by Nalini Singh
Kisses on his throat, her nails scraping over his scalp in a caress that made the tiny hairs on his body rise. “We’ll go slow.” A sensual promise. “So you can ride each edge and be ready for the next.” Another nip. “Even if I do want to eat you up and come back for seconds right now.”
He kissed her again, certain beyond any doubt that kissing would always be one of his most favorite things. The taste of her, how her eyes looked into his at the moment of contact, before her lashes drifted shut, the way her breath brushed his skin. Having her so close to him, strong and dangerous yet willing to be soft in this time and place.
Making a rumbling sound in the back of her throat as he ran his hands over her back and down her arms before retracing his path with a stronger touch, Selenka broke the kiss to say, “For an ice-cold Arrow, you’re very good at petting a wolf who needs exactly that today.”
Eyes of wild gold examined him with wolfish suspicion. “Where did you learn that? To be clear, I’m jealous.”
Blood languorous and heavy, Ethan continued his petting. He was never going to get enough of touching her. “I feel you inside me, and I know what you need.”
Frown lines furrowed Selenka’s brow, the tips of her breasts brushing his chest as she said, “I don’t know if that’s how mating works.” A kiss to his chest. “How you’re touching me, it’s precisely what I need. It’s too subtle and deep a read.”
Ethan turned to stone. “I’m not reading your mind.” He would never violate her in such a way.
It was her turn to “pet” him, the word she’d used perfect for what they were doing, this gentle caressing and learning. “I know, Ethan—that’s not what I meant.” Little kisses along his rigid jaw until he softened for her; she then slid her hand around to the back of his neck as she had a habit of doing.
According to Wild Woman, it was an act of “sneaky wolf possessiveness.”
He’d never known that skin was so sensitive—or how much he’d love a possessive lover. Love how she touched him, how she saw him, how she smiled at him with wolf eyes. “I shouldn’t be surprised you’re figuring this out so quick—that brain of yours is sexy as hell.”
Shudders rippled through his frame as she claimed his mouth in a deep, branding kind of a kiss after those caressing words. Wrapping her up in his arms, more than happy to be branded, he opened his mouth and licked at her tongue as she’d licked at his.
She growled, the rumble traveling from her body into his, and down to the heaviness of his erection. His penis had been rigid since first contact, but now, it throbbed so intensely it was a second heartbeat. He didn’t know what to do with it, but as Selenka didn’t seem to mind the aggressive heat shoving against the curve of her abdomen, he didn’t move away, didn’t attempt to give her space.
He didn’t want to give her space.
All he wanted was to get closer and closer and closer.
He ran his nails down her back.
A hiss of sound and she broke the kiss to nip at his throat. The next bite was harder and at the point where his neck flowed into his shoulder. Hard enough that he knew while she hadn’t broken skin, she would leave a mark. Blood molten, he also knew her bite wasn’t a punishment.
She licked at the mark, her clawed fingers lightly scraping his shoulders.
Chapter 22
Aunt Rita pens a special column today on intimate skin privileges for virgins. All you experienced types can turn the page. The rest of you, listen up—because Aunt Rita knows. Aunt Rita has done the horizontal tango for longer than you’ve been alive. She’s also done it vertically, diagonally, and upside down.
—From the February 2074 edition of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”
“MINE.” A GROWL of sound against Ethan as the wet silk of his mate’s hair brushed over his body.
“Yours,” he said without hesitation, then gripped the side of her neck. “You’re mine, too.”
The eyes that met his were somehow wilder, the gold glowing. And her kiss, it was feral, her hand fisted in his hair. “Yours,” she said in a voice that was half-wolf, before she made a lithe movement that ended up with her legs hitched around his hips.
Ethan supported her with his hands under her buttocks, the strength of her thighs around him a delicious pressure, and the slick of musk in the air making his mind roar. He had no walls with Selenka, no boundaries. He kissed her back as raw and deep, his hands clenching on the curvy flesh in his palms.
The sounds she made encouraged him to open himself deeper, lower even more shields. Until the only ones left were those holding back his madness . . . and then the madness surged to smash against his shields with the force of a tidal wave, stabbing a sharp pain through his head.
Though he didn’t make a sound, Selenka wrenched back. “Blood.” It was a growled word.
Uncurling from around him, she dropped her feet to the floor, then twisted to grab a wad of tissues from the counter that held the sink. “You said you wouldn’t lie, that this was safe for you.” Her voice vibrated with fury.
“It is.” Ethan wiped away the blood, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
Tilting back his head, he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t have a pain-feedback loop in my head. I want you with every cell in my body.”
Selenka stalked out into her bedroom, and when she walked back in, she was angrily tying the belt on a robe the color of a dark stormy sky. “Let me see that.” Taking the tissues from him, she dampened a clean part under the sink tap, then wiped away what appeared to be the last remnants.
They both waited, but the bleed appeared over.
“There’s something very wrong in your head.” Throwing the tissues in a small bin of obsidian green, Selenka thumped a fisted hand against her head. “I can feel you inside me, Ethan, and there are all these jagged points to you that don’t feel right.”
Ethan wrapped a towel around his hips, staggering under the agony spearing through his heart. “I told you I was damaged.” Had believed she accepted him despite that, that she’d seen him and liked him as he was.
A growl of sound before she stalked over and gripped his jaw. “It’s not about you. What I feel, it doesn’t ‘taste’ like you to my wolf and it won’t let my wolf in—I think it’s causing the static in our bond, interfering with our connection.” Dropping her hold, she folded her arms. “Ming LeBon put something in you that shouldn’t be there.”
Ethan wanted to believe that, but he knew what she didn’t. “What you’re sensing are incredibly powerful shields holding back the onset of Scarab Syndrome. It’s the only good thing Ming ever did for me—teaching me how to build titanium shields. I’d be a nightmare otherwise.” Not even for their bond would he drop those shields. “I can’t let you in beyond those shields. I won’t.” If he hurt her, he’d be lost, a creature of insanity and violence.
Selenka put her hands on her hips. “I don’t know if I’d go about believing Ming LeBon. Man just wanted to use and control you.”
“I didn’t.” Exhaling and wishing he could turn back time so he was holding and kissing Selenka again, he shoved both hands through his hair. “When I felt the first stirrings of new power, I decided to ease up on my shields and see what lay beyond, see if Ming had crippled me on purpose. What emerged was madness.” Howling screams that echoed and echoed.
“Recently, I saw an audiovisual ad for a human-made movie. The movie is set in a historical hospital for the criminally insane. The howls of the residents were like the ones inside my skull.” A broken thing, shards of glass in the brain. “Something isn’t right with me, Selenka.” It was a truth he couldn’t escape. “But it’s me, not anything Ming put in me. I feel the Scarab power screaming now, shoving at my shields, trying to break free.”
“I refuse to believe that.” Selenka swept out a hand in a hard slice, a warrior queen in full flow. �
�My wolf would never mate me to a man caught in the grip of madness.”
He would go to his knees, lower his head for her sword if she asked, but he couldn’t give her this. “How do you know?”
The question quivered between them.
“I know.” Selenka thumped her chest with a flat palm. “I know.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Ethan demanded on a wave of turbulent heat. “Who will I be to you then?” He had never been embraced as she’d embraced him, and he couldn’t bear to lose that, couldn’t bear to go back to being alone in the dark.
Yet even as he asked the question, his anger flatlined. Shaking his head, he said, “I can’t be anything but a risk to you in madness. I’ll remove myself from the equation long before that happens.”
Selenka moved so fast that he had no hope of avoiding her. He slammed up against one of the rock walls, and though it was uneven, it wasn’t sharp . . . and fury or not, she’d held back, so he was able to brace himself with his palms on either side of him. His mate knew his skills, had calibrated her movements with precision.
Looking after him even as she bared her teeth and hauled down his head with one hand in his hair. “Do not ever,” she said, her voice no longer wholly human, “speak of ending yourself. You belong to me now.”
It was the one thing Ethan couldn’t—wouldn’t—give her. “I won’t allow myself to become a threat to you. I won’t ever be an out-of-control mass murderer again.”
Selenka was an alpha, used to going toe-to-toe with anyone and coming out satisfied by the outcome. But this? She wasn’t fucking satisfied, yet she knew she had not a hope in hell of changing Ethan’s mind.
Her Arrow mate had spoken quietly, in that voice so beautiful it was a song each time he opened his mouth, but that he was resolute was unmistakable. He would not bend in this, would not change his mind.
I am the knight to your queen.
She might not agree with his choice of description, but it was how he saw himself—and no knight would ever put his queen in danger, especially not danger that came from within.
Furious with him, and at the same time intensely proud to have a mate who could withstand her even at her angriest and most aggressive—she kissed him. Hard. “This conversation isn’t over.”
“What happens now?” A searing tautness to him.
Selenka’s instinct was to protect, to shield, but Ethan didn’t need protecting in this place that was their private den. As she’d pointed out, he was no zaichik, and she’d ruin them both if she forgot that. “Are you still in pain?”
“A faint throb at the back of my skull, but the sharp pain has passed.” He watched her with eyes that gave nothing away . . . but she felt his need all the same, a contained explosion held so tightly that it was a touch away from ignition. “I am fully capable.”
Selenka knew he hadn’t meant that as a double entendre, but she decided to treat it as one anyway. Her mate had never played—but he was mated to an alpha wolf now, play an integral part of his life. “I know all about your capability,” she murmured with a slow smile, as she reached down to brush the length of his cock through the towel.
Ethan turned to stone, his breathing going rough and shallow. Sweat beaded along his hairline, darkness spreading out from his pupils to eclipse the whites of his eyes. She’d witnessed the effect with other Psy and always found it eerie, but with Ethan, it was simply another indication of her mate’s emotions.
“Should I stop?” she murmured huskily as she tugged off the towel.
The cords of his neck straining stark against his skin, he shook his head.
Her own pulse not exactly steady, she brushed her fingers over his naked length—and this time, he all but stopped breathing. Her breasts had been full and swollen, her core slick since they began, but his reaction squeezed everything inside her to breath-stealing tightness.
She’d intended to play, make his first time gentle and slow, but realized then and there her plan wouldn’t work. It wasn’t about her own trembling fingers or feral hunger. No, her wolf could keep it together if it was about making this a pleasurable experience for her mate—but Ethan wasn’t yet at a place where he could ask for what he needed, or rush her when the play got too intense. This was torturous to him right now.
“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.