Page 29 of The Iron Alpha

When I join her on the bed, I don't cover her. I lie beside her, propped on one elbow, and my free hand finds her belly.

The muscles jump beneath my palm. She's not bracing. She's uncertain, and the uncertainty is so foreign on her that it takes me a moment to identify what I'm seeing.

My hand moves up. Over her ribs, the terrain of bone and soft skin, to the curve of her breast. I cup the weight of it, my thumb drawing across the peak until it hardens under my touch, and her breath catches. Not the sharp gasp of discipline. Something quieter. Something that has room in it for the sensation to build instead of being forced past resistance.

I roll her nipple between my thumb and finger, deepening the pressure by degrees, and her back arches off the furs just enough for me to feel the movement through the bed. I tighten my grip. Her lips part. A flush spreads across her chest, pink darkening to rose under the firelight, and when I pinch harder her hips move on the furs, a restless motion she doesn't seem aware she's making. The bond tells me what the arch means: arousal tightening from her breast to her core, a direct line of heat that she's not fighting.

I lower my mouth to the hollow of her throat. Her pulse is fast under my lips, and the taste of her skin is salt and warmth and the faint mineral trace of the stone she's been working in all day. I move down. My tongue traces the curve of one breast, circling the peak before I close my mouth over it and suck, unhurried and firm. Her nipple is hard and swollen between my lips, and I work it with my tongue until the sound she makes echoes off the stone ceiling and her fingers twist in the furs beneath her.

I move to the other. The same attention, the same measured pace. I graze my teeth across the peak and her whole body jerks, a sharp intake of breath followed by a low sound that is closer to a moan than anything she's given me before. Her hands come up from the furs to close on my shoulders. Holding me there.

I keep moving down. The plane of her belly, the muscles tensing and releasing as I pass over them, the dip of her navel, the ridge of her hipbone.

I take my time, and the taking of time is itself the departure, the fracture in every pattern we've built, because I've never been this unhurried with her. I've been thorough and devastating and relentless, but never this. The pace is doing something to her that I can feel: a loosening, a lowering of defenses she's maintained since the day I took her from Dover. Her skin is hot under my mouth. The muscles of her inner thigh tremble when my lips brush the crease where her leg meets her hip, and the scent of her arousal is thick in the air between us, unmistakable, making my cock throb where it's trapped beneath my weight.

The wolf in me wants to lunge into the gap. The man is doing something worse. He's mapping it with his mouth, memorizing the terrain of a woman who is letting him see her without armor, and some part of me knows this is more dangerous than anything I've done to her in this bed. A woman I've conquered can be controlled. A woman who is choosing to open can choose to close again, and the withdrawal will gut me in ways the resistance never did.

When I reach the junction of her thighs, I don't push them apart. I rest my mouth on her leg and wait.

She opens for me. The parting of her legs is voluntary, unhurried, a decision made at a pace that belongs to her instead of to me. Her muscles aren't bracing for intrusion; her body isn't clenching to absorb what I'm about to take. She is giving this. The sensation of receiving instead of seizing hits me somewherebeneath the ribs, sharp and unfamiliar, and I don't know what to do with it.

I put my mouth on her. Deliberate. Thorough. My tongue parts her folds and traces a long path through the slick heat that the discipline raised and that she has been holding since my hand changed direction on her hip. She's soaked, the wetness coating my lips and chin as I work deeper, and the taste of her arousal is thick and warm and undeniable, salt and musk and the copper-edge of adrenaline. Her hips rock upward, seeking more, and I give it to her in measures she doesn't control but that I'm calibrating to the rhythm of her breathing instead of to the pace of my own need. The sounds are obscene. My mouth on her, the wet noise of my tongue working through her folds, her breathing fracturing above me. I don't care. I flatten my tongue and lick into her with the kind of thorough, devouring attention I've never given her, and the wetness runs down my chin and onto the furs.

I find the swollen center of her with the flat of my tongue. Her thighs clamp on either side of my head and then release, trembling, and the sound she pushes through her teeth is raw enough to make my cock ache where it's trapped beneath me.

I circle her with my tongue, varying the pressure, reading her responses: the sharpening when I bear down harder, the gathering tension when I suck, the way her hips grind toward my mouth when I flatten my tongue and drag it from her entrance to the top in one long stroke. I do it again. And again. Her fingers find my hair, and they aren't pulling me away. They're holding me closer.

I slide two fingers inside her while my tongue works the spot that makes her thighs tremble. She's tight and hot around my knuckles, the muscles inside her gripping and releasing in involuntary pulses. I curl my fingers forward, working the swollen place while my mouth keeps its rhythm, and thecombination makes her spine arch off the bed. Her thighs are shaking. Her breathing has dissolved into broken fragments.

The pleasure flooding through builds and overlaps until my own body is responding, my hips grinding into the furs beneath me, my cock so hard the ache is physical.

She comes with a sound I haven't heard from her before. Open and raw and unmanaged, nothing bitten off or swallowed or buried in the bedding. Her inner muscles clench around my fingers in crushing waves, her hips jerking toward my face, and the wetness that pulses from her coats my chin and the furs beneath her. I don't pull back. I keep my mouth on her through every wave, my tongue firm and steady while her body convulses, tasting her orgasm as it floods through her, feeling the contractions squeeze my fingers in a rhythm that makes my cock ache so hard my hips grind involuntarily into the bed. The vulnerability of that sound, a sound that has no resistance in it, hits me harder than her defiance ever has.

I move over her. Between her thighs. I hold my weight on one arm and guide the head of my cock to her entrance with the other, and the slick heat parts around me as the tip catches and holds. For one heartbeat I stay there, just the head of me stretching her open, and the instinct hits before I can stop it: pin her wrists, drive in hard, take her as I've taken her every other night because that's the language my body speaks and tenderness is a dialect I don't trust myself with.

My hand moves toward her wrist. Stops. I flatten my palm on the furs beside her head instead, and the effort of redirecting that impulse leaves my arm shaking. She watches me do it. She watches me choose, and her seeing the choice is worse than if I'd just pinned her.

I sink inside her in one long stroke. She takes me inch by inch, and the sound that fills the chamber is both of us exhaling at once. The fit is staggering. It always is, but tonight everypoint of contact is amplified until I can feel the stretch of her around me, the fullness reaching the end of her, the pulse of her heartbeat through the walls where she meets me.

I seat myself to the hilt and hold there, buried, my hips flush with the heat of her inner thighs, and for the first time I'm looking at her face while I'm inside her. Face to face. Eyes open. The intimacy of it's more obscene than anything I've done to her in the dark.

"You feel different tonight." My voice comes out low, stripped of the authority I've been wearing like armor. "Your body is doing something it hasn't done before."

Her gaze holds mine. Her legs wrap around my hips and her heels dig into the small of my back, pulling me deeper, and the pressure makes me grit my teeth. "So is yours," she says.

I set a pace that would have been impossible for me three nights ago. Deep. Measured. Each stroke a full withdrawal to the tip and a return to the hilt, and on every stroke the drag of her around my cock sends a pulse of heat through the base of my spine that threatens to end this before I'm ready. The sounds fill the chamber: the noise of our bodies meeting, her breathing fracturing on every thrust, the creak of the bed frame on stone.

One of her hands finds my arm. The other lands flat on my chest over my heartbeat. She's not fighting me. She's holding me, and her pulse reaches me through her palm on my ribs. The synchronization of our bodies isn't strategy. It's the absence of strategy. The absence is a void I don't know how to fill with anything exceptmore of her, and that hunger is less controlled than anything I've been feeding with discipline and commands.

My forehead drops to hers. My breathing is ragged. Her pleasure is layering over mine until the boundary dissolves. I move inside her and she moves with me, her hips rising to meet every stroke, and the angle grinds the base of my cock along the swollen center of her. She gasps. I do it again. Her innerwalls clench around me on the upstroke, a reflexive squeeze that drags a groan out of me I don't bother to contain. I look at her face while I do it, and the woman whose calculations never stop running has gone quiet. The strategist who maps my fortress and reads my troop deployments has disappeared, and the woman underneath is looking at me like I'm the only thing in this room that matters.

"Your body knows." My voice is low, raw, spoken into the hollow beneath her ear while I'm buried to the hilt. "Every time I push inside you, you pull me deeper. You're doing it right now."

Her breath catches. Her inner walls tighten around my cock as if to prove me right, and the squeeze makes my next thrust harder than I intended. She takes it. Her heels dig into my back and her hips rise to meet the impact, and the sound that comes out of her is the first one she hasn't tried to control.

That sound is going to cost me. Every wolf in this Tower will know by morning that something in this chamber changed. They'll taste it on the air between us, read it in how I look at her across the great hall, and the ones whose loyalty runs thin will file it under leverage. I know this. I’m inside her and I know this, and the knowing changes nothing about how my hips move or the sounds I'm making with my mouth on her throat.

She drags her nails down my back. Not the frantic clawing of previous nights where she was fighting what I made her feel. This is intentional: lines of fire scored from my shoulder blades to the small of my back, hard enough that I feel skin part under her fingers, and the sting of it makes my hips snap forward in a thrust that is harder than anything else I've given her tonight. She takes the impact with a sound that is half gasp and half satisfaction, and when I pull back to look at her she is bright and sharp and entirely herself.