you to want me”—I slide my hand around her cheek, my thumb on her chin—“the way I want you.”
The stillness is broken when an animal runs overhead and twigs and bark and needles are loosed from the canopy, falling down around us like snow.
Under my hand, I feel her head turn toward the Great Hall and the High Pines beyond as though weighing her responsibilities to her wolves against what she wants.
When she turns back, she doesn’t say anything, but she buries her lips in my hand, and suddenly, I am afraid.
I have always been selfish, fulfilling my own body’s needs. I didn’t bother to be good, because being good implied the desire for a repeat performance, of a relationship with its discussion of rings, the cuteness of baby cheeks, and the capital appreciation of real estate.
Now with a woman who could never be small, I wish I’d practiced more. All I have is a lifetime of reading people so that I could efficiently snuff out life, and I will use it to make sure this woman burns with it.
I put my hand to her breast. Cupping the soft weight underneath, I rub my thumb slowly across her skin, catching the tip. She sucks in a breath. I spread out my fingers, then I close them gently around her nipple, opening and closing until I feel the tremor through her body.
Then I bend down, tasting her, currant dark, currant hard, and currant sweet. Her body begins to move, swaying, unthinking, trying to get more skin to skin. Her knees buckle and she slides down against me and she lies against the pine-padded forest floor, releasing the scent of pine and rain as I stretch out against her, feeling her, reading her, listening to her, finding all those spots in the vast continuum between what is spoken and what is seen, where life happens.
Her eyes are closed, but I feel the tension of her body, her jaw tight, her back curved, forcing her torso toward me. The air between us thrums like cicadas in midsummer and she opens her thighs.
She puts her hand on my chest and I feel her calling all the wildness that I’ve kept in check, except for that one disastrous time.
I want every inch of my skin to touch her: chest, hips, thighs all pressed tight against her until I push my leg between hers to open her up and she pushes at me. My overloaded brain just barely manages to register the rejection of her hand and I twist away.
“I wasn’t stopping you,” she says. “I couldn’t see. I want to see.”
This time when I stretch my legs on either side of hers, I hold myself a little away on trembling arms. Head bent against mine, she watches as I slowly move back into place, nudging her open. Her mouth slack, the tip of her tongue touching the line of her teeth, she watches intently until I am poised trembling at her entrance. I move as slowly as my strung-out body will allow me, watching her want. I stop and withdraw, feeling her clench around me. Then I enter her again, a little farther this time. Each time, deeper until I slide all the way in and I am surrounded by heat and granite and moss and I am so deep that all we can see is the line where my hip touches hers.
She closes her eyes and we leave behind what is seen and what is spoken and enter that part of the continuum that is only felt. I push into her, changing the angle of my hips to find what makes her tighten around me. How deep she needs me to go until she groans my name and arches her back and I empty myself into her, only I am not emptied, because I am shattered.
And like that cup, I will never be empty again.
Chapter 25
Evie
“He’s a fool, Alpha. I can handle him.”
I can’t tell Elijah why, but I will not have any more argument. “Your Alpha,” I say, my voice resonating through my chest and skull, “would have Cassius watched. At. All. Times.”
Now Elijah lowers his eyes.
“You can’t trust Cassius,” Constantine told me last night. It was quiet, but I felt the vibration of it at the point where the top of my head fit under his chin and my ear pressed against his chest.
“I don’t.”
“If he were to escape, it would be—”
“Unfortunate?”
“Much worse than that.”
He stays quiet for a while, his lips