Page 26 of A Pack of Lies and a Big Bad Wolf

"Just keep telling yourself that." Ok, I’m getting a little smug.

She stands up. I stand up too. She closes the distance between us and puts both hands flat on my chest and pushes, and my boots don't move.

"Has anyone ever told you what an unbearably smug bastard you are?"

I throw back my head and laugh. "Has anyone ever not told me that?"

"I'm serious. You are the most arrogant, infuriating, overbearing—"

"Also, pushing a man who’s twice your size is never going to be an effective strategy." I catch her wrists gently and hold them against my chest. "I thought Bram taught you better than that."

Her eyes flash. I see it coming a full second before it happens and I let it happen anyway, because my wolf wants to know what she'll do next and frankly so do I.

She hooks her ankle behind mine and sweeps my leg out from under me.

Bram did teach her better than that. I go down hard, and she comes with me because I don't let go of her wrists, and we hit the rug in a tangle, her on top of me, both of us breathing hard, her hair falling around my face.

"Better," I say. "Your heel didn't turn out at the end."

"Shut up," she says, and kisses me.

The bra goes first, because it's closest and I've been thinking about what's under it since she pulled her shirt off on my couch and pretended it was an accident. I flip the clasp with one hand and she shrugs out of it without breaking the kiss, and then her breasts are bare against my chest and the contact drags a sound out of her that goes straight through me.

I roll us over so she's under me, and she makes a noise of protest that dies the moment my mouth finds her throat. I work my way down, taking my time, tasting the hollow of her collarbone, the soft skin below it, and when I close my mouth over her nipple she arches off the rug and her fingers twist into my hair hard enough to hurt. I stay there, sucking, circling with my tongue, until she's squirming and yanking at my shirt with both hands.

"Off. Take it off or I'll rip it off."

I pull it over my head and her hands are on me before it hits the floor, dragging down my chest, my stomach, hooking into my waistband. My jeans come off with her help — her help being largely impatient tugging and one well-placed heel — and then her jeans require a negotiation that she wins by biting my shoulder hard enough that I stop thinking about logistics and start thinking about survival.

Then she's bare underneath me on my living room rug and I take a moment to look at her, because I can, because she's here, because every inch of her is flushed and furious and mine whether she admits it or not.

"You're staring again."

"I am." I press my mouth to the inside of her knee and feel her whole leg tense. I kiss my way up her inner thigh, slow, deliberate, and her breathing goes ragged and her hand comes down to push my head where she wants it, which I ignore, because I am in charge of this part and she's going to have to accept that.

"Kieran, I swear to every fate that ever—"

I put my mouth on her and the sentence ends in a gasp. She's wet and hot and she tastes the way she smells — burnt sugar and clove, sweet and sharp — and when I drag my tongue through her folds she grabs the edge of the rug in one fist and my hair in the other. I work her clit with slow, flat strokes, learning what makes her hips buck and what makes her go rigid, and when I slide two fingers inside her and curl them she swears at me in a register I didn't know she had.

I bring her to the edge twice and pull back both times, because she swept my legs out from under me and I haven't forgotten, and because the sounds she makes when she's close and denied are going to sustain me through every difficult meeting for the rest of my natural life.

"If you don't — I will actually kill you — Kieran, please—"

The please does it. My mate said please, and my wolf and I agree on very little, but we agree on this: when she asks, she gets.

I seal my mouth over her clit and press my fingers deep and she comes apart with a cry that shakes the lamp on the end table. Her thighs clamp around my head and her back arches clear off the rug and I feel her clench around my fingers in hard, rhythmic waves, and the fire in the hearth spits a shower of sparks that neither of us notices.

I kiss my way back up her body while she's still shaking, and she grabs my face in both hands and pulls me up to her mouth and kisses me, tasting herself on my lips, and her hand wraps around my cock and squeezes and the last of my patience burns to ash.

She pushes at my chest. I let her roll me over, and then she's straddling me on the rug, her hands pinning my wrists above my head, her hair curtaining us both.

"My turn," she says.

She reaches between us and takes me in her hand and guides me to her entrance and sinks down onto me in one slow, devastating slide. I grit my teeth and let her set the pace, and she rolls her hips in a rhythm that's designed to destroy me — slow and grinding, taking me deep, watching my face while she does it.

She braces her hands on my chest and rides me harder, and I grip her hips and drive up to meet her, and the rug is bunching under us and a book falls off the shelf and the fire crackles again and I couldn't care less if the whole house comes down around us. She's tight and hot and every time she grinds down onto me the sound she makes is closer to the edge, and I can feel her getting there in the way her rhythm stutters, the way her nails dig into my chest, the way her head falls back and her lip disappears between her teeth.

I sit up without warning, wrapping one arm around her waist, pulling her flush against me. The angle changes and she gasps and her arms come around my neck and we're chest to chest, forehead to forehead, breathing each other's air. I thrust up into her deep and steady and she moans into my mouth, and I swallow it, and give her another, and another, and her whole body starts to shake.