His mouth finds the bite mark on my neck. His lips trace the scar, and the contact there sends a jolt through me that makes my hips buck.
“You’ve been wanting this all day,” he says against my skin. “I could smell it in the barn.”
“You’re delusional.”
“You were watching me shovel straw and getting wet and pretending you came for a halter.”
“Ididcome for the halter.”
“You stood there for half an hour.”
“The halter was hard to find.”
“It was on the third hook. Right in front of you.” His hand slides between my thighs. Finds what he already knew he’d find. “Hard to find. Sure.”
“I hate you.” It’s a line I say out of habit now.
“Mm.” His fingers move, and I gasp. “Tell me more about how much you hate me.”
“So— so much. Deeply. Profoundly. I —oh— I have a list.”
“Read me the list later.” He does something with his thumb, and my back arches off the cot. I grab his hair and pull, and the sound he makes is half pain, half pleasure, and entirely satisfying.
“Now,” I tell him. “Stop playing.”
“Ask nicely.”
“I will end you.”
He grins. Crooked, wicked, the face of a man who’s enjoying the hell out of this. And something about the grin — the realness of it, the way it makes him look younger, the way it makes him look like a person who can laugh during sex — cracks something in my chest that I didn’t know was still intact.
“Please,” I say. Not because he asked. Because I want to. Because the word tastes different when I choose it.
His grin softens. The wickedness doesn’t leave, but something else joins it. He positions himself against my entrance. I feel the pressure.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him. The face I’ve been trying to hate for weeks and failing, failing, failing.
He pushes in.
Slow. The stretch is—God.I know his body now. Know the exact dimensions of him, the way he fills me. My body knows him and opens for him, and the recognition is its own kind of intimacy, my muscles remembering what my mind keeps trying to forget.
“Eyes on me,” he says. Because I’ve started to close them. Because the intensity of this — his face this close, his body inside mine, the eye contact — is more than I’m built for.
I keep my eyes open. Watch his face while he moves in me. Watch the way his jaw loosens when he pushes deep. The way his breath shakes on the exhale. The way his pupils dilate when I clench around him. I can see what I do to him, and seeing it is devastating.
His rhythm builds. Not punishing. Purposeful. Deep strokes that reach something inside me that isn’t physical. I’m gripping his shoulders, my legs are locked around his hips, and we’re breathing each other’s air.
“Harder,” I say.
He goes harder, his hand gripping my hip. The other slides down my side, across my ribs, and settles on my stomach. It rests there. Light. His palm flat over the warmth.
My breath catches. His eyes change, something shifting behind them. A question he’s been holding for days, a knowledge his wolf has been carrying that the man is reaching for.
“Briar.” My name. Not a demand. A discovery. His hand warm on my belly while he moves inside me. His eyes searching mine for confirmation of something he already knows.
“Don’t stop,” I say quietly. “Don’t stop.”