RIAZ lay on the grass, so angry with himself that he couldn’t look at Adria. But he could sense her pushing her bra and T-shirt back down into place. She didn’t rise to find her jeans, and he wondered if they were even in one piece. “I’m sorry.” His voice was coated with gravel.

A pause. “Why?”

“I’ve never hurt a woman like that.” He knew damn well she had bruises, and that bite on the smooth curve of her shoulder wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

Adria sighed, stretching out under the twilight colors of the sky. “I wasn’t complaining, Riaz, and I’m strong enough to have gutted you if you’d been doing anything I didn’t want you to do.”

“Damn it, Adria.” He lifted himself up on one elbow to glare at her, his body still pumped with adrenaline. “You deserve more than a fuck in the grass.”

Her eyes widened.

He went to say something else, lost the thought when his eyes fell on half-parted lips. Kiss-bruised and lush, her mouth was the most erotic temptation, the need inside him nowhere near sated by their frantic coupling. Breath coming in harsh gasps, he managed to get out a single word, the only question that mattered, “Adria?”

“Yes.” Permission.

Promising himself he would give her tenderness this time, even if it killed him, he sucked on her lower lip, played his tongue across the part, but didn’t push for entry. Instead, he licked and tasted and teased as he should have done earlier … until her hands landed on his shoulders, her claws releasing just enough to prick his skin in silent female demand.

Smiling, he thrust one jean-clad thigh between her own and pushed up. She hissed. Breaking the kiss at once, he reached down to stroke one hand over her calf, her leg raised and bent at the knee. “Sore?” Hardly surprising since he’d shoved into her with all the finesse of the average eighteen-year-old.

She nodded, lifting her fingers to his mouth. He held position and let her explore. When she tugged him back down, he claimed a kiss that was all tongue, deep and wet and an unashamed taste of the things he wanted to do to her, before removing his thigh and shifting so that he was on the bottom. “I think,” he said, holding her steady with his hands on her waist as she pushed herself up to straddle him, “it’s my turn to take the pounding.”

ADRIA was caught by the playful smile tugging at Riaz’s lips, the harsh angles of his face relaxed to reveal an intoxicatingly attractive male—one who was playing with her just a little … but coming from a lone wolf…

“No?” Riaz said when she didn’t move, his head angled in a way that told her his wolf remained very much near the surface.

Leaning forward, she brushed his hair off his forehead. She knew it was a tender move, one that went beyond sex, but she needed to do it. The truth was, no matter what she’d said to him that day at the training run, no matter what she’d tried to convince herself because it hurt too much to do otherwise, she wasn’t a woman who could ever have sex for sex’s sake. It wasn’t in her.

Home and hearth and family, that’s what you’re built for.

Words spoken by Tarah long ago, so long ago that her sister had probably forgotten. Adria hadn’t. That woman continued to exist inside of her, and in spite of the cracks in her heart, she still wanted a family of her own; a home filled with love; a man who adored her and who she could adore in return. This lieutenant who held her with warm, strong hands, his heart already given to another, wasn’t the one with whom she would ever fulfill that dream, but that didn’t mean their joining had to be a cold, hard thing.

Riaz didn’t pull away from the gentle touch, and one of the cracks deep within her healed a tiny fraction. “Let’s be friends,” she whispered to the golden-eyed man who watched her with such predatory focus, the wolf in his eyes.

His hands flexed on her hips. “I can’t be platonic friends with you, Adria.” Not a rejection, just a blunt truth from male to female, wolf to wolf.

“I know.” Now that they’d touched, the need in her had only grown stronger.

Thumbs stroking gently over the curve of her hip. “Friends who share intimate skin privileges then?” A quiet clarification. “Do you think we can be?”

“Yes.” But she understood why Riaz hesitated, though it was clear to her he needed a friend as well as a lover. “I’ll take you as you are,” she promised, wanting him to understand that she wouldn’t demand what he didn’t have to give, wouldn’t hurt him by reminding him of what he’d lost. “No expectations. No ties. No promises.” Just a friendship that might help them both heal.

Riaz caressed his hands down to her bare thighs, back up to slide under her T-shirt, the calluses on his palms scraping over her skin with a rough seduction that made her shiver. “You almost sound as if you prefer that.”

“I do.” No lies, she thought, not here, in this beautiful moment with the world so hushed and private around them. “I’ve been … lost for a long time. I’m wolf enough to want the contact with a man I’m not only physically attracted to, but who I’m beginning to like,” she said with deep honesty, thinking of the tenderness of his kiss, of the way he’d handled her trainees with both affection and discipline this afternoon, “but I need my freedom.”

Despite the dreams of family she nurtured in a secret part of her soul, she knew she was damaged. Until she fixed herself, if that was even possible, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, steal a commitment from anyone, least of all a man who belonged to another in a way that could never be erased.

He reached up to tug the tie loose from her braid, unravel her hair. “Friends.” It was a promise, the wolf gold of his eyes glowing. “Tell me about him.”

And because she understood how hard it was for a dominant male like Riaz to be vulnerable, to have her keep his secrets, she did. “To understand how it happened, you have to know the beginning.” She shared how she and Martin had been apart for long periods for the first five years after they met, while Martin did a postgrad degree in England, and she focused on intensive soldier training.

“My family tends to lump all those years together, but they only saw me sporadically,” she told him, thinking back to that demanding, exciting time. “My parents were posted to the other end of the territory, Tarah was busy with Evie,”—it made her heart clench painfully tight even now to remember how weak Evie had been as a child—“and Indigo was still in school in den territory, while I was in the Cascades.”

Riaz nodded. “They would’ve had no idea of your day-to-day life.”

“Or how insane it was. As well as the soldier training, Hawke had me taking certain college courses online.” Things that had given her a grounding in basic business principles, so she could act as a sounding board for a lieutenant should it ever become necessary. “I barely had time to breathe, much less start a committed relationship.”

“It was like that for me when I first became a lieutenant,” Riaz said, his fingers moving on her skin, the slight roughness of his fingertips an exquisite caress. “Steep learning curve.”

“I guess that was part of why I was drawn to Martin when he came home for visits, why I said yes when he asked me out on dates. He was warm, intelligent, funny—he made me relax.” Tainted by the darkness that had come later, everyone else seemed to remember only the bad times, but it wasn’t the angry man he’d become that she’d fallen for.

“He’d talk me into watching silly movies; tell jokes in this deadpan voice that would have me in stitches.” But he’d only shared that part of himself with those he knew well. “One thing most people don’t realize is that Martin is shy, always has been. It sometimes comes across as arrogance or conceit and means he doesn’t make the best first impression—he didn’t on my parents.”

However, she’d seen and liked the man behind the mask, sincerely believed her family would too, once they got to know him. “We didn’t have explosive chemistry,” she admitted, “but I never expected that kind of passion.” Had thought her wolf too sensible for the wildfire she’d seen burn so many others in the pack. “I didn’t go around accosting brooding lone wolves then.”

Riaz’s eyes warmed with quiet amusement, but he didn’t interrupt.

“We were compatible in so many other ways, from our outlook on life, to our belief that loyalty was the core of a relationship, to the things that made us laugh that when he suggested we take our relationship to the next level, I said yes.” Her wolf had liked Martin well enough not to interfere with the human’s decision, but it had never demanded more, never hungered to tangle with Martin’s own wolf … never chosen him.

“You didn’t worry about the dominance issue?”

“Initially, yes.” It had been too important a question to blow off. “But you have to realize—by the time we moved in together, we’d known and casually dated each other for years.” Regardless of the impression others, including Tarah and Indigo, might’ve formed as a result of his remoteness around strangers, not once had Martin done or said anything to make her believe he couldn’t handle the fact of her dominance.

“When I made senior soldier while we were dating, he gave me a beautiful ceremonial knife,” she said, wanting Riaz to understand how she could’ve made such a terrible mistake and how it might not have been a mistake at all—not then. “He’d bought it months ago, because he was so certain I’d get the promotion. He was proud of me.”

Stroking hands on her thighs, the calm watchfulness of the predator that prowled behind the captivating shade of his eyes. “When did it start to go wrong?”

“I can never quite pinpoint it.” The only thing she knew was that the change had bewildered her. “Maybe it was the reality of living day to day with a woman whose wolf was dominant to his own, the realization that if it came down to it, I didn’t need him to protect me.” All she had were guesses, because the death of their relationship had been a slow, insidious thing, hard to see until it was too late.