Page 86 of Wretched Thorns

“Then I’m going to put my mouth where my hand was and make you come a second time. You can hold on to that, too.”

“Eli.”

“Then I’m going to put my cock inside you and make you come a third time. That one’s going to have my voice in your ear and my arms around you and my hand on your ass.”

“I want all of it: all of you, Eli."

“There’s one more thing after that. Before I let you go. I’m leaving a mark, a sigil on the inside of your thigh.”

She opened her eyes.

“It’s not a claim, beautiful. It’s a way home.”

She nodded once.

He got to work.

***

He undressed her the way he’d said.

The wrap dress untied in his hands. His palm spread flat to the bare skin of her back as the fabric fell open. His other hand found the bra strap at her shoulder and slid it down the line of her arm. She watched his face. She didn’t help. She let him do every piece of it in the order he’d told her.

When she was naked, he stepped back half a pace to look at her.

The wolf in him went still.

Two days of careful restraint vanished in a single breath.

“You’re staring.”

“Yes.”

He took her in. The dark gold of her skin in the firelight. The narrow rise of her ribs. The bruise his brother had left at the dip of her collarbone, warm and dark and entirely hers. The fingerprint shadows at her hips where Jasper had held her in the grove. The fresh blood-bruise at the side of her mouth where Marcus had hit her tonight, soft at the edges because the bridge wasn’t real and her body had decided how it wanted to show up here.

Her mouth was beautiful. Her typically luminous eyes were present but carried the haze of exhaustion.

He stepped back into her.

He kissed the place on her throat where Jasper had been. Slow. He moved his mouth across the line of her collarbone to the dark bloom Callum had left. He held his lips to the bruise of his brother’s kiss for the length of three slow breaths. The bond hummed the brindle frequency that was Callum’s and the gold frequency that was Jasper’s and the silver that was his own, three notes ringing into a single hymn.

She had her hand fisted in his hair.

He went lower. He put his mouth to her breast. He took her nipple slowly. Drew on it. Worked it with his tongue. Used his teeth at the edge until her hand fisted tighter and a sound came out of her he was going to be hearing for as long as he lived. He moved to the other side and gave it the same patience. Her other hand fisted in his hair.

He kept going down.

The curve of her hip. The dip of her navel. The soft inside of her thigh where he’d put his hand in the grove yesterday. Her thighs trembled once under his mouth before he slid his palm up between them.

She was slick.

She was wet enough that the heel of his hand had her on it before he’d done anything else. He held himself there for a moment. He watched her face.

Her eyes were open. Her mouth was open. Her breathing was completely different from where they had been thirty seconds ago.

He slid one finger in.

Her whole body bowed off the table.