Page 18 of A Pack of Lies and a Big Bad Wolf

"I will kill you," she pants, "later," and comes apart on my fingers with a raw cry, her thighs clamping around my wrist, her nails scoring my shoulder. The overhead light flickers. Every cabinet door opens and slams shut.

I carry her to the couch. We don't make it to the bedroom; the bedroom is a full nine feet away. She shoves my jeans off with impatient hands, and then there's nothing between us and her eyes find mine, dark and burning. I sit down and she straddles me.

She takes my cock in her hand and guides me to her entrance, and sinks down onto me slow — a deliberate, torturous inch at a time, watching my jaw clench, enjoying it, taking her revenge. She's tight and molten around me and by the time she's fully seated I'm gripping the couch cushion in one fist because the alternative is gripping her hard enough to bruise.

"There," she breathes, shaky and smug at once. "Now who's—"

I thrust up into her and the sentence dies.

She sets the pace. I hold her hips and let her ride me, watching her come undone above me — the fierce concentration, the flush spreading down her chest, her lip caught between her teeth, my name arriving in pieces. Every lamp in the room is trembling in its socket. The bookshelf is one deep breath from raining paperbacks on us both. Twenty-nine years of perfect control, and this woman has ended it in days.

"Kieran." My name breaks in half in her mouth.

And then it happens.

Between one heartbeat and the next, a door opens in my chest, and she pours through it.

Not her body. Her. Want, first — a mirror of mine, burning. But underneath the want: relief. Bone-deep, aching relief, the feeling of setting down a weight she's carried so long she forgot it wasn't part of her spine. She is happy. Under all the yelling and the pride and the armor, right now, in my lap, wrapped in my scent, she is happy — and she has no idea I can feel it.

The mate bond, open and roaring.

My wolf lunges. Mark her. Scent her. Keep her. Tell her. I lock every muscle against it and grip her hips instead, driving up to meet her, and she takes that as encouragement, and after that neither of us is capable of strategy. Her rhythm shatters. She grinds down on me, crying out, and I feel her climax twice — once around my cock and once through the bond, a double detonation no male in history has survived with dignity — and I follow her over with a growl that rattles the windows in a way that has nothing to do with weather.

For a long moment the only sound is breathing.

She's collapsed against my chest, boneless, her heart hammering into mine. Through the bond her contentment washes over me in slow, warm waves, completely unguarded, and I lie there receiving the biggest secret of my life through a channel she can't see, and say nothing.

"Okay," she mumbles into my neck, already half asleep. "Fine. I like you a little."

"I won't tell anyone."

“But you’re still an arrogant, bossy bastard.”

“Well, that is something I won’t need to tell anyone. Everybody already knows.”

I stare at the ceiling and stroke her hair and take inventory. My fated mate — the one who's spent all week calling that a ridiculous idea — is asleep on my chest, and the bond between us is wide open, and she has no clue.

"A little," she said. The bond says otherwise. The bond says quite a lot otherwise.

Tomorrow she'll wake up, rebuild the armor, and inform me that this changed nothing. And for the first time since I met her, I'll be able to feel exactly how much she doesn't mean it.

My wolf stretches out inside me, insufferably pleased with us both.

Best chase of my life.

Chapter 8

Olivia

The pack's training ground is the prettiest place I've ever been punched.

It's a clearing in a grove of white oaks, ringed with granite boulders somebody arranged on purpose a long time ago. Morning sun comes through the canopy in gold coins, dew still silvers the grass at the edges, and a woodpecker is drumming away uphill, completely unbothered by the violence below. If you have to get knocked on your butt three times before nine a.m., this is the scenery to do it in.

"You're not focusing today," Bram growls at me. "And did you actually just yawn?"

My face flushes hot. "Insomnia," I say loftily. "I barely slept last night."

That last part is true. What I'm not mentioning is that the reason I didn't sleep had nothing to do with insomnia.