Page 47 of Fate, Interrupted

I kiss her carefully at first because I still know where we are and because I need to know she wants this. She rises onto her toes and wraps her arms around me.

That answers the question. The careful part lasts approximately three seconds before it doesn’t. When she wraps her hands tightly around me, my wolf comes forward.

The next kiss isn’t careful. My wolf surges forward, but this time I’m not fighting the fact that I want her. I’m fighting what I want to do about it.

I could ravage her. The realization lands with a kind of horror that doesn’t make me want it less.

I hold onto the last working part of my brain hard enough that my hands shake with the effort of it.

I pull her closer, and she lets me. I’m hard, and she knows it. I look down at her hazel eyes and the smile starting at the corner of her mouth.

She chuckles and presses herself into me. I groan and shake my head.

I want her against the dock wall with her shirt off and her legs locked around my waist. I want to find out exactly how loud she can be, hear what she sounds like when she stops worrying about who might come through the warehouse door.

My hands tighten at her waist. I could take this too far very quickly, and the fact that she is pressing herself against my erection is not helping.

When I pull back, it is only enough to look at her, and what I find is her breath coming faster than usual and her hands around my neck now, her eyes finding mine with an expression that is searching as if she’s looking for confirmation that I want this as much as she does.

I don’t have words for what changed.

I don’t think she does either.

We stand there in that charged, suspended moment, the warehouse noise filtering back in around the edges, the wind still moving across the dock, Larkin in the background, beyond the fence line.

And then I hear it.

The even gait of someone who moves through this building with the authority of a man who has been moving through it for thirty years.

Greer.

I know it before I see him. My body knows it before I consciously process it, some combination of scent and sound absorbed in childhood and impossible to unlearn, the same way you can’t unlearn the sound of a particular voice in the house you grew up in.

I step back.

Norah feels the swing and I see her read it, her eyes moving to the warehouse entrance before I can say anything.

My father’s best friend and brother, Greer, appears in the open doorway.

He’s older than most of the men in this operation, broader through the shoulders, softened slightly with age but not much, someone who stopped needing to prove himself a long time ago. His face is that of a man who has been in the middle of things for long enough that very little surprises him.

He takes in the dock.

He takes in me.

He takes in Norah.

His expression doesn’t change. Greer has always been almost impossible to read, and right now he gives me nothing. Not a flicker, not a tightening around the eyes, nothing that would read to an outside observer as anything other than a man doing a routine check of the loading area. He is the most composed person I have ever known, and that’s saying something, given the family I grew up in.

He looks at me.

“Your father’s looking for you,” he says.

Five words. Flat, neutral, professional. The same tone he uses for a schedule change or a contract renewal. That deliberate neutrality tells me enough.

I already know he’s not going to say anything about this. And he’s not going to ask.

He’s going to walk back into that warehouse and eventually he’s going to be in a room with my father and the information will be there whether he offers it directly. Because it occurs to me, finally, that Elias already knows about Norah.