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She can feel me through my slacks, hard, straining against the fabric, and she rolls her hips against me and the friction makes us both groan.

I unzip the back of her dress so it falls down in the front, then push her strapless bra down.

I reach between us and free myself. She lifts up, pulls her thong to the side, and sinks down onto me. The sensation of the tight, wet heat of her body closing around me in the backseat of a moving car while the city slides past the tinted windows is so overwhelming that my head drops back against the headrest and my eyes close and the growl that comes out of my chest rattles the glass.

She rides me. Her hands grip my shoulders for leverage and she moves in slow, rolling waves, her forehead pressed against mine, her breath hot against my mouth. The car hits a bump and the jolt drives me deeper and she makes a sound, that soft broken gasp, and I grip her hips and hold her down and grind up into her while her breasts bounce with every thrust.

“You were the most beautiful thing in that room,” I tell her. My voice is wrecked, barely audible over the sound of the road beneath us. “Every man at that table wanted you. Every single one. And you’re here. In my lap. Taking my cock in the backseat of my car.”

“God.” Her head drops to my shoulder. Her walls clench around me and I feel the orgasm building in her, the telltale flutter that I’ve learned to read through the bond as well as through the physical signs. “Don’t stop talking.”

“Marvin Webb couldn’t take his eyes off you. When you leaned forward to show him the tax projections, he looked at your neckline and I wanted to reach across the table and put my hand over the mark so he knew what it meant. So he knew you were claimed.”

“I am claimed,” she says against my neck, and the words, voluntary, unprompted, spoken in a voice thick with pleasure, hit me so hard the wolf lunges behind my eyes and my fingers dig into her hips.

“Say it again.”

“I’m yours.” She lifts her head and looks at me and her eyes are dark and liquid and completely certain. “I’m yours, Dominic.”

I come. The orgasm tears through me with a force that bows my spine, and I pull her down onto me as deep as she can take me and spill inside her with a groan that I bury in her neck, my mouth against the scar, my teeth grazing silver. She follows me over the edge, her whole body tightening, her nails biting into my shoulders through my suit jacket, her moan muffled against my hair.

We sit there. In the backseat of a car on Lake Shore Drive, her on my lap, me still inside her, both of us breathing hard, the city lights painting the fogged windows in streaks of gold and white. Her forehead is against mine. Her hand is on my chest, over my heart, where she always puts it, and I can feel the doubled heartbeat pulsing under her palm.

“We just had sex in the back of your car,” she says.

“We did.”

“I feel like I should have more objections to this than I do.”

“You had several. You voiced them clearly. And then you climbed on top of me.”

She laughs. The sound fills the car, and I hold her and breathe her in and feel the bond hum.

The car turns onto my street. She slides off my lap and straightens her dress. We walk into my building and ride the elevator to the penthouse. She leans against me and yawns and the intimacy of the yawn, the domesticity of it, the fact that she’s comfortable enough to be tired in front of me, hits me harder than anything else tonight. I already know I would burn the world for this woman.

In the apartment, she changes into my shirt. She eats leftover pasta standing at the counter. She tells me about a discrepancy she noticed in the Webb portfolio and the analysis she wants to run in the morning and the way she talks about numbers, precise and passionate and completely alive, is the most attractive thing I’ve ever witnessed from any human being.

I watch her from across the kitchen. She’s barefoot on my tile, in my shirt, eating my food, wearing my mark. The wolf is quiet. For once, for this one evening, the wolf is quiet and the man is present and the two of them are in agreement.

She’s ours. She chose us. She said it out loud.

The reckoning is still coming. The truth about the bond, the truth about her father, the truth about what I am and what I’ve done. It’s all still out there, waiting, accumulating mass like a wave building offshore.

When it breaks, she’s going to be furious.

But I can survive her fury.

What I don’t know is whether she’ll still choose me when she understands what she’s choosing.

She finishes eating and puts her plate in the sink. She walks to the bedroom and pauses in the doorway and looks at me over her shoulder.

“Coming?”

I follow her. Because that’s what I do now. That’s what I’ll always do.

I follow her into the dark, and I make her scream my name. Twice. Then I hold her against my chest, and I listen to the doubled heartbeat and I tell myself that when the wave breaks, we’ll survive it. There is no other option.

Chapter Twenty-Two