Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(35)

I couldn’t look at him as the cloth puddled on the carpet. I could barely breathe. I knew it was a balmy sixty-eight degrees in the room, but I felt like I was in an ice cave. Naked, I stepped away from my clothes and then stopped, forcing my hands to remain at my sides and not move to protect my bareness from his sight.

Adam had seen me naked before—but I don’t think I’d ever felt more vulnerable. Because this wasn’t about being naked in flesh—it was about risking myself to help him. Help us.

Possible disastrous story lines ran in my head as I stood there. I imagined him expressing his sadness that I had put him on the spot. I heard him tell me that this wasn’t the time for such a thing—that he’d made it clear that sex was off the table until he’d figured out whatever knotty problem his head was all tangled up in. Rapidly I conjured up failure, and imagining that was nearly as traumatic as the real thing might be.

I was seriously considering throwing up, when warm hands closed over my shoulders and Adam’s face pressed against my neck.

“Fucking hell,” Adam said about the same time I realized that my neck was damp with his tears. “I don’t deserve you, my love. I don’t deserve this, Mercy—but by God I will take it. I love you, too.”

And on his last word, our bond blazed open between us, but, in this moment, it conveyed only emotions, not thoughts. I didn’t know if opening the bond was intentional on his part, or if it was a product of his control slipping. Carried by that tie, the deluge of his emotions crashed through me, a complex mix of incredulousness (I had, by golly, surprised the heck out of him), exhaustion, and love before it was all consumed in a blaze of desire.

Sheer relief let my own tears, now quite out-of-date, fall down my face. Oh thank God, it had worked. There would be a tomorrow for us. I hadn’t screwed everything up even more than it already had been.

“Why are you cryin’, darlin’?” he asked me in a murmur—then stiffened a little, as if remembering the place he’d brought us to over the past few weeks.

“Fear,” I answered him honestly. “If you hadn’t touched me when you did, I was making a beeline to the bathroom so I could throw up.”

He laughed, as I meant him to. I didn’t ask why he’d been crying. Maybe he would think I hadn’t noticed. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. But today was to give him a safe space to be, work off some stress, then rest. He wasn’t in a place, I didn’t think, where honesty about what he was feeling outside this moment was going to do any of those things for him.

His strong hands were so very warm on my chilled skin. His arms, restrictively tight around my ribs, nonetheless let me breathe. I took a moment to take in his scent. The force of relief rushing through me temporarily short-circuited the arousal I would normally have felt naked and in my husband’s arms.

That was okay, though, because the touch of Adam’s fingers that ran with hot, slow possession from my shoulders, down my back, and around my butt would have been enough to spark passion from an icicle. His hard body, both familiar and more necessary for the time we had not touched, softened my stress-tensioned muscles.

“Shhh,” he whispered in my ear. “We’re good. We’re good.”

That hand on my butt lifted me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist as he took us toward the bed—before diverting to a side table, where he set me down.

With the thin light streaming through the edges of the blinds, Adam slid to his knees without ever losing contact with my body and loved me with his mouth and hands until I forgot my grand scheme to get Adam to loosen up and give him some peace, no matter how temporary. I forgot everything except his touch. Adam was usually a generous lover, and today was no exception.

I lost track of time a bit, drowning in the heat he brought with him. The next thing I knew he was pushing inside me, the zipper of his jeans rough on my skin. He was hot and hard and mine.

I bit him on the neck, and he laughed, a husky, aroused sound that I hadn’t heard from him in far too long.

“You make this fun,” he said in a rough voice that contrasted with the smooth movement of his hips.

“Back atcha,” I managed, tight and full and wishing I could stay in this space for the rest of my life.

He moved again and I quit talking—but then so did he.

If his first acquiescence to my seduction was driven, as I thought it might have been, by his understanding of how hard it was for me to strip for him when I wasn’t sure how it would be received, there was no question of his need. When we both came, I was surprised in retrospect that the side table—sturdy as it was—had survived its encounter with us.

Adam picked me up again and took me to our bed. He looked at me sprawled languorously where he had put me and began stripping off his own clothes. Where I had jerked mine off in nervous rawness, he pulled his off slowly as his eyes—and other parts of his body—told me that he liked me naked on the bed. That was only fair because watching Adam remove his clothes was a treat I would never tire of.

He didn’t put any striptease in it, just a slow, predatory intent that made my heart, my eyes, and the rest of my insides pretty happy about it.

Werewolves, all of them, are hard-muscled because the wolf is a restless creature. Adam, though, considered staying in shape a thing of paramount importance—part of the need to protect those around him that made him an Alpha. His body was a weapon, like his guns, his knives, and his swords—and it would not fail him.