“Trust me?” she asked, running the nails of her free hand down his chest.

Those obsidian eyes held hers, and though she couldn’t see his pupils in the sweep of black, she knew he was eye-to-eye with her. “With my throat. With my life.”

A shudder raked her spine, her wolf shoving against her skin. Oh, but her Arrow knew just what to say to make her his—and the best thing of all was that he didn’t calculate or analyze. He spoke as he felt and, in doing so, fractured all those walls she’d put up to protect her heart.

Ethan would never choose to leave her, would never choose to abandon her. She could trust him with herself and know the gift wouldn’t be kicked back in her face. That she had to consciously think that even with her mate . . . yes, Ethan wasn’t the only one in this relationship who was damaged. And she’d tell him that. After.

Because this time was about the present, not the past. About pleasure, not pain.

“Let me show you pleasure.” Overwhelmed with affection and the whispers of a deeper and far more dangerous emotion, she kissed him soft and sweet over his shoulders and chest until his muscles began to soften at last. “Let me ease your ache.” She squeezed his cock.

“No, this is meant to be a mutual activity,” her stubborn mate argued even as sweat broke out over his skin. “I read it in the manual Margo recommended. No one party should lie back and receive only.”

Selenka blinked, momentarily distracted from the delicious heat and length of him in her grasp. “Manual?”

“The ‘Skin Privileges & Satisfaction’ and ‘Aunt Rita’ columns of Wild Woman magazine.”

Wolf huffing inside with affectionate laughter—because of course Ethan had done his research—Selenka kissed him, her lips curved and her hand unmoving on his cock because this wasn’t about teasing her mate. That would come later, after he knew how to tease her in return.

“The manual is correct,” she said, “except in situations where one party wishes to give and finds deep pleasure in that.”

Pressing a finger to his lips when he would’ve argued with her again, she said, “One day, you can do the same to me.”

No more arguing, Ethan’s features settling into lines of anticipation. So, her lover liked the idea of petting her to his heart’s content. Lips curved, she removed her finger from his lips. “Yes?”

A small nod.

Releasing his cock, she pulled him into the bedroom and pushed him down onto his back on the bed. Then she climbed up over him. Staying on her knees as he lay below her, watching her with obsidian eyes that devoured her, she undid the belt of her robe and shrugged it off her shoulders.

Her feminine core clenched at the way he looked at her, all hot eyes and sensual craving. Ethan Night was going to wreck her when he got going. Throwing the robe aside on a wave of arousal, she dropped her mouth to his neck and licked over the mark she’d made, the mark that shouted to the world that he was hers. Only after she’d satisfied that primal urge did she begin to kiss her way down the hard, flat planes of his chest.

His hand jerked up to grip her hair. Releasing it almost at once, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Go ahead and hold on.” A licking kiss pressed to his solar plexus. “Because I’m going for fast and hard today.” Her mate didn’t yet understand how to revel in taut sexual need—he was experiencing anticipation as pain, and that was unacceptable to either part of her.

He should know only pleasure in bed with her.

“If you want me to stop, just say ‘stop.’” She’d also pay close attention to his nonverbal cues. It was a rule she’d put into effect after an illuminating—if mortifying—conversation with her grandmother as a teenager.

“You’re an incredibly powerful wolf, Selenushka,” her gentle and submissive babushka had murmured. “Your dominance is significant and might intimidate partners. You must always give them agency and power. And keep checking to see they’re with you—we’re wolves, not humans or Psy, and your dominance is so strong that not everyone will have the power to resist the compulsion to simply obey you.”

A brush of a warm, soft hand over her hair. “I know my sweet Selenushka doesn’t want obedience with a lover. It’s not who you are. But you must take care that it doesn’t happen by accident—because I know such a thing would devastate you.”

She’d gone tomato red during that conversation, but she’d taken her grandmother’s lesson to heart. Not that Ethan needed her to give him agency in that way. The man was lethal and fully capable of stopping her dead in her tracks anytime he wished. Or . . . maybe not.

She halted.

Ethan’s devotion was a thing of stone, a thing that would not budge. While that devotion was an arrow straight to her heart, she had to be sure that he understood it didn’t mean acceptance regardless of his own needs and wants and desires.

Raising her head, she caught his gaze and spoke with blunt honesty. “I can’t enjoy myself if I’m worried you’re not enjoying what I’m doing to you. So if you need something else, or if you’ve had enough, tell me. Otherwise, I’ll feel like a mudak when I find out—because a mate will always know in the end.”

Ethan wove his hand into her hair, his breathing uneven as he said, “I disagreed with you earlier. I promise to do so in bed, too.”

Laughing because his stubbornness and unwillingness to budge on certain things was an annoying truth, she happily carried on in her path. Her thighs felt lusciously sensitive, her breasts plump and full, her core liquid honey. Ethan’s skin was hot, the taste of him delicious to her.

Her mate already carried her scent on him, but she was determined to stamp it into his skin even harder and deeper. Yes, she was a possessive beast. Good thing he didn’t seem to mind. Having reached the ridged lines of his abdomen, she licked and kissed, one hand on his hip and his erection an iron poker against her breasts.

Chapter 23

Lover mine

Kiss me

Murder me

A ruin in our bed

Pleasure in my veins

—“Pleasure” by Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)

ETHAN PULLED AT her hair, sharp enough that it stung a little, adding spice to the pleasure. “Selenka.” It was a pained sound, his beautiful voice fragmenting. “I can’t—”

She’d thought to show him heaven with her mouth, but realized now he didn’t have the capacity to deal with the overload of sensation. But her hand didn’t feel right, not for this, their first intimacy. Rising to straddle him once again, she ran her fingers over his lips, so lush in the bristled roughness of his unshaven face. “Will you let me lead this dance?”

Only after he’d jerked a nod, his hands gripping her hips, did she close her fingers around the base of his erection and begin to slide herself down on him. Quivers quaked through her, control threatening to slip from her grasp. Wrenching it back with gritted teeth because Ethan didn’t need to be handling a wild wolf this first time, she focused on her beautiful, dangerous mate.

His head had fallen back, his neck arched and his fingers digging into her hips.

Along the mating bond, the jagged night that was Ethan shuddered with huge waves of light. And inside her, he was a thick heat that pushed at the walls of her core and claimed her even as she claimed him. She sank home with a shudder, her fingers clawed on his chest, and her inner muscles spasming.

Ethan’s body jerked up without warning, a sudden wet heat inside her that made her muscles clench again as she watched Ethan’s body get impossibly more taut, his shoulders so hard they could’ve been carved out of stone. Her wolf growled, her body moving rhythmically on his.

A small sound wrenched from his throat, his fingers clenching even tighter on her as the wet pulses inside her intensified. Just when she worried he might break from the strain he was putting on his body, he slumped to the bed, the obsidian eyes that met hers dazed, and his skin filmed with a fine layer of perspiration.

Squeezing him inside her because he was still hard despite the violence of his orgasm, she leaned in to lick at his throat before claiming a kiss, both of them breathless. “There,” she said even as her heart beat like a drum, “that’s taken the edge off.” A small nip of his lower lip. “Shall we play now?”

Ethan raised his hand to her breast, cupping it with care. His hand made her moan, lean into the touch.

He parted his lips. “I feel . . .” A harsh exhale, a rough inhale.

“Me, too,” she said, moving on him with sinuous fluidity because she couldn’t stop. “You feel so good inside me.” Already, she could feel him swelling to renewed readiness inside her. Her lover had a lot of pent-up sexual energy within.

“Show me what to do.”

Selenka rose up with her hands braced on his chest. “Move with me.”

He was an Arrow and a telekinetic, physical dexterity in his blood. He picked up the rhythm in a matter of seconds, and they rocked slow and deep together. Then she took his hand and showed him just how to touch her to make her break with pleasure as he’d broken—it was only fair.

Her moan a minute later had him repeating the circular motion he’d just tried. His skin dented under the tips of her claws, but when she sliced them back in, he gripped her wrist and said, “Don’t hold back.” Lifting her hand, he sucked one finger into his mouth, echoing the rhythmic sucking with the circles he was making over her clit.

“Manual?” she gasped.

Releasing her finger, he said, “No, I just wanted to do that.” He flicked the nub of her clitoris. “That was in the manual.”

Selenka barely heard him, the shock waves of molten heat rolling over her body. She came all over and around him, and when she looked at him in the aftermath, her hands braced on his chest, the look on his face was one of pure satisfaction. She couldn’t help it; she leaned down and kissed him.

Arms wrapped around her, he kissed her deep and long and increasingly wild. “Can I do this between your legs?” he asked afterward.