Page 18 of The Iron Alpha

My mother told me the wolves' women stopped wanting to come back. His eyes are on me and the ache of what he did last night is turning into the ache of what he's about to do tonight, and I think: she wasn't trying to protect me from him. She was trying to protect me from myself.

5

RYLAND

She's watching me undress, and she doesn't know what her face is doing.

Her mouth is set, her chin raised, her spine as rigid as it was at Dover, but her eyes follow the movement of my hands as I loosen my laces with a focus that has nothing to do with tactical assessment.

My shirt lands on the floor. My boots follow.

She hasn't moved.

She's still standing in the tunic she'd worn all day, every button fastened as if the wool could serve as armor.

"You can stop pretending the tunic changes anything," I say. Her gaze snaps to mine. "Chemise."

For one heartbeat I think she's going to refuse. Then her jaw tightens.

Slowly, deliberately, she reaches for the first button at her throat.

She never looks away from me.

One button.

Then another.

The tunic loosens beneath her hands before she pushes it from her shoulders. Heavy wool whispers over linen and slips to the floor around her feet.

She's left standing in nothing but a simple white chemise.

The firelight behind her turns the linen almost translucent, outlining every curve she's pretending I haven't already memorized with my hands. The hard points of her nipples press against the fabric. Her lips are parted. The pulse at the base of her throat is hammering, and from across the room the bond gives me the rhythm of it.

Fast… faster than she wants it to be.

She steps free of the discarded tunic but doesn't try to cover herself. Doesn't fold her arms. Doesn't reach for her braid. Instead she gives me the same direct, assessing look she's given every corridor and guard rotation all day. The fact that she spent twelve hours studying my fortress while I ran my pack is something I should find threatening.

What I find is something else entirely.

She spent the day learning the bones of my world.

Now she's standing in my chamber wearing nothing but a chemise, watching me and the heat between us is filling the room like smoke through a sealed corridor.

I can't sleep with her in my bed. I can't sleep without her. Both truths make me want to put my fist through the wall.

The night before, I took her on this bed. Pinned her wrists, buried myself inside her, felt the resistance of a body that had never been entered before mine. I finished against her thigh because she hasn't stopped pretending she doesn't want what I'm giving her, and leaving anything permanent inside her before she does would be wasted. She lay curled away from me afterward, breathing hard, and when I pressed my mouth against the back of her neck and told her what comes next, thetremor that ran through her body was fear and arousal so tightly wound the bond couldn't separate them.

Tonight she's not trembling. She's standing in my chamber looking at me like a woman taking measurements, and the composure she's rebuilt since this morning is so precise it's almost admirable.

I cross the room. Her gaze follows me, steady, and she doesn't step back when I stop close enough that the heat from the fire behind her radiates through the chemise and warms my bare skin. The space between us holds like a breath not yet released. Two inches of air doing more work than the walls of this fortress.

"You walked my Tower today." I keep my voice low. Factual.

"I learned where things are." The same phrase she gave Thane. Level. Controlled. The voice of a woman stating facts rather than requesting permission.

"You learned more than that." I reach forward and gather the loose hair from her shoulder, pushing it back. My knuckles graze the side of her neck, and the heartbeat beneath her skin kicks against my fingers. She controls the reaction in her face. She can't control the one in her throat. "You mapped guard rotations. You counted doorways. You found the cistern in the inner ward and stood there studying how the water feeds through the wall until Thane had to pull you away."

Her eyes narrow. Not surprise. Recalculation. She's revising her assessment to account for the fact that I was watching her watch my fortress.