Page 72 of The Iron Alpha

His jaw tightens. He doesn't flinch. "I'm standing here telling you because you deserve the truth even when the truth is that I'dmake the same choices. I won't pretend I've become a different man. I'm the same man with one less lie between us."

Does it matter that the bond drew him to me?

Margery asked me that. I wasn't ready to answer.

I'm ready now.

I cross the room. Not slowly. Not tentatively. I cross it with the stride of a woman who faced a wolf in this man's absence and didn't flinch.

He came to me first. Not to the council chamber. Not to deal with Aldric. To me.

I stop in front of him. Close enough that the heat from his body reaches mine, close enough that I can see the pulse hammering in his throat, close enough that when I put my hands on his chest, I feel his breathing stutter under my palms.

He doesn't move. His hands hang at his sides. Every line of his body is rigid with the effort of not reaching for me, and that effort is the most honest thing he's ever shown me.

"The bond pointed you at me," I say. "The man chose me. I know." I hold his gaze. "Now hear mine. The bond didn't build the drainage. The bond didn't count the grain. The bond didn't face a wolf in the great hall and hold its ground with nothing but numbers and nerve. I chose this Tower. I chose the women in it and the work that needed doing and the walls that needed holding while you were gone."

His teeth lock together. His hands flex at his sides.

"I choose you." The words come out steady. Clear. The voice I used on Aldric's wolf, the one that doesn't shake. "Not the alpha. Not the fated mate. The man who hid the truth because telling it would have meant admitting he was exposed. I choose the man who's standing in front of me right now with nothing left to negotiate with, because that's the first version of you that's ever been real."

His control breaks.

Not the way it broke during discipline, calculated and strategic. Not the way it broke during the desperate tenderness of our last night, careful and doomed. This is the sound a structure makes when the last support gives way and the man underneath it is standing in the open for the first time.

His hands are on my face. His mouth is on mine. The kiss is not gentle. It has the hunger of the drought behind it, the accumulated want of a body denied the one thing it was built to need.

The taste of him is salt and road dust and the absence that's been sitting in the center of my chest since he walked out of this room.

I kiss him back. I grip the front of his tunic and pull, and the pulling is the point.

Every time before this, his hands put me where he wanted me. His commands moved my body. His strength held me in position while he took what he decided to take.

I am pulling him to me. The difference burns between us like a brand.

His hands slide into my hair. My back hits the wall beside the window. His body presses against mine, the full length of him, and I feel his cock hard against my hip through the leather of his breeches.

The contact sends a jolt through me that has nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the nights I spent reaching for his warmth in an empty bed and finding nothing.

I want him. The wanting is the weapon Margery warned me about, the desire my mother feared, the thing every woman in Dover was taught to guard against. A wolf's woman stops wanting to come back. She stops recognizing the difference between captivity and choice.

I recognize the difference. I'm choosing.

I sink to my knees.

His breathing stops. His whole body goes rigid against the wall, and his hands in my hair freeze with a stillness I recognize because I learned it from him.

I look up. His eyes are wide and dark. His jaw is locked. The expression on his face is one I've never seen from this angle.

Every other time I've been on my knees for him; the expression was command. Control. The alpha watching his woman perform an act of submission he orchestrated.

This is not that.

This is a man watching a woman kneel because she wants to, and the want is dismantling him more thoroughly than any defiance ever did.

I unlace his breeches. My fingers are steady. I draw him out. He's thick and hard, and the heat of him in my palm sends a pulse through the bond that I feel in my own body, a mirror of his arousal bleeding into mine until I can't separate what I want from what he needs.

I take him into my mouth.