Page 75 of Fate, Interrupted

Then she turns and disappears into the crowd. The street keeps moving.

I stand in the middle of it.

“Norah,” Silas says.

“Don’t,” I say. Not at him. Not really. I use the only word I have that will keep the crack from widening before I get somewhere private enough to let it.

I start walking.

Faster than before.

“Come with me,” I say. I don’t look back, and I know he’s there, and right now knowing is the only thing keeping everything in its right place.

Chapter twenty

Norah

I’m almost running by the time we reach my rowhouse. I don’t give myself time to reconsider what I’m about to do.

Thinking is very useful until it isn’t. Right now, it isn’t.

Because if I think about what happened on the street, I’ll have to feel it. And if I feel it, I’ll have to deal with the fact that my dead mother’s love story just got used as a weapon against me. On a public sidewalk. In front of the man I’ve been trying to figure out how to trust.

I’m not ready for that yet.

What I am ready to do is this.

I turn around and grab his shirt, and I pull him down to me. The kiss starts how I intend to start, not soft and exploring like last week after the lake. It’s hard and immediate, no preamble, no testing the edges. It tastes like the afternoon and like a month of wondering what his cock feels like inside me. A month of being wound up like a cuckoo clock ready to start singing.

His eyes widen at my urgency, but his hands find my waist before I’ve finished deciding to do this, telling me everything I need to know about where his head is. I lean into it, the warmth of him moving through me immediately. Decision made. I want this man, and if stopping means I’m thinking, then I don’t want to think; I only want to feel.

His mouth is hot and certain on mine, the kiss deepening before I ask it to. I slide my hands up his chest and feel the solid reality of him under the fabric and decide the fabric is a problem.

I start working his buttons.

I don’t bother being careful.

One button. Two. My fingers are shaking so hard he helps me with them. The fabric parts, and my hands find skin—hotter than I expected, hotter than makes sense, and whatever that does to me, it does it immediately, and I stop pretending I have any interest in slowing down.

He makes a sound against my mouth.

It is low and rough, nothing like his usual control.

I feel his attention coming closer to the surface, and instead of pulling back from it I lean into it, because I’ve seen the wolf, and it didn’t scare me, and I’m not afraid of it now. I welcome it now.

His hands tighten at my waist.

Then one of them slides up my back, under the hem of my shirt, and his palm is hot and rough against my skin. The contact sends a sharp rush of heat through me that moves faster than thought, arriving in my chest and my stomach simultaneously, and I rise onto my toes because I need to be closer to whatever this is.

“Off,” I say against his mouth.

He pulls his shirt off and over his head. His eyes are doing the thing—the green gone wolf-bright, the luminous thing that has no business existing in a man this controlled and which my body has been reading as arousal rather than threat.

I have appreciated him in fitted shirts with the measured appreciation of a woman exercising restraint. This is not that. This is the reality of a man who works with his hands and carries himself with the unselfconscious ease of someone who has never once worried about whether his body is adequate to the moment. I press my hip bones into him and find him more than adequate to the moment.

I move my hands on him, trying to memorize the shape, the solidity, the absolute beauty of him. I feel the ridges in his chest, graze my fingers in wonderment over the muscles outlined in his shoulders. The geography of muscle moves under my palms when he breathes.

He reaches for the hem of my shirt. His hands slide it up and over and it goes somewhere I don’t track. His eyes move over me. It is the wolf looking, focused and certain and entirely decided, and I feel the intensity of his attention across my skin.