Page 57 of Ruthless Bond

Me: Practical.

I set the phone down. I’m smiling. I’m smiling at my phone like a teenager and I can’t bring myself to care enough to stop.

She arrives at seven. She’s wearing jeans and a soft sweater that slides off one shoulder and exposes the silver scar, and I meet her at the door and pull her inside and press her against the wall and kiss her until she’s breathless.

“I thought you were cooking,” she says.

“I am. In a minute.”

“The last time you said ‘in a minute,’ we ended up on the kitchen floor.”

“I’ve cleaned the kitchen floor since then.”

She laughs. I swallow the laugh with my mouth and her arms come around my neck and her legs wrap around my waist and I carry her past the kitchen, past the living room, to the bedroom windows. The floor-to-ceiling glass that turns the wall into a panorama of the city, forty stories up, the lights of Chicago sprawled beneath us like a circuit board.

I stand her in front of the glass. The city glows behind her. I pull the sweater over her head. I unhook her bra and let it fall. I turn her around, her back to my chest, her front facing the windows, and the city is looking up at us and she’s looking down at it and the glass is cold against her nipples and she shivers.

“Someone could see,” she says, but her voice has that quality, the thick, dark quality that tells me her objection is performative and her body has already decided.

“We’re forty stories up.”

“Telescopes exist.”

“Then they’ll see you come apart against the skyline.”

I kneel behind her. I pull her jeans down, her panties with them, and I press my mouth against the small of her back and kiss my way down her spine. She braces her palms against the glass. I can see her reflection in it, faint and ghostly, and the sight of her naked body overlaid on the city lights is something I will remember when I’m dust.

I turn her around. I lift her thigh over my shoulder and press my mouth between her legs, and she grabs my hair and leans back against the glass and the sound she makes echoes off every hard surface in the room.

I take my time. Slowly, deliberately, tasting her, memorizing the exact rhythm and pressure that makes her knees buckle. She comes against the window with her hand in my hair and the city at her back and my name on her lips, and I catch her when her leg gives out and I lay her down on the floor and I’m inside her before her breathing steadies.

The floor is cold beneath her back. My body is burning above her. The contrast makes her arch, seeking more of my heat, and I give her all of it, driving into her with a force that slides her across the polished floor until I grip her hip with one hand and anchor her against me.

“Look at me,” I tell her. “Sophia. Look at me.”

Her eyes open. Dark and liquid. I hold her gaze while I move inside her, and the intimacy of it, the eye contact, the exposure of being seen while doing this, is more vulnerable than anything the wolf has ever experienced.

She sees me. Not the alpha. Not the businessman. Not the hundred-and-thirty-two-year-old predator. The man. The man who loves her. The man who is going to drag the truth out of Viktor before he puts it in her hands. The man who knows she may hate him when he does.

“I love you,” she says.

The words hit me like a bullet in the chest. Not because they’re surprising. Because they’re true, and she’s saying them while I’m inside her, while the bond is wide open between us, while every defense I have is down, and the truth of them reaches a place in me that no one has ever touched.

“Sophia.”

“I know.” She puts her hand on my face. Her thumb traces my cheekbone. “I know. You don’t have to say it back.”

“I love you.” The words come out before I can stop them, raw and cracked and so honest they hurt. “I’ve been yours since the first day. I love you now, and I will love you until there’s nothing left of me.”

She pulls me down and kisses me and I feel her tears on my face and I come inside her with her mouth on mine and her hand on my heart and the doubled heartbeat thundering between us.

Afterward, we lie on the floor. The city glows above us through the glass. She’s curled against my side, her leg thrown over mine, her finger tracing lazy patterns on my chest.

“You really need to get a rug for this room,” she says.

“I’ll buy one tomorrow.”

“Something soft. My back is going to have floor marks.”