Chapter 18 Chosen Loudly
Liza POV
The argument hit me before I saw who was in it.
The next afternoon, I’d parked the lodge truck near the snowmobile garage and stepped out with my radio in one hand and my patrol pack slung over one shoulder.
My left calf burned from a full shift on the mountain, and I was thinking about coffee, a hot shower, and letting Dominic’s hands work the knot between my shoulders when I heard Shane’s voice cut across the yard like a blade through powder.
“Say it again.” Shane stood in the open bay of the garage, his work jacket unzipped, his shaggy hair pushed back from his face.
Three West wolves faced him. I recognized two of them from the lodge common room, and the third was one of the younger patrollers from Kristen’s rotation. None of them looked comfortable.
“All I said was that the Alpha’s bond comes first,” the closest one muttered. He was thick through the chest, maybe thirty, with a reddish beard and the kind of defensive hunch that told me he’d already said more than he wanted to defend. “That’s how it works. She’s his fated mate.”
“She decides who matters to her,” Shane said. His voice was level, but I’d spent enough hours beside him on the mountain and in the garage to hear the anger underneath it. “A fated bond doesn’t make every other feeling worthless.”
The younger patroller shifted his weight. “Shane, come on. Nobody’s saying she doesn’t get a choice.”
“That’s exactly what you’re saying. You’re saying Dom’s bond is the only one that counts, and anything else is just some guy hanging around hoping for scraps.”
“I didn’t say scraps.”
“Your meaning was clear.”
I stopped walking. My boot crunched on refrozen gravel, and all four of them turned.
Shane’s green eyes found mine, and whatever distance he’d kept between us for weeks cracked open.
I’d seen him easy, reckless, funny, serious on a slope, gentle after a fight.
I had never seen him stripped down to raw want like this, standing in the cold afternoon light with his jaw set and his hands open at his sides.
Beyond the garage, near the yard gate, Everett was at the gatepost with a socket wrench hanging from one hand and a new bolt in the other.
He’d been working on the upper hinge. The borrowed flannel hung loose on his thinning frame, and his face had no color left in it, but his blue eyes were wide open and locked on Shane.
“I’ve been keeping my mouth shut since the night she walked through that gate,” Shane said.
He’d stopped talking to the three wolves.
He was talking to the yard, the garage, the cold air, and anyone in earshot, and he was talking to me.
“I watched her fix a sled with grease on her hands. I watched her haul a man off a mountain in a whiteout. I wrapped my coat around her shoulders when she was bleeding in the snow, and I didn’t say a goddamn word because the last thing she needed was another man with a claim. ”
The wolf with the reddish beard opened his mouth. Shane didn’t let him speak.
“Then Pryce came through our gate and started looking at her as if he still had some right to what he threw away. I’m done keeping quiet.
” He looked at me across the hard-packed snow.
“I want you, Liza. I mean to court you, if you’ll have me.
The Goddess didn’t tell me to want you. You’re the best person I’ve ever met, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t think about you every time you laugh. ”
The yard went still. Wind moved through the high pines. Somewhere behind the lodge, a truck engine idled and cut off.
Everett’s shock reached me through the old bond, thin enough that I barely registered it over my own pulse filling my ears. Shane stood there with his eyes on me. He had finally said aloud what he’d held back for weeks.
My throat went tight. I thought of his coat around my shoulders in the snow, and how I’d held it closed long after I’d stopped shaking.
“Upstairs,” I said.
Shane blinked.
“Your apartment.” I crossed the distance between us, and the three West wolves scattered like they’d been released from a trap. “Now.”
His grin started to form, the familiar one, the easy deflection he used when things got too real. I grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him toward the exterior stairs, and the grin died on his mouth. What replaced it was better. Hungrier.
We took the stairs fast enough that my injured calf screamed, and I didn’t care.
Shane got his key in the lock on the second try.
The apartment smelled like him: engine oil, coffee, pine soap, and the faint bite of cold that never quite left mountain clothing.
A jacket hung over a chair. Boots by the door.
A bed against the far wall, unmade, with a heavy quilt thrown half across it.
The door closed behind us. I backed Shane against it and pulled him to me by his belt.
“Liza.” His voice had gone rough. His hands hovered at my waist.
I kissed him. Hard, open-mouthed, with my fingers working his belt buckle and his jacket zipper at the same time. He tasted like the cold he’d been standing in, and when his tongue met mine, he made a low sound against my mouth.
His jacket hit the floor. I pulled his thermal up and over his head, breaking the kiss just long enough to get it clear, and then my hands were on his bare chest. Lean muscle shifted beneath warm skin, and a scattering of light hair trailed past his navel. His stomach tensed under my palms.
I dropped to my knees on the cold floorboards and pulled his cock free of his jeans.
Shane’s head fell back against the door with a thud. “Jesus, Liza.”
I took his cock into my mouth, and his hand came down to cradle the back of my head, fingers threading into my hair without pulling.
He was hard and thick against my tongue, and the sound he made when I took him deeper erased every polite distance he’d ever put between us.
His hips twitched forward, then locked, fighting the urge to thrust while I worked him with my mouth and one hand wrapped around the base.
His green eyes were half closed, his lips parted, and his chest heaved with the effort of holding still. I liked him like this, too aroused for charm or jokes. He’d wanted me badly enough to say so in front of his packmates.
I pulled back and looked up at him. His hand stayed in my hair, trembling.
“Bed,” he rasped.
He hauled me up by my arms, kissed me again while walking me backward across the room, and laid me on the unmade bed with his body over mine.
He was fast and deft with my clothes, a man who worked with his hands for a living.
My patrol jacket, my base layer, my sports bra.
He stopped when he got to my bare skin, and the look on his face made something clench low in my belly.
“You’re incredible,” he said.
He tugged off my boots, unzipped my patrol pants, and eased them down with my underwear without disturbing the bandage on my left calf. Then he knelt between my thighs and put his mouth on my pussy, and I arched off the mattress and grabbed a fistful of the quilt.
Shane was thorough. Methodical in a way that made me want to hit him and never let him stop.
His tongue circled and pressed while his fingers worked inside me, finding the angle that made my breath stop.
I could feel the rough drag of his calluses, and the contrast between that texture and the soft heat of his mouth sent me climbing fast.
“Shane. Shane, I’m going to—”
He pulled back.
I made a sound that was not dignified. He rose over me, braced on one arm, his free hand sliding up my ribs, and grinned. The grin held none of his easy public charm. He knew exactly what he was doing and planned to enjoy every second of it.
“Come here,” I said, and pulled him down by the back of his neck.
He settled between my thighs, and I felt him hot and hard against me, pressing but not entering. His forehead touched mine. His breath came fast, and his green eyes held mine.
“I’ve wanted this for weeks,” he said.
I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him forward.
He pushed inside me in one long, full stroke, and we both went still. He stretched me, filled me, and the heat of it spread until my wolf lifted her head and keened.
He moved, and I met him. His pace was measured at first but built fast. Each thrust pushed deeper, harder, and I locked my ankles at the small of his back and matched his rhythm until the bed frame knocked against the wall.
His hand slid under my hips and tilted me, changing the angle so that every forward stroke ground against my clit. I gasped and dug my nails into his shoulders. His muscles bunched beneath my grip, and his breath went ragged against my throat.
“More,” I said. “Harder.”
He gave it to me. His hips drove forward with force that shoved me up the mattress, and I braced one hand against the wall behind the headboard and took it, took him, took the fullness and the friction and the sound of our bodies meeting.
Shane’s forehead pressed into the curve of my neck, his teeth grazing my skin, and the edge of pain mixed with the building pressure until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
The orgasm rose low and heavy with every thrust. Shane’s rhythm faltered, and I knew he was close. I tightened around him, deliberately, and he groaned against my throat.
I turned my head.
The scar ran down the left side of my neck. I gave him the right.
I bared the smooth skin where my neck met my shoulder, the unmarked side, and tilted until the invitation was unmistakable. Shane went rigid above me. His hips stilled. His breath stopped.
Every wolf knew what it meant. A mark sealed a bond that no rejection, distance, or passage of time could sever. It was permanent and chosen, given freely by the person offering their throat.
“You’re sure?” he whispered against my skin. The words shook with the weight of what I was giving him.
“I chose you,” I said. “Now take it.”
His teeth sank into the muscle where my neck curved into my shoulder, and the pain was bright and absolute.
The bond we’d chosen slammed into place.
I felt Shane everywhere, not just inside me but in me, his heartbeat tangling with mine, his fierce, shaking joy flooding my chest until I couldn’t breathe.
The orgasm hit at the same moment, cresting over the pain and swallowing it whole.
My back bowed off the mattress, my legs locked around his waist, and I came so hard the sound I made was nothing I’d heard from myself before.
Shane drove into me through it, his teeth still set in my neck, his whole body shuddering with the bond tearing through him.
From somewhere below the apartment, from the yard or the gate, Everett Pryce roared.
The raw, anguished sound cut through the walls. Across the old, unresolved connection, I felt a faint crack of grief where the resentment had been.
Shane’s hips stuttered and locked, and he came deep inside me, gasping my name. I held him there, my arms around his back, my fingers in his sweat-damp hair.
We lay tangled on the ruined sheets while our breathing slowed. Shane’s weight pressed me into the mattress, and I didn’t want him to move. His mouth rested against the fresh mark, his lips gentle now where his teeth had been savage, and a fine tremor still ran through his arms.
“You’re bleeding,” he murmured against my neck.
“You bit me. That’s how it works.”
He lifted his head. He looked dazed and bright-eyed, and there was blood on his lower lip. My blood. The sight of it stirred a possessiveness the bond hadn’t put there.
“You should’ve said something sooner,” I told him.
“You needed a friend.”
“Some days I wanted more than that.”
“Maybe.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “But I’d rather have waited for you than pushed before you were ready.”
I laughed, and he laughed too, and the sound was relief as much as joy. We lay there laughing like idiots with blood drying on our skin and the quilt kicked to the floor and the winter light coming through his window at a low, golden angle.
Below us, the yard had gone quiet. Everett’s roar had faded, and the old bond sat in my chest, turned down to a murmur.
Shane pulled the quilt up from the floor and draped it over us both. His arm settled across my waist, heavy and certain, and I pressed my face against his chest and breathed him in. Shane. Mine, now, in a way that couldn’t be undone.
“Dom’s going to want to talk about this,” he said into my hair.
“I know.”
“I wasn’t trying to go around him. I just couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t—”
“Shane.” I put my hand over his mouth. “I took you upstairs because you’d already shown me exactly who you were, and I was tired of letting you pretend you didn’t want me.”
He kissed my palm, and the bond between us pulsed once, warm and bright and entirely ours.
Outside, the sun dropped behind the western ridge, and the long blue shadow of the mountain crept across the snow. The mark on my neck throbbed in time with my heartbeat, a small, steady pain that felt like proof.
I’d been rejected by a man who saw my scar and flinched. I’d been chosen by a man who saw my blood and stayed.
I held on to Shane and let the difference sink in.