She doesn’t run.
That’s the difference. In the clearing, she bolted, barefoot through the forest, blood down her shoulder, gone before Icould stand up. Tonight, she’s face down in the moss, and she breathes, and she stays.
Minutes pass.
I sit up. She hasn’t moved. The long line of her back, rising and falling. The bite mark dark on her shoulder. In the moonlight, she looks like she belongs to this forest — silver skin, dark hair, the sharp lines of a fighter softened by the aftermath of what just happened between us.
My hand finds the small of her back. Rests there. Her skin is warm under my palm.
She tenses. Doesn’t pull away.
“Briar…”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. Hoarse.
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to talk about anything.”
“Okay.”
“And this doesn’t change—”
“I know.”
She turns her head, frowning.
“Stop agreeing with me.”
My mouth does something without my permission. Not quite a smile. Close enough. I feel her irritation arrive — sharp, familiar, the most normal thing she’s directed at me since I got here. The ordinariness of her being annoyed at me makes the almost-smile worse.
She puts her face back in the moss. “I still hate you.”
“I still know.”
My hand stays on her back. Her breathing slows. The forest settles around us. The heat is banked… not gone, still there, but the sharpest edge is off. Not urgent now.
Later.
Later, she’ll need me again. In a few hours, the heat will climb, and her body will want me. Her pride will fight, and her body will win.
I lie down beside her. Close. My hand on her back, her warmth in the space between us. The moss is damp, the air is cool, and I should be cold, but I’m not. She’s enough.
My wolf closes his eyes. Smug and sated.
I don’t close mine. I watch her breathe. Count the breaths. Learn the rhythm. My hand on her back. Her hand curled in the moss six inches from mine.
The heat is coming back. I can feel the slow rise, the tide turning. When it does, I’ll be here.
Chapter 17
Briar
I wake up warm. Not the heat, not the furnace that’s been running me for days. Just warm. Body warmth. The kind that comes from skin against skin, from someone else’s weight tucked around you.
My sleep-stupid brain registers the details before my conscious mind catches up: his chest against my back, his arm around my waist, his hand resting on my stomach. His breathing, slow and deep against my hair. And his thumb… his thumb is moving. A small, idle stroke across the skin below my navel. Back and forth. Not sexual. Not deliberate. The absent touch of a man who’s half asleep and touching what’s his.
My wolf sighs, which is new. Because the last three times we woke through the night, she pounced on him.