Page 57 of Wretched Thorns

He took her at her word.

The plaster was rough. Her shoulder blades were going to feel it tomorrow. She didn’t give a single goddamn fuck.

He had her thigh hooked over his hip. One of her hands fisted in his hair. The other flat against the wall. He held her there for a moment, his face inches from her face, and she understood without being told that he wanted her looking at him when he did it.

She looked back.

When he pushed into her, she made a sound that didn’t come close to being a word and yet said everything, and he made one to match.

He wasn’t gentle. She hadn’t asked for gentle.

His hand under her thigh tightened to a grip that was going to leave a mark. She leaned into it. His mouth came down on her throat, teeth at her pulse, challenging every ounce of his restraint, breath hot against the line of her jaw.

She wrapped both arms around his neck.

He set a rhythm and she met it, and the cypress-rough plaster was scraping her shoulder blades and his other hand was up under her shirt now, callused thumb at her nipple through the cotton of her bra.

She bit the lobe of his ear.

He laughed once into her throat. Not at all human in its sound.

When she came, she came hard; shoulders pressed against the wall, toes curled into the back of his thigh, hips pressed hard against his. His name came out of her mouth in a register she had not ever used in her life.

“Mm,” Dex said in a velvet voice at her ear. “Say it again, chère.”

She did.

He kept going.

The second one took her half off the wall. He caught her at the waist and hauled her with him backward toward the bed in the corner without taking himself out of her. Her knees hit the mattress and she sat down hard and pulled him with her. They half-fell. He laughed once, low and growly. She laughed with him.

She got him on his back.

Her brain might still have been catching up, but the rest of her had made this decision miles ago. She straddled him and put her hands flat on his chest through the shirt he hadn’t bothered to fully unbutton. Rolled her hips once.

His eyes went a shade deeper into wolf.

She rolled them again.

His hands came up to her hips. Tight. Not guiding. Just holding her there like he was afraid she was going to leave.

“Slow,” she said. “I want it slow.”

“Hmmm… yep, I'm good with that.”

She rode him slowly at first. His eyes stayed on her face. His thumbs at the points of her hipbones. Every time she lifted off him, he made a sound at the back of his throat that was wolf, and every time she sank back down he made a smaller one that was just a man.

Then, not slow at all.

His hands moved to her thighs. Eyes fully gold. Lip caught between two of his teeth, jaw locked, the wolf right there at the surface and being held back by something he was clearly not going to explain to her.

She watched him choose.

The choosing was hotter than anything else he had done yet.

“Come on, chère,” he said, voice gravel. “I want to feel you again.”

She bent forward and put her mouth on his, and he met it, and his thumb came up between them and found her clit. The spine she had been holding deliberately straight gave up the pretense. The third one took her before she had any input on it, hard enough that she went forward over him, her hands flat on his chest and her forehead against his collarbone, and he came under her with a sound that was a little too rough to belong entirely to a man.