Page 75 of Bound to the Wolf
She tugged at his shirt, and he let go of her long enough to yank it over his head. His chest was broad and pale against her hands, the sparse reddish hair between his pecs coarser than the waves on his head. The old scar on his left side, that long smooth ridge running from ribs to hip, stood out in a thin white line.
Then she pressed herself against him, skin to skin, and the full contact made her breath stutter. His heartbeat was fast and hard under her palm. The heat coming off him was ridiculous. The man ran hot on a normal day, but right now he was practically a furnace, and she pressed closer instead of pulling away.
She pressed her mouth to his collarbone and tasted salt and warmth and that deep green scent of him that she had stopped pretending she didn’t love.
Love.
The word sat in her mind like a lit match, and she didn’t blow it out.
Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.
Reece’s hands slid down her back, fingers finding the notches of her spine, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. He hooked his thumbs under the waistband of her shorts, and she lifted up on her knees to let him push them down.
She kicked them off one leg at a time, graceless and impatient. She nearly kneed him in the ribs on the second one, which would have ruined the moment, but Reece didn’t seem to care. She settled back onto his lap in nothing but her underwear.
Delainey could feel him hard beneath her, the thick ridge of his cock straining against his sweats, and she ground down against him. His fingers dug into her hips and his head fell back against the couch, throat bared, eyes half-shut with gold burning through the brown.
God, that was a good look on him.
She kissed his throat. Ran her tongue along the tendon that stood out when he clenched his jaw, tasted the pulse hammering beneath his skin. She found the hollow below his ear and felt him shiver.
This enormous man, trembling under her mouth.
Delainey had power over him, and it had nothing to do with magic. It was trust. He had given her the ugliest parts of his story, the parts that had broken him and rebuilt him, and he was still here, still looking at her like she was the answer to every question he’d been afraid to ask.
That should have sent her running.
Instead, she slid off his lap and grabbed his hand.
He followed without a word, fingers laced through hers, and she led him into the bedroom. The light coming in through the window fell across the rumpled sheets where she had slept alone last night.
She wasn’t going to sleep alone tonight.
She turned to face him and pushed his sweats down. He stepped out of them. She hooked her thumbs into her own underwear and slid them off. And then they were standing in front of each other in the full light with nothing to hide behind.
She’d seen him naked more times than she could count at this point. But she looked at him now the way she’d been afraid to before. Not just his body, though that was worth looking at. The scar on his side from a life she now understood. The freckles on his shoulders. The way his red hair fell across his forehead, wrecked from her fingers. His gold eyes that she had once found unsettling and now couldn’t imagine not seeing.
Reece was looking at her the same way.
Not with the hungry urgency of their other times, not the desperation of the woods or the reckless heat of the power outage. He was looking at her the way he had that first morning after. Like she was something he was terrified of losing. Except this time she recognized the expression for what it was.
She didn’t flinch.
“Get over here,” she said, because if he kept looking at her like that without touching her, she was going to lose it.
He almost smiled. The corner of his mouth twitched, and the gold in his eyes flickered warmer. She yanked him down onto the bed.
He went willingly, settling over her, his weight braced on his forearms, and when he kissed her, it was slow. So slow it ached. His tongue traced her lower lip, and she opened for him, and the kiss deepened into something thorough and unhurried that left her feeling taken apart.
His mouth trailed down her jaw, her throat. He found the spot below her ear that made her arch and lingered there, and the sound he made against her skin, that low wolf rumble, vibrated through her. She’d come to associate that sound with satisfaction. With want.
With him.
He kissed between her breasts and pressed his mouth right over the place where the tether lived. She felt something pulse between them. Not magic exactly, but the bond responding, warming. Her magic stirred in her chest, and for once it wasn’t the uncontrolled surges of the past weeks. It was something gentle, reaching toward him. She was too far gone to fight it.
His mouth found her nipple, tongue circling slowly before he sucked, and the wet heat of it sent a jolt straight between her legs. She thrust her hips against him, feeling the hard press of his cock against her inner thigh. His free hand traced down the curve of her waist, over her hip, along the outside of her thigh. Unhurried. Every touch unhurried, and saying something neither of them was ready to say out loud.
She was hearing it anyway.
