we both desperately needed it.
I was shaking with the effort of holding back.
Every nerve I owned was screaming to thrust forward, to bury myself to the hilt and never leave.
But I stopped. I forced the animal down, because there was a thing I had to say and I was not going to be the kind of man who said it after.
“Kaia. Look at me.”
Her eyes opened. The startling, suppressed gold was burning all the way through now, blown wide, hazy with the edge of her climax.
“Reed said the lines need heirs.” The words cost me.
I had to force them through a throat that felt lined with broken glass.
“Pups, to anchor the magic. To spit in the Order’s face after they spent three hundred years sterilizing and harvesting our kind.
That’s the mandate. That’s the war.” I pressed my forehead to hers, my breath coming in jagged tears.
“And you don’t owe that war one single cell of your body.
Not after what they did to you in that place.
So we use protection tonight, and Reed gets his Compact some other way, and nobody—not my alpha, not a king, not the moon goddess herself—gets to command this. This is yours. You hear me? Yours.”
I felt the wound move in her through the bond. The deepest one, the one the Order had carved into her spine before she had language for it: you are a resource to be managed, your body is not your own, the choice was made before you knew you had one.
She reached up. She cupped my jaw in both her clean hands, the gold in her eyes gone blazing and absolutely certain.
“A pup isn’t a duty,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver.
Not once. “It’s the most defiant thing I could ever do.
They built me to end bloodlines, Tommy. To process them and shelve them and write the numbers down.
” She pulled my mouth a breath from hers.
“I want to start one. With you. I want to build a whole future out of this ash and I want to choose it, right now, free, with nobody’s hand on me but yours. ”
The last wall in either of us came down.
I sank into her in one long, deliberate stroke, no barrier, no suppressant, no hex-cuff, nothing in the world between us, and the agonizing, incredible stretch of her accommodating my full size sent a shockwave of absolute rightness straight to the base of my spine.
It obliterated every word in my head. She took all of me, arching her back and locking her legs around my hips, demanding more, and I gave it to her—the storm, the uncaged thing, the pure, unfiltered want I’d been strangling since she slid a cuff onto my wrist.
Ours, the wolf chanted, driving my hips forward in a relentless, punishing rhythm. Ours, ours, ours, and it wasn’t a question anymore and it wasn’t a prayer, it was a fact being written into the bones of the earth.
Yours, her wolf screamed back, meeting mine blow for blow in the dark, golden space between our minds. Yours, yours, yours!
She matched me physically too. Her nails dug into the corded muscle of my back, scoring tracks I would wear for days.
My name broke apart in her mouth, the pack-link humming gold and distant as the others pulled their presence completely back to give us this isolated universe.
The light slid silver across her sweat-slicked skin, and the bed and the room and the war all fell away.
There was only the woman who had burned down her whole world to choose this, choosing it again, and again, and again.
The friction built the way a backfire crests a ridge—fast, totally consuming, leaving no oxygen in its wake.
She gasped, her head throwing back, completely undone as I ground the thick root of my shaft against her swollen center.
I was lost to the scent of her arousal, the taste of her on my own lips, the desperate, wrecked sounds tearing out of her throat.