Page 11 of How I Met My Mate

He grins, cocky. In one graceful motion he slides off the couch and stands, towering, and pulls his own shirt off. Then his jeans.

The moment his pants drop, I learn two things: my assumptions about shifters being more-than-average in certain departments are correct, and I am in real, actual trouble.

Good trouble.

I want to memorize every detail, but my brain won’t cooperate; it’s all sensation, all overload, all stimulus turned up so high the only thing left to do is ride the wave. Cole’s hands find my waist, his grip so tight it makes my blood thrum.

He hesitates just long enough to lock eyes with me. There’s a question there, even now, but I’m past words. So I just reach down and guide him to me, shameless, greedy. He sinks into me with a noise that’s eight parts feral, one part relief. I’m too tight at first, painfully aware.

He pushes in, slow enough to burn, and I go tight around him, my whole body shuddering in resistance and then giving in with a pulse. I’m shocked by the stretch, wild by how perfectly he fills me, how every cell in me is both clutching and melting at once. He stops, breathing ragged, and his forehead drops to mine, a sweaty, desperate collision that says hold on, hold on, hold on.

“Breathe,” he rasps, and when I gasp, the sound is half-pain, half-starvation. He waits—it takes a second, two, forever—my body remembering how to open, to trust, to want. He grazes his thumb over my cheek, so soft it’s absurd, then licks a tear away that I didn’t even know was there. I want to apologize, laugh it off, but he kisses my lips, swallowing any joke I’d make and every sound that escapes me.

His hips rock and suddenly I’m moving with him: involuntary, out of sync and then perfectly matched. I’m losing my mind. Nothing in my life has ever felt this urgent, this necessary.

He keeps his forehead pressed to mine, every breath a furnace against my mouth. “You okay?” he says, and it’s so at odds with the way he’s wrecking me that I want to claw at his back and never let him go.

I can’t talk, so I nod, and when he picks up the pace the world narrows down to where we’re joined, the friction, the heat, and the fact that this man is straight-up worshiping every inch of me.

I expect him to go to the edge and stop there, but instead—he leans down and kisses me, slow, like he wants to memorize what my mouth feels like right before I come undone. I’m shivering and it’s more than sensation, it’s some kind of tectonic shift in who I am. Cole’s hands are everywhere, mapping me, guiding me, and the rumble in his chest is a warning and a prayer all at once.

I peel my nails down his back (partial apology, partial challenge) and he lets out a ragged sound that’s not even fully human. He shifts, just a fraction, and something inside me lights up like an arc reactor—the angle, the pressure, the way he says my name (fuck, nobody’s ever said it like that, like he could use it to roll back the stars).

I clench around him once, twice, and then it’s not just a build, but a blinding, tidal rush.

I come so hard my vision whites out and my body locks, and Cole has to keep me anchored to the planet with his arms.

He holds, rides it out with me, keeps thrusting through the aftershocks, and then it’s his turn. He bites down—not enough to break skin, just enough that it’s a promise and a brand and a warning—and the sound he makes is closer to a howl than anything human. He shoves deep, holds there, and I feel him shatter, hips stuttering, arms shaking. For a second, the only thing holding us together is sweat and instinct and the feral gravity he brings to everything.

He buries his face in my shoulder, and I just float, weightless, staring at the ceiling and trying to remember how to operate my limbs. There’s a part of me that wants to panic, that wants to overthink exactly what I just did, but the rest of me is still unspooling, gloriously numb, and I decide, for once, to let myself just have this.

Chapter Seven

Alexis

I wake up gloriously aching – and alone. Cole is not in bed with me, and I feel his absence immediately. Absurdly, I feel a fierce craving for his return, this man I just met…yesterday?

What have I done? Have I gone crazy?

I blink, rub my face with my hands, stretch, and sit up.

The morning light filters softly through pale linen curtains, turning the whole room honey-gold. The bed is big—king-sized, naturally—and the sheets smell faintly of cedar and the warm spice that clings to him.

His bedroom is simple—rough-hewn wooden furniture, a dresser scarred with age and polish, a framed photograph of the mountains above Cedar Run on one wall.

I stretch again, missing his warmth next to me, and that’s when I hear him—his low voice carrying from somewhere down the hall. The words are indistinct, but the tone is serious, clipped, all business. Whoever he’s talking to, it’s not a social call.

I slide out of bed, heart starting to beat faster. There’s something in his voice—tension, frustration —that tells me whatever’s going on out there, it’s not just small talk.

I grab my shirt and pull it on over my head, and then slip into a pair of panties. Then, carefully, lightly, I tiptoe out into the hall. I want to overhear what Cole obviously doesn’t want me to hear.

Unfortunately, shifters have incredible hearing. Instantly, Cole’s voice changes and goes all chipper. “That sounds great! I’m going to run by pack headquarters to check in with my mother. Talk to you soon.”

My warm feeling of satisfaction from last night fades. He’s keeping secrets from me. This is not a great start to a relationship.

I stalk into the kitchen just as he’s hanging up.

The kitchen is rustic but not rough. Warm pine cabinets, the knots and grain visible under a soft satin finish. The counters are polished granite, dark as river stone, and the morning light slants in through the big window over the sink, glinting off the chrome coffee maker and the faint shimmer of steam rising from two mugs. A cast-iron skillet still sits on the stove, a few crumbs of toast and the faint scent of butter clinging to it.