Page 30 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"This doesn't change the terms."
"Nothing changes the terms." Her voice is steady, but her scent is telling a different story, warm and sweet and thickening with every second my hand stays on her arm. "The terms are the only thing keeping me alive. You think I'd risk them for this?"
"I think you'd risk anything if the calculation told you to."
"The calculation isn't telling me anything right now." She meets my eyes, and what I see isn't strategy. It's the same raw, furious wanting that's been clawing at the inside of my chest since the scent slip, stripped of every justification and framework and careful lie. "The calculation stopped working the night you didn't answer when I asked why."
I kiss her.
The kiss is rough and graceless and tastes like the argument that produced it. My mouth finds hers with the precision of a wolf who has been tracking this target for weeks, and the taste of her hits my bloodstream like something I didn't know I was already addicted to.
She bites my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and the pain cuts through the haze just enough to register that my other hand has found the back of her neck and my fingers are spread across the nape with a possessiveness that my wolf approves of and my training does not.
She doesn't pull away. She grabs the front of my tunic and hauls me closer, and the hauling is not surrender. It's a counter-attack.
We hit the wall. My body pins hers against the stone, and the impact pushes a gasp out of her that is half fury and half something hungrier, something that vibrates against my mouth and sends my blood south so fast that my hands lose their coordination. Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels digging into the backs of my thighs, and the pressure of her hips against mine drags a growl from somewhere deep in my throat.
Her tunic comes off. I pull it over her head with hands that are shaking and I don't care that they're shaking because the skin underneath is warm and flushed and her nipples harden against the cool air and my mouth is on her collarbone before I make a conscious decision to put it there.
I taste the salt of her skin and the undertone of the omega scent rising from her pores, and my tongue traces the line of her throat toward the hollow where the bonding site pulses under thin skin.
My wolf wants the bite. The pull toward that spot is gravitational, a biological imperative screaming at the base of my skull, and I drag my mouth away with an effort that makes my arms shake harder. The bite stays hypothetical. For now.
Her hands find the hem of my tunic and yank it over my head with an efficiency that leaves no room for hesitation. Her fingers find the scars on my chest and trace them without gentleness, nails scraping along the raised lines, and the rough contact on damaged skin sends a bolt of sensation through my nervous system that shorts out every remaining professional thought.
"You're shaking," she says. The words carry no concern, only the strategist taking field notes even now.
"You're about to be."
I pin her wrists above her head with one hand and press my hips into hers hard enough to feel the heat of her through the layers between us, and the sound she makes when the pressurefinds the right angle is worth every principle I'm about to destroy.
Her head drops back against the stone. Her throat is exposed, the pulse hammering at the hollow, and I put my mouth on the skin beside the bonding site, close enough to feel the vibration of her heartbeat against my lips, far enough that the bite stays hypothetical.
Her hips roll against mine. The movement is deliberate, calculated to produce exactly the friction she wants, and the want is mutual and obvious and pressing against the laces of my trousers with an insistence that my body answers by grinding into her until she gasps.
"Bed or wall?" I ask against her throat.
"Are you taking requests now?"
"I'm giving you a choice. Enjoy it. I don't plan on giving you many."
"Wall." The word comes out breathless and fierce. "I don't want to be comfortable."
The rest of our clothes come off in a tangle of pulling and unlacing that has all the grace of a fight and none of the distance.
Her body against mine without barriers is a sensory event that rewires my entire nervous system. The omega scent is pouring off her skin in waves now, thick and sweet, and my own pheromone output has escalated to a level I can actually smell on myself, dark and heavy, the two scents tangling in the air between us and producing a combined scent that is neither mine nor hers but something new, something that belongs to what is happening between us and will linger in this room long after we stop.
I lift her against the wall. Her thighs lock around my waist, the muscles in her legs taut and strong, and I can feel the slick heat of her against my cock before I'm inside, her body responding to the compatible match with an urgency that fallsshort of heat but carries enough of its intensity to make the distinction academic.
I push inside her, and the world narrows to the place where our bodies meet.
She's wet and hot and tight in a way that grips the length of me and pulls, her body responding to the match with an intensity that isn't heat but runs close enough to blur the line. My wolf howls. My vision tunnels. The relief of being inside her after the closeness of proximity and restraint hits my nervous system like a drug, and underneath the relief the fury is still there, white-hot and mutual, because this changes everything and fixes nothing and neither of us is going to stop.
She's slick—the omega biology makes her body grip mine with a responsiveness that sends white sparks across my vision. My wolf howls inside my chest. My hips snap forward, driving deeper, and she answers with a roll of her pelvis that changes the angle and tears a groan from somewhere in my gut that I feel in my teeth.
The sex is a fight. Every thrust is a counter-argument, every grip a claim contested and answered. She wraps around me with a fierce refusal to be passive even when she's pinned, and her hips match my rhythm and then break it, establishing her own pace until I pin her harder against the stone and take it back.
She takes it back again. Her heels dig into the small of my back and her hips lock into a rolling grind that changes the angle and puts the control squarely in her body, and the new friction hits a place that buckles my knees and tears a sound from me that I can't suppress. My hands are braced on the wall and she's using my body as leverage, setting the depth, the speed, the pressure, and the look on her face is the same look she wears across the debriefing table when she's winning an exchange and knows it.
