“Get up here,” she says.
I crawl up her body. Kiss her stomach, her ribs, the swell of her breast. She reaches between us and takes my cock in her hand, stroking with a grip that’s firm and sure and makes my vision flicker at the edges.
“Now,” she says. “I want you inside me.”
I push in. Slowly, the way I couldn’t at the Railhead, the way the truck didn’t allow. The full length of me sliding into her, inch by inch, her body opening around me with a heat that makes me grit my teeth to keep from losing it immediately. She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper, and the sound she makes—low, satisfied, a sigh that’s almost a growl—vibrates through my chest.
I move. And this time, I set the pace. Not frantic. Not desperate. Deep, deliberate strokes that let me feel every inch of her. The wet grip of her around me. The way her hips rise to meet each thrust. The small sounds she makes on every stroke;not performed, not exaggerated. Real. The sounds of a woman who’s stopped pretending.
“You feel…” I don’t finish. There’s no word for what she feels like. Like the answer to something. Like a place I didn’t know I was looking for.
She pulls me down. Kisses me while I move inside her. Her hands are on my back, my shoulders, my face. The tenderness is back, the same quality as the kiss at the swimming hole, but deeper now, edged with something I can’t describe. She touches me like she’s memorizing me. Like this is the last time.
I push the thought away. Don’t think about last times.
“Harder,” she whispers. Not demanding. Asking.
I push harder. The pace builds, the restraint dissolving into something more animal. My hips thrust against hers, and the bed frame hits the wall in a rhythm that I’d care about if I had room in my head for anything except the feel of her and the sounds she’s making and the way her nails dig into my shoulders with an urgency that tells me she’s close again.
I slip a hand between us. Find her clit. She breaks against my mouth, a cry she doesn’t bother to muffle this time because there’s no one to hear, no pack fifty yards away, just the two of us in a house on Sycamore Road with the windows dark and the night holding still around us.
Her orgasm takes me with it. The clench of her pulls me over the edge, and I come with my face buried in her neck, her scent filling my lungs, her name in my mouth, and the world going narrow and bright and absolutely certain.
We lie tangled. My weight on her, her legs still around me, our breathing ragged in the quiet room. The house is silent around us, aside from the creak of old wood, the hum of the fridge in the kitchen, and the distant sound of a coyote calling from the ridge.
She’s running her fingers through my hair. Slow, absent, the way you pet an animal without thinking. The gesture is so gentle that it makes my throat tight.
“Stay,” I say. Not a question. Not quite.
“Okay.”
The word is so small and so simple, and it fills the room.
I pull the covers over us. She turns on her side, and I curve around her, my arm across her waist, my face against her hair. She smells like sex and sweat and herself, the spring-leaf sweetness that I’d know anywhere in the world.
My wolf is quiet. Not the restless silence of the past week, not the heavy silence after the relocation. A different quiet. Full. Complete. The stillness of an animal that has exactly what it needs and isn’t asking for anything more.
I think about the files. The thirty-seven. The questions Garrett won’t answer. I think about the kid with the backpack and the father who asked“have you checked?”About the look on Tate’s face when he talked about the girl he used to know.
And then I think about the woman in my arms, her breathing evening out, her body warm against mine, her fingers going still as sleep takes her. This woman who came to me in the middle of the night because she needed something she couldn’t explain. Who kissed me in my hallway with a desperation that felt like the opposite of her recent coldness. Who saidokaywhen I asked her to stay.
I hold her tighter. Close my eyes. Sleep comes faster than it has in weeks, and for the first time in a long time, the dark is warm, and the silence isn’t empty.
Chapter 20
Willow
His breathing changed twenty minutes ago. Deeper. Slower. The rhythm of a wolf in heavy slumber, his body unwinding from the inside out, his muscles going slack, his arm heavy across my waist.
I’ve been counting his breaths. Lying still. Matching my breathing to his so that anything monitoring my heartbeat—his wolf, his instinct, whatever part of him reads me even in sleep—hears nothing but two people at rest.
I wait until I reach a hundred. Then I wait for fifty more.
The house is quiet. The digital clock on his nightstand reads 3:41 a.m in red numbers that paint a faint glow across the sheets.
His phone is on the nightstand. Screen dark. Locked.
I ease out from under his arm. Slowly. An inch at a time, shifting my weight so the mattress doesn’t dip. His breathing doesn’t change. His wolf doesn’t stir. He’s deep—the kind ofsleep that comes after sex and emotional intensity. The guilt of that knowledge is something I’ll deal with later. Not now.