His mouth is warm against my temple. “Tell me if anything doesn’t feel right,” he murmurs.Not feel right? Nothing has ever felt so right.“You say stop, I stop.”
“I know,” I breathe, and do, down in the newly forged place inside me that knows his scent from a mile away, his heartbeat in a room, and the shape of his gentleness.
Fate may have lit the match.
But this heat, thisyes, this choosing, is ours.
Chapter 8
Scarlett
Reid doesn’t speak. Just watches me with eyes that know all the edges of pain and still choose softness. There’s nothing predatory in the way he lowers himself to his knees beside the bed. No threat. No demand. Only intention.
“Can I touch you?”
My heart throbs at his question, that he’s still respecting my wishes enough to ask for permission despite the desire burning in his amber eyes.
I nod.
“Your words. I need your words, Scarlett.”
“Yes,” I whisper. “Touch me, Reid. Please.”
His voice is low and steady. A tether. “Lie back, my little wolf.”
Five words. That’s all. But they feel like a command etched with intent. My body, still reeling from the shift, responds before my mind can second-guess. I lower myself to the pillows, heart a staccato drum against my ribs.
He slides the blanket down slowly, giving me time to stop him. But I don’t. Can’t. I want this. Wanthim. My skin prickles as the air kisses it, and my thighs press together instinctively.
His hand slides up my thigh, and when he touches me with that careful mouth and those clever fingers, the fire inside me stops devouring and startsanswering.I arch, a sound breaking loose that belongs to me, and the last of the fear burns clean.
I clutch the blanket tighter around my shoulders, breath catching. “Reid…?”
“I’m going to take care of you,” he says, his hands bracing on either side of my hips. “You’ve been through hell, and I’m going to remind you that you’re alive. That this body is yours. That it’sbeautiful.”
My heart stutters.
I expect his mouth on mine, but he doesn’t start there.
He kisses the inside of my knee.
A tremor skates up my spine. He trails his lips along the tender curve of my thigh, reverent and slow, like I’m something sacred and rare. And maybe to him, I am. Not a fevered wolf in a borrowed body, not the girl gasping for air hours ago, buthis.
I tilt my hips without meaning to. The ache between my legs is no longer just post-shift tension. It’s a throb of need, ofplease, ofyes.
When his breath ghosts over my center, I flinch. Not from fear. From the unbearable anticipation.
“I can smell how much you want this,” he murmurs, his voice rough silk. “You don’t have to hide it.”
I don’t. I can’t. I’m already unraveling, and he’s barely touched me.
His fingers part my folds with such gentleness that it undoes me. And then?—
His mouth.
Gods.
The first stroke of his tongue is slow and deliberate, a long, luxurious pass that drags a sound out of me I didn’t know I could make. My hips jolt, and he anchors them with strong hands, holding me steady as he does it again. And again.
