Page 63 of Bound to the Wolf
The sound he made against her skin was muffled and broken and had enough wolf in it that she might have teased him about it if she could form words.
He was heavy on top of her. She let him stay, her fingers carding absently through his sweat-damp hair, feeling his breath slow against her throat. His heartbeat thudded against her own, gradually settling from a gallop to something steadier.
He shifted off her eventually, pulling out with a slick drag that made her shiver. He rolled onto his back beside her and the mattress creaked. The rain was still hammering the windows. The power was still out. The candle in the living room was either dead or burning a hole in the coffee table.
Delainey stared at the ceiling she couldn’t see. Her body was buzzing, that pleasant heavy-limbed hum of a good orgasm settling into her muscles.
She rolled onto her side, away from him, and pulled the blanket up to her chin. His warmth radiated across the gap between them, steady as a furnace, and she did not scoot backward into the solid wall of his chest.
And if, sometime in the deep hours of the night, she woke to find herself tucked against him with his arm heavy around her waist and his face buried in her hair and his heartbeat slow and sure against her spine, she let it happened. It was just sleep.
It wasn’t that something in her had gone quiet and settled for the first time in weeks. It wasn’t that she fit against him like she’d been carved to be there.
She was going to stick with that story for as long as she could.
Chapter
Thirty
Reece woke with Delainey in his arms. It wasn’t the first time, nor the second.
He almost tightened them on instinct before she could pull away. He wanted her with a kind of fierceness that scared him a little. After last night, he had no idea how he could walk away and pretend he didn’t want more.
His wolf was satisfied with himself, as if he had done something to get her into his bed, rather than her tripping in the dark and taking that final step.
When she opened her eyes, was he going to see rejection?
Maybe he should get out of bed first and push her away before she could take that step. But her body was soft, and she smelled so good, and so right, and sohisthat nothing short of a physical attack could have dragged him away from her.
There was a word hovering on the edge of his mind that he was too afraid to think, especially when it came to Delainey.
She couldn’t be, not for him, not a witch.
But his wolf was getting restless.
The air smelled of them, and of the heavy moisture that came after the storm. Light broke through the windows andhighlighted Delainey’s rich brown skin and the purple bonnet on her head. He hadn’t seen her put it on last night, which meant she had gotten up and then chosen to get back into bed with him.
That was a good sign, wasn’t it? But where else would she sleep?
Delainey blinked her eyes open and looked at him. He braced himself for her walls to come back up, for her to shove him away and pretend nothing happened, that it had been a storm-induced wave of lust they could both ignore forever.
But her eyes were surprisingly soft, and she gave him a sleepy grin. She looked over his shoulder and must have seen the clock blinking on the nightstand.
“When did the power come back on?” She asked, her voice still rough with sleep, one hand tucked beneath the pillow under her head.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been up for long.” He propped himself up on one elbow, his red hair swooping forward over his forehead, the wave in it looser and wilder than usual from sleep.
He was still braced for rejection, his whole body tight. It would come any second now. Instead, he felt Delainey’s fingers trail along his cheekbone and up, circling his eye.
She dragged her hand across his forehead to his other cheek, then down over his chin, like she was physically memorizing the feel of his face. The sheet covering them had fallen down.
Her breasts were just sitting there, all perfect, with more sunlight falling over her warm brown skin, tempting him to take another taste. He tried not to stare, but he was only a man.
Delainey’s fingers trailed down his arm but didn’t stop moving.
“I’ve been thinking,” she started, in a careful tone.
“That’s dangerous.” He aimed for light. He could take this, whatever she was going to say, whatever rejection she handed him. Hehadto take it. There was no other choice. They werestuck together until they could figure out how to break this damn bond and be free of one another.
