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I made a sound against his throat. His whole body responded to it; a shudder he didn't suppress, a tightening of his arms around me. His rhythm lost its perfect calibration for one unguarded moment before he found it again.

Good. I wanted him unguarded. I wanted to be the thing that made him lose himself.

I wrapped my legs around him and changed the angle. He let me and exhaled sharply into my hair. A surge of triumph burned through me alongside everything else that I'd taken an inch of control. I loved having him in charge, but I was bossy by nature.

We moved together. Finding it; the rhythm that two people find when instincts take over.

I was close again, which should not have been possible so soon. My body had apparently abandoned all previous schedules in favor of Magnus Blackwood's. I dug my fingers into his back and chased the orgasm. He met me, stroking deeper, hitting the exact spot where I needed him.

He was going to let me do it this time. He was going to let me come. That realization was a prerelease. So when the orgasm hit, it left me drowning.

I had never clenched so hard in my life. The shudders had never lasted this long. I had never once cried during sex. All of these things happened. Magnus kept his promise and held me through it.

Distantly, I felt his surrender a few moments after mine. Such a gentleman to wait for me. His growl was low and broken against my throat. His whole body shuddered through his climax.

We lay still. His weight on me. My hands in his hair.

And then I felt it.

Something — changed. Inside me. A swelling, a fullness. A pressure built where there had been only the thickness of his cock nestled inside me. This was bigger than his manhood.

It wasn't painful. It was the opposite of painful. It was warm and deep and spreading outward through my whole lower body like the heat of the first sip of a stiff drink.

I shifted, trying to relieve the pressure and continue riding out the aftershocks of my orgasm.

The pressure held.

I shifted again, and realized with a dawning awareness that I could not move away from Magnus. Not because he was holding me. His arms were loose around me. His weight easy. Nothing restraining.

"Magnus?"

"Don't move." His voice was different. He sounded as if an animal had hold of his vocal cords. The amber in his eyes was very bright.

"What—" I tried to shift again. The pressure bloomed warm and insistent. It was not going to let me go.

"Nell, stop. Fuck. Don't move, baby. Just — fuck." He pressed his lips to my temple. His arms tightened around me. "Don't be afraid. I'll explain."

I was afraid. There was something growing inside of me. It felt good, but… not wrong. Just big. Magnus was already a big boy. This thing between us, this thing inside of me, was growing to the point I knew it would split me in two. But there was nothing I could do. There was no escape.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MAGNUS

Fuck. This was not happening. The best fuck of my life, a fuck that made me see stars, a fuck that made me question my commitment to my family, and then this.

I was so screwed.

The knot swelled at the base of my cock, locking us together with biological certainty. It didn't care about contracts. It didn't care about war or allies. It didn't care about anything other than making the woman who was now attached to my dick attached to me permanently.

Wolves only knot their fated mates.

Not their lovers. Not their one-night stands. Not their weeklong indulgences before they committed to their arranged marriages. Only their fated mates.

My wolf had chosen Nell. The wolf, once it chose, did not un-choose.

I had known that one-night with Nell was fiction before I got in the car tonight. I had known it when she climbed into my lap in the living room and kissed me. I had known it before that — in the elevator, in the office, in the cabin. Hell, probably, when I scooped up her unconscious body in the park.

I had been lying to myself for weeks, and now the knot swelling inside her was the end of the fiction.