Page 59

I’ve seen it once. In a warehouse, in the dark, with blood on it. This is nothing like that. He closes his eyes in the sun, and he lets his breath out, and he goes down into the grass like a man kneeling, and then he isn’t a man.

There’s no scream. There’s no snap. It’s easy. Like it was always in there waiting for somebody to say yes.

And there he is.

He’s enormous. He comes up to my chest at the shoulder. Black, with silver running through it like somebody spilled moonlight on him, and eyes so gold they don’t look real. His scars are still there. I can see them under the fur, the long one on his throat, and I want to put my hands on all of them.

He shakes himself out. He lifts his head. And he looks at me.

“Hi, handsome,” I say.

His tail goes.

I laugh. I can’t help it. This terrifying, beautiful animal, the thing they called the Beast, and his tail’s whipping the grass like a puppy who heard the front door.

I walk up to him and put my hand in the fur at his neck. It’s thick and warm and softer than I thought it would be. He leans into me so hard I have to brace my feet.

Then he does it. He drops. He lies down in the grass at my feet and rolls onto his back with his legs in the air, and I laugh so hard I have to sit down.

“Oh, you big baby.” I get both hands on his belly. “Oh, look at you. Who’s a good boy?”

He makes a sound I’m going to remember on my deathbed.

I stay there a long time. I sit in the grass with my hand on his chest and I tell him things. Where I grew up. What I was scared of when I was small. That the first time he looked at me through that glass, I thought he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I was right.

He listens with his eyes closed and his tail going.

Then I lie back in the grass, with his shirt under my head and the sun on my face, and I look at him upside down.

“Come here.”

He comes back on two legs. But not all the way.

I watch it happen. The wolf doesn’t want to leave. He’s had my hands on him for an hour and he’s not giving that up, so he stays. Gold eyes. Fangs down. Claws out. Fur up his forearms and across his shoulders. And when he says my name, it’s not a voice a man makes.

Oh.

Oh, this is what I wanted. This is exactly what I wanted, and I didn’t know it until right now.

“That’s it,” I whisper. “Both of you. I want both of you.”

He gets my shirt off. His shirt. He doesn’t tear it, but it’s close. Then his mouth’s on me. My throat. My breasts, which are heavier already, and I see him notice, and I see what it does to him. My belly, and he puts his face there and breathes until I’m pulling his hair. Then he’s between my thighs, and his claws are digging lines in the dirt by my hips, and he’s eating me in the middle of a field under the sky, and I scream, and nobody hears it but the birds.

“Declan…”

“Not yet.”

“Alpha, please…”

He comes up over me. One hand in the ground by my head, claws sunk to the knuckle. He pushes into me slow, so slow, and I feel every inch, and he’s making a sound in his chest that isn’t a purr and isn’t a growl and I feel it in my teeth.

He fucks me in the grass with the sun on his back and my nails in his shoulders. I’m not quiet. I’ve never been quiet. I say his name and I say Alpha and I say yes and I say things that would get me thrown out of my own courtroom, and he takes every one.

“Look at me,” he says. “Look at me, wife.”

I look. Gold eyes. Fangs. Fur on the arms braced on either side of my face. The thing between a man and a wolf, on top of me, inside me.

“I love you,” I tell him. “All of it. I love all of it.”