Page 71 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
She looks at me with the expression she gets when she's deciding whether to accept a compliment or redirect it. "I merely knew where things were."
"You knew where things were because you spent the entire day making sure everything had a place," I counter. "That's not nothing."
She absorbs it with the particular stillness of someone deciding how much to react, and then decides. "Noted."
I hold the door open and follow her inside, and she sets her notebook on the table and turns around, and the moment has a weight to it that makes me say what I've been holding since the meeting ended.
"Watching you in that room tonight—" I stop. Start again. "The mate bond has been real since the first night. I've knownthat. But watching you step into this pack the way you did today—" I pause, finding the honest version of the sentence. "It's stronger now than it was. I need you to truly understand that."
She goes still in the particular way she does when something is landing rather than passing.
"Logan—"
"I'm not saying it to pressure you," I continue, because I need her to understand that. "I'm saying it because you deserve to know what's true." I hold her gaze. "If Dawson finds a way to take you off this mountain—if something happens and you leave before this is resolved—the loss of that would do something to me that I don't have a clean word for." I pause. "But I will never use that to trap you. That is not a condition I am placing on anything. It'—" I stop. "It's true, and I'm done pretending it isn't."
The cabin is very quiet for a moment.
Harper looks at me with those hazel eyes that have gone entirely green in the firelight, and I watch her work through it—the processing sequence, the assessment, the thing she does when something significant has landed, and she's deciding what to do with it.
Then one side of her lip moves.
"You know," she begins, in the particular dry tone that means something warm is coming in through the side door, "for a man who spent all this time being strategically vague about his feelings, you've gotten remarkably forthcoming."
"I've had a lot of time to think," I reply.
"Clearly." She tilts her head, and her face arrives somewhere I have never seen it arrive — the most unhedged, unmanaged version of itself, held without apology. "I chose this. I chose the pack." She pauses. "I choose you. I choose to be your mate." Without flinching, she fixates on my eyes. "That's nota provisional statement. That's not me figuring it out as I go. That's me telling you clearly, with full information, what I want."
I look at her.
I don't move. I don't reach for her. I simply look at her, because the words have landed somewhere so deep and so specific that the usual mechanisms I use to manage what I feel about this woman have simply stopped functioning. She is standing in the firelight in my cabin with her chestnut hair loose around her shoulders and her hazel eyes entirely green, and she has said the thing I have been waiting to hear since the first night she stood on my porch in a ruined dress, and I am not ashamed to admit that I am completely undone by it.
By her words.
By the steadiness of her.
By the fact that she is here, on this mountain, in this room, having chosen it the same way she chooses everything—with her whole self and without apology.
My wolf is completely, entirely silent.
The wolf has gone quiet, and not because it has retreated. It has simply run out of things to say. Everything it has been telling me since the night she appeared on my porch has been confirmed by the woman herself, standing three feet away from me in the firelight, and there is nothing left to wait for.
"Okay," I say quietly, because there is no sentence large enough for what I actually want to say, and she would probably find it excessive anyway.
"Okay," she agrees.
Then she reaches up and pulls me down into a kiss.
It starts the way our first kiss started—with Harper deciding, which is the only way anything has ever worked between us and the only way I'd want it. Her hands are on my jaw, and she kisses me with the particular combination of certainty and warmth thatis simply who she is, and I respond to it the way I respond to everything she does—with my full, undivided attention.
The kiss deepens before either of us decides to let it.
Then she pulls back far enough to look at me, her hands still at my jaw, and she is breathing differently, and her hazel eyes are entirely green, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
She grins—sharp and certain and entirely hers.
Then she grabs me by the front of my flannel and walks me backward, and I let her for exactly two steps before my hands find her thighs and I lift her in one motion, her legs wrapping around my waist with the ease of something that was always going to happen, and I carry her to the bedroom without stopping, and she laughs against my neck, and I feel it everywhere.
She works the buttons of my flannel with the focused efficiency she brings to everything, and I shrug it off, and I watch her eyes move over me in the firelight—the broad set of my shoulders, the chest and stomach earned through years on this mountain, the old scars along my forearms that she traces with her fingertips, slow and deliberate, the same as every time.
