Page 93 of Bearly Out Loud

“Of course.”

“My career.”

“Always.”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

“That’s more like it.”

She undressed herself.

Slowly. Deliberately. Making him watch.

Her jacket first—dropped on the chair by the window, backlit by the late sun. Then her shirt, pulled over her head withunhurried confidence—she had spent her entire adult life using her body as an instrument and understood exactly what each movement communicated. The scars on her back—three parallel lines, still pink, still new—caught the light. She didn’t hide them. They were hers now. Proof of a choice she would make again.

He stood where she’d left him. Hands at his sides. Fists. The control he was famous for fraying visibly—a muscle in his jaw, a wildness in his eyes, his chest rising with breaths that were deeper than they needed to be.

She used her voice. The performance voice—the one that commanded recording booths and convention halls and the attention of every person in a room. Low, deliberate, pitched to hit him where words landed hardest.

“The hero watches. He can’t look away.” She unfastened her jeans. Let them slide. Stepped out of them—she narrated seductions as a profession and had never been the lead in one until now. “She’s the most dangerous thing in his world and she’s taking off her shirt.”

“You’re killing me.” His voice was rough. Wrecked. A hum rising underneath it that filled the room like her voice filled a booth.

“I haven’t even gotten to the good part.”

He broke.

Two steps. His mouth on hers. His hands finally on her skin—spanning her waist, pulling her against him, the patience he wore like a suit jacket abandoned on the floor with the rest of the pretense. She kissed him back with equal urgency, her fingers already at his belt, shoving his shirt off those shoulders she’d been cataloguing since the first session. The shirt caught on his arms. She pulled harder. It ripped.

“That was a five-hundred-dollar shirt.”

“Send me the bill.” She shoved the fabric off. Ran her hands across the breadth of him—shoulders to chest to the flat planeof his stomach. He was unreasonably built. Every line of him designed for size and power and a gentleness that made the powerruinous, and she wanted all of it against her, around her, over her. “You’re unreasonably built.”

“Complaint?”

“Observation. Shut up and kiss me.”

He lifted her. Easy. Effortless. Bear strength applied to the logistics of getting a woman from her living room to her bed without breaking the kiss that was turning his brain to static. She wrapped around him—legs at his waist, arms at his neck—and bit the hinge of his jaw. The sound he made was pure animal: a growl so deep it vibrated through her ribcage and settled between her thighs.

He laid her on the bed and covered her with his body, and the heat between them was a living thing—consuming, mutual, fed by months of restraint and a performance that had cracked her open and the specific, addictive chemistry of two people who had been through fire and come out fused.

He kissed down her body with focus that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with intent. Her neck. Her collarbone. The scars on her back when he turned her—his mouth gentle there, tracing each line, honoring the marks she’d earned protecting his family. She shivered. He kissed lower. His hands pinned her hips when she arched, holding her steady while his mouth found the center of her and his tongue undid every remaining coherent thought she possessed.

The rumble in his chest vibrated into her skin. She could hear it—a sound so low it bypassed her ears and hit her bones—and the combination of his mouth and that hum drove her up fast and hard. Her hands twisted in the sheets. Her back arched against his hold. She came with his name in her throat, at full voice, the one that filled stadiums, and something beneath his skin answered with a sound she could feel in her teeth.

When he moved back up her body, his eyes were solid gold.

“This is when I mark you.” He entered her slowly. Completely. Eye contact unbroken. “When we’re connected. When you’re mine and I’m yours.”

“Yes.”

He moved. Deep. Deliberate. Every stroke a conversation they didn’t need words for. She matched him—rolling her hips, dragging her nails down his back, wrapping her legs tighter. This was not passive. This was two people choosing each other in the most primal language available, and she refused to be quiet about it.

She told him.Toldhim—because she was Nari and hiding was for people without her vocal range. What she wanted. How it burned. That she loved him. That she chose him. That every version of this they’d ever have would include her voice because she would not be silent about this, not about him, not about how he made her body sing.

Her voice in his ear broke him apart.

The mark came at the peak. Both of them shaking, the bond between them pulled taut—a wire about to snap—and his teeth found the curve where her shoulder met her neck. Not savage. Precise. The bite was hot, then electric, then a current that rewired her from the inside out. She came with the mating bond flooding through her—not physical pleasure alone buteverything.His heartbeat. His satisfaction. A triumphant, tender roar that echoed through her chest as if her body had grown a second heart.