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“Little Ghost.”

“Don’t.”

He drew back a fraction. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t stop.”

A low laugh went through his chest, and I felt it under my hands.

“You’re going to be the death of me.”

“Probably.”

“At least I’ll die happy.”

I kissed him again.

I want it written down somewhere that in the middle of all that I kept the whole of my weight off his ribs, which is more consideration than that man has ever shown my dignity. His hand splayed open at the small of my back and pulled me flush against him, and I felt the breath go out of us both.

He kissed the place beneath my ear and the top of my cheek and came back to my mouth each time like he was taking inventory, and there was hunger in every bit of it, enough that I could feel him shaking with how hard he was holding it.

That was the part that undid me.

He wanted me badly enough to tremble, and not once did he use a single ounce of the strength in those arms to make me do anything. He held me like I had come to him on my own, because I had, and every touch of his hands kept asking rather than telling. I had been kissed before, by boys at harvest dances in another life. I had never been kissed by a man who could have overpowered me in half a second and chose instead to let me set the pace.

“I’ve wanted this longer than I should admit,” he said against my mouth.

“Then perhaps you should stop talking and make up for lost time.”

He did.

I do not know how long we stood by that window. Long enough that the gray light on the floor had moved and my hands had learned the shape of his shoulders, long enough that when I finally took a fistful of his shirt and started pulling him back toward the bed, I did it without thinking twice.

His hand came up and caught my wrist.

Gently. There was no force in it at all, but he stopped me, and everything in me dropped straight through the floor.

“Oh,” I said.

“No.” He read my face before I could get it under control, and his grip changed at once, turning my hand over and pressing my palm flat against his chest so I could feel what his heart was doing. “Look at me. It’s not that.”

“You just…”

“Robin, I have twelve stitches in his side and you have a heat coming on…” He said it carefully, like a man walking over ice with something precious in his arms. “When I take you to bed, I want you clear enough to remember choosing it. I want to hold you without bleeding all over your father’s mattress. Both of those things are going to happen. Neither of them is happening this afternoon.”

“You’re stopping again,” I complained.

He smiled, and bent, and pressed it against my forehead.

“Temporarily.”

“You’re a very frustrating man.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“I could find another Alpha.”

The smile went out of him instantly.