Page 116

You ask the forest to witness, he sends, and his voice in the bond is lower than before, less amused now, dragged through something old and hungry. You ask the beast to stop walking you back to softness. You ask to be taken where roots hear, where bark remembers, where every creature knows my mate came back to my hands and wanted the claws nearby.

My mouth goes dry.

All I can do at first is stand there with my pulse pounding under his hand and my fingers twisted in his hair. The words I said are hanging between us, real now, impossible to shove back under jokes or embarrassment. I asked for this—not the den, not the nest, not the furs and roots and warm darkness where everything feels contained.

Here. Open forest. Morning light. A tree at my back. His true body in front of me, massive and alive after weeks of fearing I’d only ever feel the ghost of him through a dying bond.

His skull dips, and he drags the edge of it along my cheek, then down to my shoulder, where the mark he gave me pulses under the skin. My body answers with a shiver I can’t control, and I know he feels it. The bond catches every stupid, needy pulse of me and feeds it back to him until his chest rumbles with a sound that travels straight through my hands.

Say yes again, he demands. No brave mouth running ahead of frightened body. Say it while my teeth are at your mark.

My knees almost go. I swallow once, hard, and force my voice out. “Yes. I want you right here. I don’t want gentle. I want you to take me here in this body. I want your true form. I want you rough. I want to feel that you’re back every time I move tomorrow, and I want you to stop treating me like I’ll shatter if you grip me too hard.”

Onyx growls.

The sound rolls through the clearing and sends birds scattering out of a nearby pine. His hand leaves my neck only to slide under my thighs. I barely manage a breath before he lifts me, and my boots leave the ground as if I weigh nothing.

Instinct makes my legs wrap around him. My arms lock around his neck, one hand burying in the thick hair there while the other grips the edge of his skull because there is nowhere else to hold that feels real enough.

He carries me two strides—that’s all it takes.

My back hits the tree with a rough thud that knocks the breath out of me and sends a sharp flare of heat through my stomach. Bark bites through my shirt and into my shoulder blades, grounding me so completely that I almost groan from that alone.

Onyx presses in immediately, his true body caging mine, furred hips between my thighs, claws braced in the trunk on either side of my head and sinking into bark with a crack that makes my cock throb so hard I have to swallow a groan. The sound of the bark splintering is obscene in a way nothing human could ever be.

I love it.

God help me, I love it so much my face burns.

There, he sends, almost vicious with satisfaction. There is the want my mate tries to make polite. Bark at his back. Legs around his beast. Heart hammering because he knows I can hold him up and take him apart without letting him fall.

My hips roll against him before I decide to move, and my breath stutters. The protected seam between his furred hips is still hidden, but I feel him through the bond, feel the immediate pulse there. I can feel the slick gathering, the hidden part of him stirring under fur and heat because I’m wrapped around him and asking for the true body.

My own body answers too. Since the bond changed me, there’s no need for slow coaxing the way there used to be. The slick comes with want now, warm and humiliatingly eager, easing the places that once needed his fingers and mouth and patience. It gathers between my thighs, slicking me before he’s even opened my jeans.

I have a feeling that the bond did something else to my body other than creating natural lube—something that changes the way I take him inside of me. Because, let’s be real: my insides would be my outsides if it wasn’t for something supernatural happening to me.

I lean forward as much as his body allows and press my mouth to the bone near his jaw. “You got me, Wildheart.”

Onyx’s restraint fractures. One clawed hand leaves the tree and goes to my shirt. Fabric rips down the front in one clean, brutal pull, buttons snapping into the leaves below. The cold morning air hits my chest, and I arch against him, legs tightening around his hips.

He grinds into me once, forcefully enough that I feel the hidden weight of him pressing through fur and slickness beginning to emerge.

The growl turns rougher as he shoves the tattered shirt off my shoulders until it hangs uselessly around my wrists. His huge hand follows immediately, palm dragging down over freckles, over muscle, over the places where months of missing him turned me sharper around the edges. He touches my ribs and stills for the smallest second.

I feel what he feels—the changes in me, the weight lost, the exhaustion carved under my skin, the body that kept going but didn’t thrive without him.

A dark, furious ache moves through the bond.

My mate grew thin without me, he sends, and the words come out rough enough to hurt. My flame burned alone. No more.

My eyes begin burning so fast I get angry at them. “Don’t make me cry before you fuck me against a tree.”

His head lifts. For one second, those pale eyes pin me so completely I forget how to breathe.

Cry if it comes, he sends. Take me if it comes. Beg if it comes. There is no shame in my forest.

I grab at him, dragging one hand up to the edge of his skull, the other buried deep in his hair. “Then stop talkin’ and show me you missed me.”