Chapter 9 What She Wants
Liza POV
I crossed the cabin to him. I never broke stride to question the timing.
I put my hands on his jaw, tilted his mouth down to mine, and kissed him the way I’d been wanting to since the generator shed, since the garage stairs, since the first time his scent hit me through falling snow at the West gate.
Dominic’s restraint lasted exactly as long as it took my lips to touch his.
His hands came up into my hair, fingers sliding through it, pulling the tie loose so it fell heavy around my shoulders. He groaned against my mouth, a low, rough sound. Then his hands dropped to my waist and hauled me against him. When he kissed me back, there was nothing careful about it.
He tasted like black coffee and cold air and Dominic. His tongue found mine and I made a sound I didn’t recognize, something between a gasp and a moan, and his grip on my waist tightened until I could feel each of his fingers pressing through my base layer.
He pulled back far enough to look at me. His eyes were nearly black, the brown swallowed by blown pupils, and his chest was moving fast. Snow was still melting in his dark hair, catching the stove’s orange light.
“Liza.” His voice had gone somewhere deep and wrecked. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I said. “Right now.”
He kissed me again. Harder this time, one hand fisted in my hair and the other sliding down to my hip, and he turned us and walked me backward until my thighs hit the edge of the plank table.
The radio squawked static against my elbow.
He dragged his mouth down the side of my neck, hot and open.
His beard scraped my skin, and I arched into him, clawing at the zipper of his coat.
He shrugged it off without breaking contact. The heavy canvas hit the floor. He stripped his fleece over his head in one rough motion and came back to me in a dark thermal that pulled tight across his shoulders and chest. I ran my hands up his stomach and felt the muscles contract under my palms.
“Get up here,” he said, and hoisted me onto the table.
I sat on the table’s edge with my legs on either side of him while he unzipped my patrol pants, worked them down over my hips, and dragged them past my knees. They caught on my boots and he left them there, bunched around my ankles, and pushed my thighs apart.
His hand slid between my legs and found me soaked through my underwear. His breath punched out of him.
“Fuck,” he said, his voice unsteady.
He pulled the fabric aside and his thumb found my clit and pressed, and my whole body jolted.
I grabbed his shoulders. His free hand was already working his belt open, shoving his own pants down far enough, and then his cock was pressing against me, thick and hot and insistent, and he looked at my face.
His eyes stayed on mine when he pushed inside me.
The stretch was immediate and intense and I sucked in a breath through my teeth.
He was big. I’d felt his cock against my hip when we’d been pressed together in the generator shed, but feeling it and taking it were different things entirely.
He went deep in one hard push, filling me until I felt him everywhere, and then he held still.
His jaw was clenched so tight the muscle jumped beneath his beard.
“Move,” I told him.
He moved. I hooked my heels behind his thighs as he pulled me to the edge of the table.
His hands gripped my hips so he could drive deeper.
Each thrust walked the heavy table backward on the floorboards, and I heard the coil of rope slide and the radio scrape toward the far edge, but his eyes never left mine.
He watched my face with the same focused intensity he’d brought to every problem he’d ever solved with his hands.
Now his thumb circled my clit with deliberate pressure, and his cock hit a place inside me that left me unable to hold a thought.
“Oh, God—” I gripped the table’s edge with both hands. My boots were still on, pants tangled around my ankles, and I couldn’t have cared less. The rope hit the floor. The radio followed with a clatter and a burst of static that neither of us acknowledged.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice low and demanding.
I looked at him. His face was flushed, his eyes dark and unwavering. He kept moving, his thumb pressing my clit, until I came so hard my vision went white. My pussy clenched around him, and I heard myself say a name I’d never used before: Dom.
He held still inside me while it ran through me. His hands steadied my hips. His breath came ragged through his nose, and I could feel him pulsing, feel how close he was, but he didn’t let himself finish. He just held me and watched my face until the tremors eased and I could breathe again.
The stove had turned one side of the cabin into an oven while cold leaked across the floorboards from every gap the wind could find. Aftershocks still rolled through my shaking legs as Dominic lifted me off the table and carried me to the rug beside the stove.
He set me down on the rough wool and pulled my boots off one at a time, then my pants, then my underwear. My base layer shirt came over my head, and then I was naked on the rug in the orange light of the stove. He knelt between my knees and looked at me like terrain worth learning.
He peeled off his own thermal. His chest was broad and furred with dark hair, his shoulders dense with muscle from years of work, and his skin flushed from the stove’s heat.
He leaned down and kissed my stomach. Then lower. His beard dragged across my hip, and I sucked in a breath as his mouth moved between my thighs.
Dominic didn’t rush. He licked long and slow, learning what made my breath catch and what made my hips jerk, and when he found the rhythm that unraveled me, he stayed with it.
His hands held my thighs open, thumbs pressing into the soft skin above my knees, and he worked me with his tongue like he had nowhere else to be.
My fingers twisted into the rug’s coarse fibers. His tongue flattened against my clit and then circled it, then drew it gently between his lips, and I cursed.
“Dominic. Fuck.”
He hummed against me, and my thighs tensed around his head. I pulled at the rug with both fists and felt my hips lift off the floor, chasing his mouth, and he let me, adjusting the angle to keep the pressure on my clit.
He slid one finger inside me, then two, curling them upward while his mouth kept working, and I stopped being able to form words.
The orgasm built low in my belly until it hit, and I arched off the rug, pressed hard against his mouth, and cried out.
My wolf surged under my skin, and I felt the bond between us flare bright and demanding.
He didn’t pull away until the last tremor had passed. Then he kissed the inside of my thigh, once, and rested his forehead there. His breath was ragged against my skin.
I pushed him onto his back.
He let me. He’d been holding back since he arrived, and the effort of it showed in the way his abdomen tightened when I straddled his thighs. His cock was hard against his stomach, thick and dark, and when I wrapped my hand around it, his head fell back and his eyes closed.
I learned him with my hands and watched each response. The weight of him in my palm. The ridge beneath the head where he was most sensitive. The way his breath broke apart when I tightened my grip and stroked him from base to tip. His hips strained up into my fist, and a muscle in his jaw twitched.
“Liza.” His voice was gutted. “Please.”
I rose up on my knees and took him inside me.
The angle let me take him deeper, and the fullness made my thighs shake.
I set my hands on his chest and rode him at my own pace, watching his face.
His hands rested open on my thighs, fingers spread.
He watched me move above him with his dark eyes and his jaw slack and every muscle in his body coiled.
I rolled my hips and his breath caught. I did it again, grinding down, and he groaned, a raw sound that came from his chest. His fingers curled against my thigh but didn’t clamp.
“Move,” I told him.
He sat up beneath me, wrapped one arm around my lower back, and shifted us onto our sides, facing each other on the narrow strip of rug between the stove and the cabin wall.
Our legs tangled together. His arm was under my head, and his other hand gripped my hip, and he pushed back inside me from this angle, slow and deep.
I understood what he’d done. On our sides, he was beside me, his weight never pinning me or putting him above my scar.
He found an unhurried, relentless rhythm, each thrust long enough that I felt every inch of him. This close, he smelled of smoke, sweat, and sex. His forehead rested against mine, our breath mixing, and the bond pulsed between us like a second heartbeat.
His hand left my hip and found my face. One finger traced the scar from my cheekbone, across my jaw, and down the left side of my throat to its end. He touched it without hesitation, as familiar and real as any other part of me.
I kissed him. He kissed me back, deep and lingering, as his hips drove into me harder.
His breathing roughened. His hand slid from my scar to the back of my neck and held me against his mouth.
His thrusts shortened and quickened, and when he came, he buried himself deep and groaned against my lips.
I felt the heat of his release inside me, his cock pulsing as the bond settled.
He stayed inside me while his breathing evened out. His thumb moved in small circles on the back of my neck. Outside, the storm threw snow against the window with a sound like sand.
? ? ?
Afterward, we lay together under the emergency blankets on the rug. My body was loose and warm and thoroughly used, his arm heavy across my ribs. I was satisfied down to my bones.
I pressed my back against his chest and felt his heartbeat against my shoulder blade. Neither of us said a word about what came next. We didn’t talk about the bond, East Valley, or what this meant for his pack or mine. Wind battered the cabin, and the plow wouldn’t come until morning.
Then the other bond flickered.
It came from far away, a faint, fast flare of Everett’s fury through the open bond, and then it was gone. He had felt us.
Guilt never came. But Dominic felt the instant my attention shifted.
His arm tightened around my ribs. He didn’t ask. He pulled the blanket higher over my shoulder, tucking it against my neck, and pressed his lips to the back of my head. His breath was warm against my hair.
I closed my eyes and let the storm fill the silence.