Page 83 of Wretched Thorns

“Again,” he said. Against her throat.

“Dex.”

“Again, chère.”

He hooked her thigh over his hip and went deeper. Her hand fisted in his hair. His teeth dragged at the side of her throat. The third one took her hard, or was it the fourth? At any rate, she came harder than the previous two, and her hips came up off the bed to meet his of their own accord, and he made a sound against her shoulder that wasn’t a man’s sound at all.

The rhythm broke after that. He stopped being a man holding back. His hips pumped faster. His hand fisted in her hair. The slow steady rhythm he had been giving her was gone, and what replaced it was need with no pacing left in it. The bed creaked. Her nails opened skin on his massive, sexy as fuck lats. She dug her heels into the small of his back and pulled him deeper, and the orgasms stopped having downtime between them and became one long rolling wave she could not have walked away from if the cottage had been on fire.

His teeth pressed at the place on the side of her throat that a lesser wolf would have laid claim to without asking.

He didn’t lay claim.

He pulled his teeth back the second he realized his wolf was frothing for it. He kissed the place instead, soft, careful, with everything he had not allowed his mouth to do, and she understood without having to be told what he was holding back. He pulled back, breathing hard.

She turned her face into his.

“Come for me, Dex.”

His whole body went tight against her. The muscles in his back locked under her palms. The wolf at the surface of his face pressed its forehead into hers for one held moment before whatever line he had been holding inside him let go.

He came a second later with her name in the curve of her shoulder and his hand gripping the swell of her ass, and for a long stretch neither of them moved.

***

She traced the scar across his back lightly with her finger.

She had her body curled against his side and her hand on the long-healed line that ran from the back of his left shoulder down to the blade. The type of scar a wolf acquired in a fight he wasn’t supposed to survive. While the skin had grown smooth over it, the line hadn’t healed clean.

Dex didn’t pull away when her fingers found it. He turned his head into the pillow toward her face. His eyes were warm-brown again, no gold in them now; the wolf had gone back to wherever the wolf went.

“A Beaumont brat gave me that scar when I was nineteen,” he said quietly. “A coyote he was running with decided to leave me in a ditch overnight.”

Silence stretched briefly.

“Bodie found me the next morning.”

His eyes lifted back to hers.

“Nobody saw much of the coyote after that.”

She kissed the scar.

She didn’t move for a long beat. He didn’t either.

Then the guilt struck, sharp enough to take the breath out of her and evoke bile at the back of her throat.

The bed was the smallest part of it. The rest went all the way back to Nashville, to her own voice on the phone all those months ago, light as anything, telling Serena to stay put with the hot brothers and enjoy herself, God knew she’d earned a little fun after Marcus. She’d said it the way you tell a girlfriend to order the second margarita. She’d known what the Voss boys were and thought knowing made her wise about it. She had not known one true thing about the world she was waving her best friend into, coyotes, wolves, warlocks, the feedings, rooms with no windows, all the things that walked this corner of the world wearing the faces of men. She had aimed Serena straight at the center of it and called it a good time. And here Tara was now, in a wolf’s bed with a thrum in her own chest she would not say out loud, learning bit by bit what that world actually cost a person. Learning it in her own skin, because apparently that was the only way she was ever going to learn anything.

Dex picked up on it immediately. Damn thrum.

His hand at her hip tightened a fraction.

“Tara.”

“Don’t.”

“You’re not failing her by lying in this bed. The boys are working. Rowena is working. Bodie is working. Eli is going to be on the trail-magic until his hand gives out. There is nothing you can do for her right now that any of us is not already doing.”