Page 33 of Match Made In Growl

The pressure built faster than she could track, coiling tight and hot at the base of her spine, spreading outward through her thighs and her stomach and the backs of her knees. She could feel him getting close too, his rhythm growing ragged, his breath coming in sharp bursts against her throat, and she wanted it. She wanted to feel him come apart the same way she was about to come apart, at the same time, in the same breath.

She tightened around him deliberately, clenching hard, and his whole body stuttered.

"Steph." His voice was raw, almost broken. "I can't... if you do that I'm going to..."

"Good." She tightened again and rolled her hips up to meet his next thrust and the friction against her clit was the last thing she needed. "Let go. With me."

The orgasm crested and broke and she felt it pull him under with her. He drove into her one final time, deep enough that their hips ground together, and she felt him pulse inside her as her own body seized around him. The pleasure didn't come in waves this time. It came all at once, a full-system overload that locked every muscle and stole every sound except the breath they choked out against each other's skin, shaking, clinging, the world reduced to the place where their bodies joined and held and wouldn't let go.

It lasted longer than she thought possible. The aftershocks rippled through them in tandem, her clenching triggering his pulse triggering hers, a feedback loop that kept them pinned together until the last tremor faded and they collapsed into the dirt, sweating and spent and tangled so thoroughly she couldn't tell whose limbs were whose.

Criss's face was buried in her neck. She could feel his heartbeat hammering against her chest, fast and hard, gradually slowing. His breathing evened out in stages, each exhale warm and damp against her skin. One of his hands was still cupped behind her knee, holding her leg up even though the urgency was gone, like he'd forgotten to let go.

She ran her fingers through his hair, pushing the golden-brown strands back from his forehead where sweat had plastered them. His scalp was warm under her touch and she felt him lean into it, just slightly, a small unconscious surrender that didn't match the alpha bravado he wore like a second skin.

"You saved my life," she said quietly.

The dust was settling around them, the destroyed basin ghost-white in the moonlight, and the air was cold on every part of her that wasn't pressed against him. She could feel him still inside her, softening slowly, and the intimacy of that was different from the frantic, electric urgency of a few minutes ago. Quieter. More dangerous in its own way.

He lifted his head and looked at her. In the moonlight, his amber eyes were pale gold, the pupils still blown but the wildness receding, and behind it she saw something that caught her off guard. Not the cocky assurance she was used to. Nor the easy charm he deployed like a weapon. Something careful. Something held back, leashed so tightly she could see the effort it cost him in the fine tension around his eyes and the set of his jaw.

He was holding back. Even now. Even in this, where they'd stripped everything down to skin and sweat and the raw, undeniable fact of wanting each other. There was a part of him he wasn't letting her see, a door he kept locked even when every other wall came down.

He pressed a kiss to her forehead. Gentle. Almost reverent. And the tenderness of it, after the roughness of everything else, wasn’t anything she had been ready for.

He eased out of her carefully, and she felt the loss of him as a physical absence, cool air rushing in where his warmth had been. He pulled her against his side and she let him, too wrung out to pretend she didn't want the contact, and they lay in the dirt behind the oak roots with the night sky spread above them, stars sharp and bright now that the dust had cleared. She would have been cold if it hadn’t been for the heat of his shifter blood.

Her body was heavy with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours of work and too much adrenaline burned too fast and the particular emptying that followed sex like that. The kind that left you transparent, every defense stripped, every pretense burned off.

She looked up at the stars and felt his arm tighten around her shoulders and his breath slow. His chest rose and fell under her hand, warm skin over hard muscle, and the spiced cedar scent of him mixed with dust and sex and the cold mineral smell of the ruined site.

The first time, she'd left before dawn and told herself it was nothing. This time, lying in the wreckage of her excavation with the man who'd thrown himself between her and a collapsing ridge, she couldn't sell herself that lie.

Something was between them. Something bigger than attraction, bigger than chemistry, bigger than two people who happened to be good together in the dark. She'd felt it in the way his body had found hers before his mind had made the choice, the shift and the sprint and the instinct that operated below the level of conscious thought.

And he knew. She could see it in the thing he kept pulling back behind his eyes. The restraint that lived underneath the confidence. The careful, controlled distance he maintained even when he was as deep inside her as he could get.

Criss Holt was hiding something. Not about the dig or the collapse or even Rydan Ashkar. Something about them. About what this was between them and what it meant and why his body kept finding hers like gravity.

She didn't ask. Not tonight. Tonight she was alive and exhausted and his arm was warm around her and the stars were very bright and very far away and the ground beneath them hummed with the faint, patient pulse of something that had been waiting a very long time.

She closed her eyes against his shoulder and let the exhaustion take her.

20

CRISS

She'd fallen asleep against his shoulder within minutes, her breathing evening out with the sudden, total surrender. Criss lay in the dirt with her weight warm against his side and the stars wheeling overhead and his tiger so still inside him it was almost silent, which was worse than the restlessness. The restlessness he could fight. The stillness meant the animal had made up its mind.

He didn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, the collapse replayed behind his lids. The sound of the trench folding inward. The crack of the ridge face splitting apart above her head. The half second where he'd been airborne, and shifted with his instinct aimed at the only thing in the world that mattered, and the sick certainty that he might not make it in time.

He'd made it. She was here, breathing, alive, curled against him with her hand resting on his chest and her dark curls dusted white and her heartbeat slow and steady under his palm.

And during what had happened after, somewhere in the middle of it, when she'd pulled him in and he'd felt her body lock around his and they'd come apart together in the dirt and the dust and the ruin of everything she'd worked for, something had clicked into place inside him with the finality of a deadbolt turning.

He knew what it was. He'd known since the first night at the tavern, maybe since the Griddle & Grind, maybe since her scent had hit him across a room. He'd just been very, very good at not looking at it directly.

He lay awake until the eastern horizon started to soften from black to grey, the first pale suggestion of dawn bleeding through the tree canopy. Then he eased out from under her arm and sat up, every muscle stiff from the cold ground and the hours of holding still.